Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by Cal Newport

Becoming more systematic about your leisure, in other words, can significantly increase the relaxation you enjoy throughout your week.

doing nothing is overrated. In the middle of a busy workday, or after a particularly trying morning of childcare, it’s tempting to crave the release of having nothing to do—whole blocks of time with no schedule, no expectations, and no activity beyond whatever seems to catch your attention in the moment. These decompression sessions have their place, but their rewards are muted, as they tend to devolve toward low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and half-hearted binge-watching. For the many different reasons argued in the preceding pages, investing energy into something hard but worthwhile almost always returns much richer rewards.

Join the Attention Resistance

the “attention economy” describes the business sector that makes money gathering consumers’ attention and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers.

If your personal brand of digital minimalism requires engagement with services like social media, or breaking news sites, it’s important to approach these activities with a sense of zero-sum antagonism. You want something valuable from their networks, and they want to undermine your autonomy—to come out on the winning side of this battle requires both preparation and a ruthless commitment to avoiding exploitation. Vive la résistance!

This strategy is classic digital minimalism. By removing your ability to access social media at any moment, you reduce its ability to become a crutch deployed to distract you from bigger voids in your life. At the same time, you’re not necessarily abandoning these services.

This practice of default blocking might at first seem overly aggressive, but what it’s actually doing is bringing you back closer to the ideal of single-purpose computing that’s much more compatible with our human attention systems. As with all of the advice in this chapter on the attention resistance, default blocking doesn’t require you to abstain completely from the fruits of the digital attention economy but forces you to approach them with more intention. It’s a different way of thinking about your relationship with your computer, and one that is becoming increasingly necessary to remain a minimalist in our current age of distraction.

PRACTICE: USE SOCIAL MEDIA LIKE A PROFESSIONAL

approach social media as if you’re the director of emerging media for your own life. Have a careful plan for how you use the different platforms, with the goal of “maximizing good information and cutting out the waste.”

Early in 2010, a trio of Germans with backgrounds in sociology, technology, and market research posted online a document titled “Das Slow Media Manifest.” The English translation reads: “The Slow Media Manifesto.”

Slow Media cannot be consumed casually, but provoke the full concentration of their users. . . . Slow Media measure themselves in production, appearance and content against high standard of quality and stand out from their fast-paced and short-lived counterparts. This movement remains predominantly European.

Whereas the Europeans suggest transforming the consumption of media into a high-quality experience (much like the Slow Food movement approach to eating), Americans tend to embrace the “low information diet”: a concept first popularized by Tim Ferriss, in which you aggressively eliminate sources of news and information to help reclaim more time for other pursuits. This American approach to information is much like our approach to healthy eating, which focuses more on aggressively eliminating what’s bad than celebrating what’s good.

the European focus on slowness is more likely to succeed in the long run.

To embrace news media from a mind-set of slowness requires first and foremost that you focus only on the highest-quality sources. Breaking news, for example, is almost always much lower quality than the reporting that’s possible once an event has occurred and journalists have had time to process it.

you should constrain your attention to the small number of people who have proved to be world class on the topics you care about. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to write for a big established organization—a powerful voice expressing herself on a personal blog can be just as high quality as a longtime reporter for the Economist—but instead that they’ve proved to you to be reliably smart and insightful with their writing. When an issue catches your attention, in other words, you’re usually better served checking in on what the people you respect most think about it than wading into the murk of a Twitter hashtag search or the back-and-forth commenting littering your Facebook timeline.

a small amount of high-quality offerings is usually superior to a larger amount of low-quality fare.

PRACTICE: DUMB DOWN YOUR SMARTPHONE

implementing this philosophy is largely an exercise in pragmatism. Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves. They don’t accept the idea that offering some small benefit is justification for allowing an attention-gobbling service into their lives, and are instead interested in applying new technology in highly selective and intentional ways that yield big wins. Just as important: they’re comfortable missing out on everything else.