Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

Finally, in justifying this planning approach, I want to underscore the foundational argument delivered throughout this chapter: doing nothing is overrated. In the middle of a busy workday, or after a particularly trying morning of childcare, it’s tempting to crave the release of having nothing to do—whole blocks of time with no schedule, no expectations, and no activity beyond whatever seems to catch your attention in the moment.

investing energy into something hard but worthwhile almost always returns much richer rewards.

It’s important to know that the “attention economy” describes the business sector that makes money gathering consumers’ attention and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers. This idea is not new. Columbia Law professor and technology scholar Tim Wu (who wrote a book on this topic titled The Attention Merchants) traces the beginning of this economic model to 1830, when the newspaper publisher Benjamin Day launched the New York Sun, the first penny press newspaper.

Extracting eyeball minutes, the key resource for companies like Google and Facebook, has become significantly more lucrative than extracting oil.

the rapid switching between different applications tends to make the human’s interaction with the computer less productive in terms of the quality and quantity of what is produced.

the power of a general-purpose computer is in the total number of things it enables the user to do, not the total number of things it enables the user to do simultaneously.

you want to join the attention resistance, one of the most important things you can therefore do is follow Fred Stutzman’s lead and transform your devices—laptops, tablets, phones—into computers that are general purpose in the long run, but are effectively single purpose in any given moment. This

The slightest hint of boredom becomes a trip wire to activate this whole hulking Rube Goldberg apparatus.

timeline. It’s a general rule of slow movements that a small amount of high-quality offerings is usually superior to a larger amount of low-quality fare.

Serious news consumers also tend to deploy browser plug-ins or aggregation tools that can present them with articles stripped clean of advertisements and clickbait.

Declaring freedom from your smartphone is probably the most serious step you can take toward embracing the attention resistance. This follows because smartphones are the preferred Trojan horse of the digital attention economy.

Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves.

In my experience, the key to sustained success with this philosophy is accepting that it’s not really about technology, but is instead more about the quality of your life.