Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.

Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.

Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology.

Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies.