Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology

by Cal Newport

look beyond the notification settings on his 112 apps and ask the more important question of why he uses so many apps in the first place.

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.

digital minimalists, because they believe that the best digital life is formed by carefully curating their tools to deliver massive and unambiguous benefits. They tend to be incredibly wary of low-value activities that can clutter up their time and attention and end up hurting more than they help.

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.

Tyler roughly a year after his minimalist decision to leave social media. He was clearly excited by how his life had changed during this period.

He started volunteering near his home, he exercises regularly, he’s reading three to four books a month, he began to learn to play the ukulele, and he told me that now that his phone is no longer glued to his hand, he’s closer than he has ever been with his wife and kids.

Adam is a digital minimalist, which means maximizing convenience is prioritized much lower than using technology to support his values. As a father, teaching his kids an important lesson about embracing life beyond the screen was far more important than faster typing.

digital minimalist

He had been a Twitter addict before adopting this philosophy. He has since quit that service and instead receives his news through a curated collection of online magazines that he checks once a day in the afternoon.

Instagram; he instead thought hard about how best to integrate this tool into his life. In the end, he settled on posting one picture every week of whatever personal art project he happens to be working on.

He also follows only a small number of accounts, all of which belong to artists whose work inspires him—making the experience of checking his feed both fast and meaningful.

Principle #1: Clutter is costly. Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.

Acfually, this is the thing. Defining your personal boundary, parents, wife, kids, very close circle of friends, and my pet. After that dont take anything personlly.

after eating his meal he would read the wrapping. He found time during this leisurely construction process to take detailed notes on the nature that surrounded him.

“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.”6,7

What these farmers are actually gaining from all the life they sacrifice is slightly nicer stuff: venetian blinds, a better quality copper pot, perhaps a fancy wagon for traveling back and forth to town more efficiently.

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.

treat the minutes of our life as a concrete and valuable substance—arguably the most valuable substance we possess—and to always reckon with how much of this life we trade for the various activities we allow to claim our time.

The reason the second principle of minimalism is so important is that most people invest very little energy into these types of optimizations.

Another optimization that was common among the digital minimalists I studied was to remove social media apps from their phones. Because they can still access these sites through their computer browsers, they don’t lose any of the high-value benefits that keep them signed up for these services. By removing the apps from their phones, however, they eliminated their ability to browse their accounts as a knee-jerk response to boredom.

The result is that these minimalists dramatically reduced the amount of time they spend engaging with these services each week, while barely diminishing the value they provide to their lives—a much better personal technology process than thoughtlessly tapping and swiping these apps throughout the day as the whim strikes.

Finding useful new technologies is just the first step to improving your life. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use them.

Amish commitment to the biblical tenet to “be in the world, but not of it.”

Amish, Mennonites embrace the biblical principle to be in the world, but not of it,

“I’m controlling the role technology is allowed to play in my life.”

The central idea of minimalism, that less can be more, is not novel.

I’ve convinced you that digital minimalism is worthwhile, the next step is to discuss how best to adopt this lifestyle.

The Digital Declutter Process Put aside a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life. During this thirty-day break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful.

At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank slate. For each technology you reintroduce, determine what value it serves in your life and how specifically you will use it so as to maximize this value.

More common were subtle mistakes in implementation. A typical culprit, for example, was technology restriction rules that were either too vague or too strict. Another mistake was not planning what to replace these technologies with during the declutter period—

leading to anxiety and boredom.

A temporary detox is a much weaker resolution than trying to permanently change your life, and therefore much easier for your mind to subvert when the going gets tough.

STEP #1: DEFINE YOUR TECHNOLOGY RULES

digital tools that are delivered through a computer screen or a mobile phone and are meant to either entertain, inform, or connect you.

Once you’ve identified the class of technologies that are relevant, you must then decide which of them are sufficiently “optional” that you can take a break from them for the full thirty days of the declutter process.

“In a nutshell, I only lost touch with people I didn’t need (or, in some cases, didn’t even want) to be constantly in touch with.”

The digital declutter focuses primarily on new technologies, which describes apps, sites, and tools delivered through a computer or mobile phone screen. You should probably also include video games and streaming video in this category.

Take a thirty-day break from any of these technologies that you deem “optional”—meaning that you can step away from them without creating harm or major problems in either your professional or personal life.

In the end, you’re left with a list of banned technologies along with relevant operating procedures.

Write this down and put it somewhere where you’ll see it every day.

Clarity in what you’re allowed and not allowed to do during the declutter will p...

it’s a mistake to think of the digital declutter as only a detox experience.

After your thirty-day break comes the final step of the digital declutter: reintroducing optional technologies back into your life. This reintroduction is more demanding than you might imagine.

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.

With this in mind, 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.

then face a more difficult standard: Is this technology the best way to support this value?

If a technology makes it through both of these screening questions, 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?

Digital minimalists combat this by maintaining standard operating procedures that dictate when and how they use the digital tools in their lives. They would never simply say, “I use Facebook because it helps my social life.” They would instead declare something more specific, such as: “I check Facebook each Saturday on my computer to see what my close friends and family are up to; I don’t have the app on my phone; I culled my list of friends down to just meaningful relationships.”

To allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must: Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

sales engineer named Enrique told me that “Twitter is what caused me the most harm,” so he also restricted himself to checking his feed only once a week, on the weekend.