Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

Digital minimalists combat this by maintaining standard operating procedures that dictate when and how they use the digital tools in their lives. They would never simply say, “I use Facebook because it helps my social life.” They would instead declare something more specific, such as: “I check Facebook each Saturday on my computer to see what my close friends and family are up to; I don’t have the app on my phone; I culled my list of friends down to just meaningful relationships.”

To allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must: Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

In the pages ahead, I hope to convince you that, regardless of how you decide to shape your digital ecosystem, you should follow Lincoln’s example and give your brain the regular doses of quiet it requires to support a monumental life.

This finding underscores the fundamental importance of social connections to human well-being. As Lieberman summarizes: “The brain did not evolve over millions of years to spend its free time practicing something irrelevant to our lives.”

Lieberman also discovered that the human brain devotes significant resources to two different major networks that work together toward the goal of mentalizing: helping us understand other people’s minds, including how they are feeling and their intentions. Something as simple as a casual conversation with a store clerk requires massive amounts of neuronal computational power to take in and process a high-bandwidth stream of clues about what’s going on in the clerk’s mind. Though this “mind reading” feels natural to us, it’s actually an amazingly complicated feat performed by networks honed over millions of years of evolution.