Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology

by Cal Newport

(compulsive use is the foundation for many social media business plans).

less can be more to our relationship with digital tools.

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,

“This was supposed to be an iPod that made phone calls,” he confirmed.3 “Our core mission was playing music and making phone calls.”

We didn’t, in other words, sign up for the digital world in which we’re currently entrenched; we seem to have stumbled backward into it.

The source of our unease is not evident in these thin-sliced case studies, but instead becomes visible only when confronting the thicker reality of how these technologies as a whole have managed to expand beyond the minor roles for which

we initially adopted them. 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.

most people who struggle with the online part of their lives are not weak willed or stupid. They’re instead successful professionals, striving students, loving parents; they are organized and used to pursuing hard goals.

attention economy

The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children.5 Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.

“Technology is not neutral?”

“The App Store wants your soul.”

attention economy drives companies like Google into a “race to the bottom of the brain stem.”

Time Well Spent with the mission of demanding technology that “serves us, not advertising,”

wearing a red shirt on a dating profile will lead to significantly more interest than any other color,

intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

“It’s hard to exaggerate how much the ‘like’ button changed the psychology of Facebook

“How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”17 And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.