Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.

People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable.

“Well, every time I check my phone, I’m playing the slot machine to see ‘What did I get?’”

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.

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

How much of your time and attention, he would ask, must be sacrificed to earn the small profit of occasional connections and new ideas that is earned by cultivating a significant presence on Twitter? Assume, for example, that your Twitter habit effectively consumes ten hours per week. Thoreau would note that this cost is almost certainly way too high for the limited benefits it returns. If you value new connections and exposure to interesting ideas, he might argue, why not adopt a habit of attending an interesting talk or event every month, and forcing yourself to chat with at least three people while there?