Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

A common term I heard in these conversations about modern digital life was exhaustion. It’s not that any one app or website was particularly bad when considered in isolation. As many people clarified, the issue was the overall impact of having so many different shiny baubles pulling so insistently at their attention and manipulating their mood.

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.

“Whether there’s a notification or not, it doesn’t really feel that good,” Pearlman said about the experience of checking social media feedback. “Whatever we’re hoping to see, it never quite meets that bar.”

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.

Even when a new technology promises to support something the minimalist values, it must still pass a stricter test: Is this the best way to use technology to support this value?

A maximalist is very uncomfortable with the idea that anyone might miss out on something that’s the least bit interesting or valuable.

Oops guilty! That opportunity mindset...

When people consider specific tools or behaviors in their digital lives, they tend to focus only on the value each produces.

The poet and essayist May Sarton explored the strangeness of this point in a 1972 diary entry, writing: I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone . . .

My Moleskine notebooks are not exactly diaries because I don’t write in them on a regular schedule.

GuYs ItS NOT A DIARY iTs a JoUrNaL! 🤣

our brains evolved to crave rich social interaction, and then explore the serious issues caused when we displace this interaction with highly appealing, but much less substantial, electronic pings.

The studies that found positive results focused on specific behaviors of social media users, while the studies that found negative results focused on overall use of these services.

Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

Computer interfaces, and the increasingly intelligent software running behind the scenes, are designed to eliminate both the rough edges and the possibilities inherent in directly confronting your physical surroundings.