Notes from the book ‘Digital Minimalism’ by Cal Newport

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We do not necessarily need to reject all social tools, but as digital minimalists, we must carefully optimize services that most people fiddle with mindlessly.

I think it is first of all important to mention that the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport does not require one to abstain completely from the new technologies of our current digital attention economy. Instead, it proposes being more intentional about their use, rejecting the mindset that we must always have our smartphones with us. LOVE IT!

Cal elaborates on the need to develop a philosophy of technology use to carefully determine which digital tools we allow into our lives, for what reasons, and under what conditions. Digital Minimalism on this note he describes as “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.”

A digital minimalist uses new technologies as tools to support things they deeply value not as sources of value themselves. By conducting a cost-benefit analysis, we’re able to examine what actual benefits new technologies offer other than being time-consuming and demanding our attention. We must constantly ask ourselves, what are my values, and is this the best way to use technology to support these values? This is contrary to the default mindset that any potential for benefit is enough to start using a technology that catches our attention.

We do not necessarily need to reject all social tools, but we must carefully optimize services that most people fiddle with mindlessly as digital minimalists. Optimizations like subscribing only to one or two beneficial email newsletters and a handful of blogs we check maybe once a week might seem small but would yield a major difference in your daily life.

Cal Newport bases his argument on three core principles:

1. Clutter is costly

When we clutter our time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services, there is an overall negative cost that swamps the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation. We need to balance these little benefits of new technologies against the costs measured in terms of our life.

“How much of your time and attention must be sacrificed to earn the small profit of occasional connections and new ideas that is earned by cultivating a significant presence on Twitter?”

If we spend hours on social media because we want to connect with new people sharing ideas, we may consider replacing that with a habit of attending an interesting talk or event every month and forcing ourselves to chat with at least three people while there. This would produce similar types of value but consume only a few hours of our life per month.

2. Optimization is important

“Optimizing how we use technology is just as important as how we choose what technologies to use in the first place”. We need to think carefully about how we’ll use technology to produce value in our personal lives. The real benefits sets in once we start experimenting with how best to use them.

3. Intentionality is Satisfying

Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. The very act of being selective about our tools will bring us satisfaction, typically much more than what is lost from the tools we decide to avoid.

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 to maximize this value.

The goal of this process is to replace these technologies with meaningful activities that we truly enjoy and gain value from. He recommends defining personal clear technology rules such as what is optional and what is relevant. Optional here means its temporary removal would not harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life.

For technologies classified as not optional, specify a set of operating procedures that dictate exactly when and how we use the technology during the process. In the same vein, when reintroducing technology after the thirty-day detox, let’s ask ourselves the following screening questions:

• Does this technology support any critical value?
• Is this the best way to support this value?
• How am I going to use this technology going forward to maximize its value and minimize its harm?

On Solitude

Cal also shares the need for solitude. He defines solitude as freedom from input from other minds, and time spent alone with your own thoughts. Inputs from other minds come in different forms such as the content we consume on devices, social media, etc. Here are a few practices to help us integrate more solitude into an otherwise connected routine:

• Leave your phone at home when going out
• Take long walks, if possible, without your phone (this is a high-quality source of solitude)
• Write letters to yourself

Digital communication tools, if used without intention, have a way of forcing a trade-off between conversation and connection. Cal recommends adopting “the baseline rule that you’ll no longer use social media as a tool for low-quality relationship nudges: clicking like and commenting on hundreds of posts from friends and people you barely know (weak-tie social connections).” We could rather invest time in real conversations with the people that really matter in our life shifting our social life from connection back to conversation.

Practices that Support Intentional Use of Digital Communication Tools (Not Passive Consumption)

• Keep your phone in Do Not Disturb mode by default, turning off notifications when instant text messages arrive. We can of course adjust settings to allow calls from a selected list (e.g. our spouse, our kid’s school, etc)
• Schedule specific times for texting and checking your backlog of texts
• Schedule specific and restricted times to indulge in web surfing
• Cultivate high-quality leisure activities to fill your leisure time.
• Schedule leisure time in advance so you can devote time to more quality activities.
• Hold conversation office hours by putting aside set times on set days during which you’re always available for conversation with the people you care about. Let them know of your availability in advance so that they can reach you.

To drive his point home, Cal referenced several studies that found that “the more time you spend connecting on these services, the more isolated you’re likely to become.” The more we use social media to interact with our network (weak-tie social connections) the less time we devote to offline communication (real-world relationships). These social tools should instead be used to enhance real communication with important relationships in our lives. In this new state, digital technology is still present but now subordinated to a support role: helping us to set up or maintain our leisure activities, but not acting as the primary source of leisure itself.

Other Recommendations from the Attention Resistance Movement

• Delete social media apps from your phone and access them when need be through the web browser on your laptop.
• Use blocking tools to block apps on your phone and make them available to you on an intentional schedule (specific windows say 20 mins in the evenings).
• Use social media like a professional.
• Embrace slow media — maximizing the quality of what you consume and the conditions under which you consume it
• Find an alternative communication device that is not a smartphone

Bonus Section: My Digital Minimalist Plan

As a minimalist myself, I love the idea of a digital declutter and being intentional about our use of these new technologies so I have listed a few action points I am practicing:

1. I have deleted some apps from my mobile to access them only on the web browser of my computer
2. I try to keep my phone on DND most of the time especially when I am deep-working.
3. All notifications on my phone from WhatsApp to Email are turned off. I am loving this already!
4. I hope to experiment with setting conversation office hours say from 5.30 pm daily when I can make calls or text to check in on my family and close friends as opposed to all-day chatting.
5. I am currently researching a list of the best app blocking tools for iPhones to restrict the times I can access apps on my phone. Currently, I use the iPhone Screen Time feature that allows one to set usage limits for apps. I need something more aggressive. Please feel free to share recommendations in the comments if you know any good ones.

My name is Gloria Aniekan and I love sharing simple, concise summaries of some of the books I enjoy reading. Connect with me on LinkedIn on Instagram.

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