More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cal Newport
Read between
March 22 - April 12, 2020
you can simultaneously cherish your ability to discover inspiring photos on Instagram while fretting about this app’s ability to invade the evening hours you used to spend talking with friends or reading.
Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences.
approaching decisions with intention can be more important than the impact of the actual decisions themselves.
The Amish prioritize the benefits generated by acting intentionally about technology over the benefits lost from the technologies they decide not to use.
previous technologies that threatened solitude, from Thoreau’s telegraph to Storr’s car phone, introduced new ways to occasionally interrupt time alone with your thoughts, whereas the iPod provided for the first time the ability to be continuously distracted from your own mind.
The philosophy of conversation-centric communication takes a harder stance. It argues that conversation is the only form of interaction that in some sense counts toward maintaining a relationship.
nothing against technology—so long as the tools are put to use to improve your real-world social life as opposed to diminishing it.
It won’t take many walks with a friend, or pleasantly meandering phone calls, before you begin to wonder why you previously felt it was so important to turn away from the person sitting right in front of you to leave a comment on your cousin’s friend’s Instagram feed.
To replace this rich flow with a single bit is the ultimate insult to our social processing machinery.
To say it’s like driving a Ferrari under the speed limit is an understatement; the better simile is towing a Ferrari behind a mule.
Coffee shop hours are also popular. In this variation, you pick some time each week during which you settle into a table at your favorite coffee shop with the newspaper or a good book. The reading, however, is just the backup activity. You spread the word among people you know that you’re always at the shop during these hours with the hope that you soon cultivate a rotating group of regulars that come hang out.
Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.
Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.
Craft allows an escape from this shallowness and provides instead a deeper source of pride.
activities mediated through a screen exhibit a fundamentally different character than those embodied in the real world.
Typing computer code into an advanced integrated development environment is not quite the same as confronting a plank of maple wood with a handheld plane. The former misses both the physicality and sense of unlimited options latent in the latter.
“Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work.”
Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.
Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.
A foundational theme in digital minimalism is that new technology, when used with care and intention, creates a better life than either Luddism or mindless adoption.
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.
A well-known journalist recently told me that following a breaking story on Twitter gives him the sense that he’s receiving lots of information, but that in his experience, waiting until the next morning to read the article about the story in the Washington Post almost always leaves him more informed.
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.
engaging with arguments provides a deep source of satisfaction independent of the actual content of the debate.
smartphones are the preferred Trojan horse of the digital attention economy.
Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools.
