Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology

by Cal Newport

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—a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child’s bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience.

our seemingly unhealthy relationship with new technologies like smartphones and video games,

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.

I met 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. On the professional side, the increased focus he achieved after leaving these services earned him a promotion. “Some of my work clients have noticed a change in me and they will ask what I am doing differently,” he told me. “When I tell them I quit social media, their response is ‘I wish I could do that, but I just can’t.’ The reality, however, is that they literally have no good reason to be on social media!”

Thoreau’s new economics, however, demands that you balance this profit against the costs measured in terms of “your life.” How much of your time and attention, he would ask, must be sacrificed to earn the small profit of occasional connections and new ideas that is earned by cultivating a significant presence on Twitter?

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.

As is often true in life, getting started is the most important step.

The day the declutter was over, I raced back to Facebook, to my old blogs, to Discord, gleeful and ready to dive back in—and then, after about thirty minutes of aimless browsing, I kind of looked up and thought … why am I doing this? This is … boring? This isn’t bringing me any kind of happiness. It took a declutter for me to notice that these technologies aren’t actually adding anything to my life.

“In the end, I just accepted the fact that I would miss some events in their lives, but that this was worthwhile for the mental energy it would save me to not be on social media.”

regardless of how you decide to shape your digital ecosystem, you should follow Lincoln’s example and give your brain the regular doses of quiet it requires to support a monumental life.

The smartphone provided a new technique to banish these remaining slivers of solitude: the quick glance. At the slightest hint of boredom, you can now surreptitiously glance at any number of apps or mobile-adapted websites that have been optimized to provide you an immediate and satisfying dose of input from other minds.

there’s nothing wrong with connectivity, but if you don’t balance it with regular doses of solitude, its benefits will diminish.

The purpose of these observations is to underscore the following point: the urgency we feel to always have a phone with us is exaggerated. To live permanently without these devices would be needlessly annoying, but to regularly spend a few hours away from them should give you no pause. It’s important that I convince you of this reality, as spending more time away from your phone is exactly what I’m going to ask you to do.

Motivated by these historical lessons, we too should embrace walking as a high-quality source of solitude. In doing so, we should heed Thoreau’s warning that 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.

I’m quite simply happier and more productive—by noticeably large factors—when I’m walking regularly.

the more you use social media, the less time you tend to devote to offline interaction, and therefore the worse this value deficit becomes—leaving the heaviest social media users much more likely to be lonely and miserable.

Humans are naturally biased toward activities that require less energy in the short term, even if it’s more harmful in the long term—so we end up texting our sibling instead of calling them on the phone, or liking a picture of a friend’s new baby instead of stopping by to visit.

A subtler effect is the way that digital communication tools can subvert the offline communication that remains in your life. Because our primal instinct to connect is so strong, it’s difficult to resist checking a device in the middle of a conversation with a friend or bath time with a child—reducing the quality of the richer interaction right in front of us. Our analog brain cannot easily distinguish between the importance of the person in the room with us and the person who just sent us a new text.

In her book, Sherry Turkle summarizes research that found just five days at a camp with no phones or internet was enough to induce major increases in the campers’ well-being and sense of connection.30 It won’t take many walks with a friend, or pleasantly meandering phone calls, before you begin to wonder why you previously felt it was so important to turn away from the person sitting right in front of you to leave a comment on your cousin’s friend’s Instagram feed.

the role of low-value interactions will inevitably expand until it begins to push out the high-value socializing that actually matters.

In recent years, as the boundary between work and life blends, jobs become more demanding, and community traditions degrade, more and more people are failing to cultivate the high-quality leisure lives that Aristotle identifies as crucial for human happiness. This leaves a void that would be near unbearable if confronted, but that can be ignored with the help of digital noise. It’s now easy to fill the gaps between work and caring for your family and sleep by pulling out a smartphone or tablet, and numbing yourself with mindless swiping and tapping.

“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.”9

“Leave good evidence of yourself.22 Do good work.”

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

to escape the drain of low-value digital habits, it’s important to first put in place high-quality leisure activities. These quality activities fill the void your screens were previously tasked to help you ignore.

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.

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.

doing nothing is overrated.

To build a new sector of the economy on the back of this device required somehow convincing people to start looking at their phone … a lot. It was this directive that led companies like Facebook to innovate the field of attention engineering, figuring out how to exploit psychological vulnerabilities to trick users into spending far more time on these services than they actually intended.

Declaring freedom from your smartphone is probably the most serious step you can take toward embracing the attention resistance.

“Your Time = Their Money.” You should feel empowered to instead invest this value in things that matter more to you.

electronic communication, a way to take advantage of the wonders that these innovations do in fact provide (Maine and Texas, it turns out, did have some useful things to say once connected), without allowing their mysterious nature to subvert our human urge to build a meaningful and satisfying life.