Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

On a regular basis, go for long walks, preferably somewhere scenic. Take these walks alone, which means not just by yourself, but also, if possible, without your phone. If you’re wearing headphones, or monitoring a text message chain, or, God forbid, narrating the stroll on Instagram—you’re not really walking, and therefore you’re not going to experience this practice’s greatest benefits.

Thoreau once wrote: I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.

“blank page productivity,”

In December of that year, I wrote an entry titled “The Plan,” underneath which I put a list of my values in life, falling under the categories of “relationships,” “virtues,” and “qualities.”

This entry also gets credit for instigating a habit where every time I started a new Moleskine notebook, I would begin by transcribing my current list of values, underneath the heading “The Plan,” in the notebook’s first pages. The 2010 entries are particularly interesting, as they contain the seeds of the ideas that grew into my past three books: So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Deep Work, and the title you’re currently reading.

These notebooks play a different role: they provide me a

to write a letter to myself when encountering a complicated decision, or a hard emotion, or a surge of inspiration. By the time I’m done composing my thoughts in the structured form demanded by written prose, I’ve often gained clarity. I do make a habit of regularly reviewing these entries, but this habit is often superfluous. It’s the act of writing itself that already yields the bulk of the benefits. Earlier in this chapter, I introduced Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin’s definition of solitude as time spent alone with your own thoughts and free from inputs from other minds. Writing a letter to yourself is an excellent mechanism for generating exactly this type of solitude. It not only frees you from outside inputs but also provides a conceptual scaffolding on which to sort and organize your thinking.

Dwight Eisenhower leveraged a “practice of thinking by writing” throughout his career to make sense of complicated decisions and tame intense emotions.

Abraham Lincoln had a habit of recording thoughts on scraps of paper that he would stick in his hat for safekeeping. (Indeed, the first draft of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was collated, in part, from ideas spanning paper scraps. Inspired by this, the nonprofit that now operates the President Lincoln’s Cottage historical site runs

program encouraging young students to do more rigorous original thinking. They call it Lincoln’s Hat.) This practice asks you to embrace this well-validated strategy by making time to write a letter to yourself when faced with demanding or uncertain circumstances. You can follow my lead and keep a special notebook for this purpose, or, like Abraham Lincoln, you can grab a scrap of paper when the need arises. The key is the act of writing itself. This behavior necessarily shifts you into a state of productive solitude—wrenching you away from the appealing digital baubles and addictive content waiting to distract you, and providing you with a structured way to make sense of whatever important things are happening in your life at the moment.

A strong rock paper scissors player integrates a rich stream of information about their opponent’s body language and recent plays to help approximate their opponent’s mental state and therefore make an educated guess about the next play. These players will also use subtle movements and phrases to prime their opponent to think about a certain play. The opponent, however, might notice the priming attempt and adjust their play accordingly. Of course, the original player might expect this, and execute a tertiary adjustment, and so on. It should come as no surprise that participants in rock paper scissors tournaments often describe the experience as exhausting.

Understanding rock paper scissors champions is important to our purposes because their strategies highlight a foundational endowment shared by every human being on earth: the ability to perform complicated social thinking.

most people don’t realize the extreme degree to which they perform similarly demanding feats of social navigation and mind reading throughout their normal everyday interactions. Our brains, in many ways, can be understood as sophisticated social computers. A natural conclusion of this reality is that we should treat with great care any new technology that threatens to disrupt the ways in which we connect and communicate with others. When you mess with something so central to the success of our species, it’s easy to create problems.