Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

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

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

The digital declutter provides this aggressive action. This process requires you to step away from optional online activities for thirty days. During this period, you’ll wean yourself from the cycles of addiction that many digital tools can instill, and begin to rediscover the analog activities that provide you deeper satisfaction.

There are many ways to portray this change. I think the social critic Laurence Scott does so quite effectively when he describes the modern hyper-connected existence as one in which “a moment can feel strangely flat if it exists solely in itself.”

Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable. What’s making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control

how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

these technologies are in many cases specifically designed to trigger this addictive behavior. Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan.

By working backward from their deep values to their technology choices, digital minimalists transform these innovations from a source of distraction into tools to support a life well lived.

this minimalist philosophy contrasts starkly with the maximalist philosophy that most people deploy by default—a mind-set in which any potential for benefit is enough to start using a technology that catches your attention. A maximalist is very uncomfortable with the idea that anyone might miss out on something that’s the least bit interesting or valuable.

Put another way: 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.

first principle of minimalism: that more can be less.

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.” This new economics offers a radical rethinking of the consumerist culture that began to emerge in Thoreau’s time. Standard economic theory focuses on monetary outcomes.

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.

When we confront our habits through this perspective, we will reach the same conclusion now that Thoreau did in his era: more often than not, the cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises.

Once we view these personal technology processes through the perspective of diminishing returns, we’ll gain the precise vocabulary we need to understand the validity of the second principle of minimalism, which states that optimizing how we use technology is just as important as how we choose what technologies to use in the first place.

Part of what makes this philosophy so effective is that the very act of being selective about your tools will bring you satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools you decide to avoid.

you’re supposed to take a break from “optional technologies” in your life. The first step of the declutter process, therefore, is to define which technologies fall into this “optional” category.

My general heuristic is the following: consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life.

A major reason that I recommend taking an extended break before trying to transform your digital life is that without the clarity provided by detox, the addictive pull of the technologies will bias your decisions.

it’s a mistake to think of the digital declutter as only a detox experience. The goal is not to simply give yourself a break from technology, but to instead spark a permanent transformation of your digital life. The detoxing is merely a step that supports this transformation.

For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life.

The goal of this final step is to start from a blank slate and only let back into your life technology that passes your strict minimalist standards. It’s the care you take here that will determine whether this process sparks lasting change in your life.

for each optional technology that you’re considering reintroducing into your life, you must first ask: Does this technology directly support something that I deeply value? This is the only condition on which you should let one of these tools into your life.

Once a technology passes this first screening question, it must then face a more difficult standard: Is this technology the best way to support this value?

there’s one last question you must ask yourself before it’s allowed back into your life: How am I going to use this technology going forward to maximize its value and minimize its harms?

As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.

To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence.

regular doses of solitude, mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish as a human being. It’s more urgent now than ever that we recognize this fact, because, as I’ll argue next, for the first time in human history solitude is starting to fade away altogether.

For one thing, when you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you: the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, and to strengthen relationships. If you suffer from chronic solitude deprivation, therefore, the quality of your life degrades.

The sudden rise in anxiety-related problems coincided with the first incoming classes of students that were raised on smartphones and social media. She noticed that these new students were constantly and frantically processing and sending messages. It seemed clear that the persistent communication was somehow messing with the students’ brain chemistry.

Twenge agrees with the intuition of the university mental health administrator when she notes that these shifts in mental health correspond “exactly” to the moment when American smartphone ownership became ubiquitous. The defining trait of iGen, she explains, is that they grew up with iPhones and social media, and don’t remember a time before constant access to the internet. They’re paying a price for this distinction with their mental health.

The key is the act of writing itself. This behavior necessarily shifts you into a state of productive solitude—wrenching you away from the appealing digital baubles and addictive content waiting to distract you, and providing you with a structured way to make sense of whatever important things are happening in your life at the moment.

the team found that there’s a particular set of regions in the brain that consistently activate when you’re not attempting to do a cognitive task, and that just as consistently deactivate once you focus your attention on something specific.

The default network, in other words, seems to be connected to social cognition. Sure enough, once scientists knew what to look for, they discovered that the regions of the brain that defined the default network are “virtually identical” to the networks that light up during social cognition experiments. When given downtime, in other words, our brain defaults to thinking about our social life.

The loss of social connection, for example, turns out to trigger the same system as physical pain—explaining why the death of a family member, a breakup, or even just a social snub can cause such distress.

Given the power of the pain system in driving our behavior, its connection to our social life underscores the importance of social relationships to our species’ success.

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.

A subtler effect is the way that digital communication tools can subvert the offline communication that remains in your life.

Face-to-face conversation is the most human—and humanizing—thing we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood.

As an academic who studies and teaches social media explained to me: “I don’t think we’re meant to keep in touch with so many people.”

Being less available over text, in other words, has a way of paradoxically strengthening your relationship even while making you (slightly) less available to those you care about.

a life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.

if your life consists only of actions whose “worth depends on the existence of problems, difficulties, needs, which these activities aim to solve,” you’re vulnerable to the existential despair that blooms in response to the inevitable question, Is this all there is to life?

Harris felt uncomfortable, in other words, not because he was craving a particular digital habit, but because he didn’t know what to do with himself once his general access to the world of connected screens was removed.

If you begin decluttering the low-value digital distractions from your life before you’ve convincingly filled in the void they were helping you ignore, the experience will be unnecessarily unpleasant at best and a massive failure at worse. The most successful digital minimalists, therefore, tend to start their conversion by renovating what they do with their free time—cultivating high-quality leisure before culling the worst of their digital habits.

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

In this context, “craft” describes any activity where you apply skill to create something valuable.

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

Craft allows an escape from this shallowness and provides instead a deeper source of pride.

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