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.

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.

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.

Thoreau establishes early in Walden: “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.”

A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

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

Craft doesn’t necessarily require that you create a new object, it can also apply to high-value behaviors.

What makes Handmade particularly relevant to our discussion is that Rogowski specifically investigates the value of craft in contrast to the lower-skilled digital behaviors that dominate so much of our time—a

They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. 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.

In a culture where screens replace craft, Crawford argues, people lose the outlet for self-worth established through unambiguous demonstrations of skill.

these digital cries for attention are often a poor substitute for the recognition generated by handicraft, as they’re not backed by the hard-won skill required to tame the “infallible judgment” of physical reality, and come across instead as “the boasts of a boy.”

Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.

“It is the antithesis of the glossy, streaming waterfalls of information and marketing that masquerade as relationships on social networks.”

Boardgames.

Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.

In this new state, digital technology is still present, but now subordinated to a support role: helping you to set up or maintain your leisure activities, but not acting as the primary source of leisure itself.

although these activities are primarily analog in nature, their successful execution often depends on the strategic use of new technologies.

FIX OR BUILD

Fix your room. Improve the organization of the house. Every week.

SCHEDULE YOUR LOW-QUALITY LEISURE

Schedule cooking for the home.

schedule in advance the time you spend on low-quality leisure.

A seasonal leisure plan is something that you put together three times a year:

The Weekly Leisure Plan At the beginning of each week, put aside time to review your current seasonal leisure plan.

Ginsberg and Burke are encouraging people to think critically about what exactly they want to get out of this service.

if you’re going to use social media, stay far away from the mobile versions of these services, as these pose a significantly bigger risk to your time and attention.

TURN YOUR DEVICES INTO SINGLE-PURPOSE

Not single purpose. I use it to: Communicate. Ai assistance. Music. Travel.

If you want to join the attention resistance, one of the most important things you can therefore do is follow Fred Stutzman’s lead and transform your devices—laptops, tablets, phones—into computers that are general purpose in the long run, but are effectively single purpose in any given moment.

USE SOCIAL MEDIA LIKE A PROFESSIONAL

Jennifer also uses Facebook significantly less than the average user by maintaining a simple rule regarding the service: it’s only for close friends and relatives, and for occasionally connecting with influencers.