Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.

trying to both better understand its contours and seek out the rare examples of those who can extract great value from these new technologies without losing control.*

The key to thriving in our high-tech world, they’ve learned, is to spend much less time using technology.

It’s not about usefulness, it’s about autonomy.

Compulsive use sells, which Harris now acknowledges when he claims that the attention economy drives companies like Google into a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.”

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.

intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

I’ve argued that the best way to fight the tyranny of the digital in your life is to embrace a philosophy of technology use based in your deeply held values. I then proposed

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“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.”

This is why clutter is dangerous. It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life.

For Thoreau’s obsession with calculation runs deep. . . . He says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose?

The first is that most of these technologies are still relatively new. Because of this reality, their role in your life can still seem novel and fun, obscuring more serious questions about the specific value they’re providing.

The large attention economy conglomerates that introduced many of these new technologies don’t want us thinking about optimization.

By contrast, if you think of these services as offering a collection of features that you can carefully put to use to serve specific values, then almost certainly you’ll spend much less time using them.

Once you break free from this mind-set, however, and begin seeing new technologies simply as tools that you can deploy selectively, you’re able to fully embrace the second principle of minimalism and start furiously optimizing—enabling

enabling you to reap the advantages of vaulting up the return curve. Finding useful new technologies is just the first step to improving your life. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use them.

do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.

“the Amish stand out as offering an honorable alternative.” It’s important to understand what exactly makes this alternative honorable, as it’s in these advantages that we’ll uncover a strong argument for the third principle of minimalism,

which claims that approaching decisions with intention can be more important than the impact of the actual

decisions the...

The Amish prioritize the benefits generated by acting intentionally about technology over the benefits lost from the technologies they decide not to use. Their gamble is that intention trumps convenience

the sense of meaning that comes from acting with intention.

Part of what makes this philosophy so effective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction,

it’s the commitment to minimalism itself that yields the bulk of their satisfaction. The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.