Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

property of walking: it’s a fantastic source of solitude. It’s important here to remember our technical definition of solitude as freedom from input from other minds, as it’s exactly this absence of reaction to the clatter of civilization that supports all of these benefits. Nietzsche emphasized this point when he contrasted the originality of his walk-stimulated ideas with those produced by the bookish scholar locked in a library reacting only to other people’s work. “We do not belong,” he wrote, “to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books.”

we’re not talking about a short jaunt for a little exercise, but honest-to-goodness, deep-in-the-woods, Nietzsche-on-the-slope-of-a-mountain-style long journeys—these are the grist of productive aloneness.

Thoreau once wrote: I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.

grab a scrap of paper when the need arises. 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.

Anything textual or non-interactive—basically, all social media, email, text, and instant messaging—doesn’t count as conversation and should instead be categorized as mere connection. In this philosophy, connection is downgraded to a logistical role. This form of interaction now has two goals: to help set up and arrange conversation, or to efficiently transfer practical information (e.g., a meeting location or time for an upcoming event). Connection is no longer an alternative to conversation; it’s instead its supporter.

if you adopt conversation-centric communication, you’ll still likely rely on text-messaging services to simplify information gathering, or to coordinate social events, or to ask quick questions, but you’ll no longer participate in open-ended, ongoing text-based conversations throughout your day. The socializing that counts is real conversation, and text is no longer a sufficient alternative.

To be clear, conversation-centric communication requires sacrifices. If you adopt this philosophy, you’ll almost certainly reduce the number of people with whom you have an active relationship. Real conversation takes time, and the total number of people for which you can uphold this standard will be significantly less than the total number of people you can follow, retweet, “like,” and occasionally leave a comment for on social media, or ping with the occasional text. Once you no longer count the latter activities as meaningful interaction, your social circle will seem at first to contract. This sense of contraction, however, is illusory. As I have argued throughout this chapter, conversation is the good stuff; it’s what we crave as humans and what provides us with the sense of community and belonging necessary to thrive. Connection, on the other hand, though appealing in the moment, provides very little of what we need.

as you trade more of this time for conversation, the richness of these analog interactions will far outweigh what you’re leaving behind.

Once you no longer treat text interactions as an ongoing conversation that you must continually tend, it’s much easier to concentrate fully on the activity before you. This will increase the value you get out of these real-world interactions. It might also provide some anxiety reduction, as our brains don’t react well to constant disruptive interaction

When your friends and family are able to instigate meandering pseudo-conversations with you over text at any time, it’s easy for them to become complacent about your relationship.

On the other hand, if you only check your text messages occasionally, this dynamic changes. They’re still able to send you questions and get back a response in a reasonable amount of time, or send you a reminder and be sure that you’ll see it. But these more asynchronous and logistical interactions no longer give off the approximate luster of true conversation. The result is that both of you will be more motivated to fill this void with better interaction, as the relationship will seem strained in the absence of back-and-forth dialogue. 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.

This practice suggests that you follow the aforementioned executive’s example by instating your own variation of his conversation office hours strategy. Put aside set times on set days during which you’re always available for conversation. Depending on where you are during this period, these conversations might be exclusively on the phone or could also include in-person meetings. Once these office hours are set, promote them to the people you care about. When someone instigates a low-quality connection (say, a text message conversation or social media ping), suggest they call or meet you during your office hours sometime when it is convenient for them. Similarly, once office hours are in place, it’s easy to reach out proactively to people you care about and invite them to converse with you during these hours whenever they’re next available.

Ironically for the inventor of the iPhone, Jobs was not the type of person who would be interested in maintaining important relationships through ongoing drips of digital pings.

Let’s start this search for insight by interrogating the habits of the informal leader of the FI 2.0 movement: a former engineer named Pete Adeney, who became financially independent in his early thirties and now blogs about his life under the purposefully self-deprecating moniker Mr. Money Mustache.

Here’s how Pete explains his leisure philosophy on his blog: I never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can’t stand tourist attractions, don’t sit on the beach unless there’s a really big sand castle that needs to be made, [and I] don’t care about what the celebrities and politicians are doing. . . . Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.

As Pete summarizes his leisure philosophy: “If you leave me alone for a day . . . I’ll have a joyful time rotating between carpentry, weight training, writing, playing around with instruments in the music studio, making lists and executing tasks from them.”

Pete and Liz emphasize a perhaps surprising observation: when individuals in the FI community are provided large amounts of leisure time, they often voluntarily fill these hours with strenuous activity. This bias toward action over more traditional ideas of relaxation might strike some as needlessly exhausting, but to Pete and Liz it makes perfect sense.

Pete, for his part, offers three justifications for his strenuous life: it doesn’t cost much money, it provides physical exercise, and it’s good for his mental health (“For me, inactivity leads to a depressive boredom,” he explains).

As president, Roosevelt regularly boxed (until a hard blow detached his left retina), practiced jujitsu, skinny-dipped in the Potomac, and read at the rate of one book per day. He was not one to sit back and relax.

Expending more energy in your leisure, Bennett tells us, can end up energizing you more. He’s reworking the old entrepreneurial adage “You have to spend money to make money” into the language of personal vitality. This idea, which for lack of a better term we can call the Bennett Principle, provides a plausible foundation for the active leisure lives we’ve encountered so far in this section.

the value you receive from a pursuit is often proportional to the energy invested.

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

Any conversation about high-quality leisure must eventually touch on the topic of craft. 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.

Rogowski published a book titled Handmade, which is part craftsman memoir and part philosophical investigation of craft itself.

his book’s subtitle: Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction.

“People have the need to put their hands on tools and to make things. We need this in order to feel whole.” As Rogowski explains: “Long ago we learned to think by using our hands, not the other way around.” As our species evolved, in other words, we did so as beings that experience and manipulate the world around us. We are orders of magnitude better at doing this than any other animal, and this is true due to complex structures that evolved in our brains to support this ability.

When you use craft to leave the virtual world of the screen and instead begin to work in more complex ways with the physical world around you, you’re living truer to your primal potential. Craft makes us human, and in doing so, it can provide deep satisfactions that are hard to replicate in other (dare I say) less hands-on activities.

a deep activity like writing a piece of computer code that solves a problem (a high-skill effort) yields more meaning than a shallow activity like answering emails (a low-skill effort).

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

Another common property of high-quality leisure is its ability to support rich social interactions.

Playing games also provides permission for what we can call supercharged socializing—interactions with higher intensity levels than are common in polite society. Sax describes the excited chatter and loud belly laughs he encountered at Snakes & Lattes during a busy night. This observation doesn’t surprise me. Every couple of months, a group of dads I know get together to (poorly) play poker. These sessions provide us an excuse to joke and chat and vent for three hours. When a player in our game runs out of chips early, he always sticks around for the rest of the game. It’s not really about the cards, just as playing Catan at Snakes & Lattes is not really about building roads.

Another interesting intersection of leisure and interaction is emerging in the world of health and exercise. Arguably one of the biggest trends in this sector is the “social fitness” phenomenon, in which, as one sports industry analyst describes it, “fitness has shifted from a private activity at the gym to a social interaction in the studio or on the street.”

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

Aristotle argued that high-quality leisure is essential to a life well lived. With this in mind, in this chapter I provided three lessons about how to cultivate these high-quality pursuits. I then concluded with the caveat that although these activities are primarily analog in nature, their successful execution often depends on the strategic use of new technologies.

PRACTICE: FIX OR BUILD SOMETHING EVERY WEEK

My suggestion is that you try to learn and apply one new skill every week, over a period of six weeks. Start with easy projects like those suggested above, but as soon as you feel the challenge wane, ramp up the complication of the skills and steps involved. When this six-week experiment ends, you won’t quite be ready to rebuild the engine on your Honda, but you’ll have achieved entry-level handy status. That is, just enough competence to realize you’re capable of learning new things, and to realize that you enjoy doing so. If you’re like most, this six-week crash course will spark a persistent and rewarding inclination toward getting your hands dirty.

[The executive was] just raving about these people spending twelve hours a day on Facebook . . . so I asked a question to the guy who was raving: “The guy who’s spending twelve hours a day on Facebook, do you think he’ll be able to do what you’ve done?”

As Clark incredulously pointed out, no matter what immediate benefits these services might provide the users, the net impact on their productivity and life satisfaction must be profoundly negative if all these users do is engage the service. You can’t, in other words, build a billion-dollar empire like Facebook if you’re wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook.

Here’s my suggestion: schedule in advance the time you spend on low-quality leisure. That is, work out the specific time periods during which you’ll indulge in web surfing, social media checking, and entertainment streaming. When you get to these periods, anything goes. If you want to binge-watch Netflix while live-streaming yourself browsing Twitter: go for it. But outside these periods, stay offline.

by confining your use of attention-capturing services to well-defined periods, your remaining leisure time is left protected for more substantial activities. Without access to your standard screens, the best remaining option to fill this time will be quality activities.

You’re not quitting anything or losing access to any information, you’re simply being more mindful of when you engage with this part of your leisure life. It’s difficult to paint such a reasonable restriction as untenable, which makes it more likely to last.

Once you start constraining your low-quality distractions (with no feeling of lost value), and filling the newly freed time with high-quality alternatives (which generate significantly higher levels of satisfaction), you’ll soon begin to wonder how you ever tolerated spending so many of your leisure hours staring passively at glowing screens.

PRACTICE: JOIN SOMETHING

In the professional world, many high achievers are meticulous strategists. They lay out a vision for what they’re trying to accomplish on multiple different time scales, connecting high-level ambition to decisions about daily actions. I’ve both practiced and written about these types of professional strategies for many years.* Here I want to suggest that you apply this same approach to your leisure life. I want you, in other words, to strategize your free time.

A seasonal leisure plan is something that you put together three times a year: at the beginning of the fall (early September), at the beginning of the winter (January), and at the beginning of summer (early May). I’m preferential toward seasonal timing as I’m an academic, and this matches the university calendar. Those with a business background might prefer quarterly planning, which works fine too.

A good seasonal plan contains two different types of items: objectives and habits that you intend to honor in the upcoming season. The objectives describe specific goals you hope to accomplish, with accompanying strategies for how you will accomplish them. The habits describe behavior rules you hope to stick with throughout the season. In a seasonal leisure plan, these objectives and habits will both be connected to cultivating a high-quality leisure life.

If you’re already in the habit of creating detailed plans for your week (which I highly recommend), you can just integrate your weekly leisure plan into whatever system you already use for planning. The more you see these leisure plans as just part of your normal scheduling—and not some separate and potentially optional endeavor—the more likely you are to succeed in following them.

You might be concerned that injecting more systematic thinking into your leisure life will rob it of the spontaneity and relaxation you crave for the time left over after your professional and family obligations. I hope to convince you that this concern is overblown. The weekly leisure planning process itself requires only a handful of minutes, and scheduling in advance some high-quality leisure activities hardly removes all spontaneity from your free time.

In addition, I’ve noticed that once someone becomes more intentional about their leisure, they tend to find more of it in their