Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

I call it digital minimalism, and it applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools.

“Philip Morris just wanted your lungs,” Maher concludes. “The App Store wants your soul.”

A similar drive to regulate social approval helps explain the current obsession among teenagers to maintain Snapchat “streaks” with their friends, as a long unbroken streak of daily communication is a satisfying confirmation that the relationship is strong.

Our Paleolithic brain categorizes ignoring a newly arrived text the same as snubbing the tribe member trying to attract your attention by the communal fire: a potentially dangerous social faux pas.

We didn’t sign up for the digital lives we now lead. They were instead, to a large extent, crafted in boardrooms to serve the interests of a select group of technology investors.

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.

My argument for this philosophy’s effectiveness rests on the following three core principles:

It took them seven years, but their efforts culminated in the 2017 release of Lead Yourself First.

Storr’s conclusion is that we’re wrong to consider intimate interaction as the sine qua non of human thriving. Solitude can be just as important for both happiness and productivity.

To put this in context, 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.

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

His book about the experience, Walden, is rich with long passages describing Thoreau alone and observing the slow rhythms of nature. (You’ll never think of pond ice the same way again after you read Thoreau’s lengthy discussion of how its qualities change throughout the winter.)

The pianist Glenn Gould once proposed a mathematical formula for this cycle, telling a journalist: “I’ve always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now what that X represents I don’t really know . . . but it’s a substantial ratio.”

Much in the same way that the “innovation” of highly processed foods in the mid-twentieth century led to a global health crisis, the unintended side effects of digital communication tools—a sort of social fast food—are proving to be similarly worrisome.

The problem, then, is not that using social media directly makes us unhappy. Indeed, as the positive studies cited above found, certain social media activities, when isolated in an experiment, modestly boost well-being. The key issue is that using social media tends to take people away from the real-world socializing that’s massively more valuable.

I refer to this philosophy by the superfluously alliterative name conversation-centric communication.

Put simply, you should stop using them. Don’t click “Like.” Ever. And while you’re at it, stop leaving comments on social media posts as well. No “so cute!” or “so cool!” Remain silent.

Put simply, don’t click and don’t comment. This basic stricture will radically change for the better how you maintain your social life.

This practice suggests that you keep your phone in Do Not Disturb mode by default.

Doesn’t this mean he will be talking while driving?

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

I conjecture that the vast majority of regular social media users can receive the vast majority of the value these services provide their life in as little as twenty to forty minutes of use per week.

The average Facebook user, by contrast, spends around 350 minutes per week on this company’s services (if we take the fifty minutes per day cited above and multiply it by the seven days in a week). This means that if you were careful, you would be using these services somewhere around eleven to seventeen times less than average.

This practice, in other words, suggests that you remove all social media apps from your phone. You don’t have to quit these services; you just have to quit accessing them on the go.