Notes from Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
Rather than tips/trick/stopgaps, this is a philosophy of tech use
We didn’t sign up for technology like this. When the iPhone released, it was just an iPod and a phone. When Facebook released, it was a way to look up friends.
If someone is hooked on technology, it’s not their fault. We have lost control of tech, we’ve been pushed into it by tech companies and deliberately manipulated.
“This thing is a slot machine” - Tristan Harris. “Philip Morris just wanted your lungs, the App Store wants your soul” - Bill Maher
Behavioral addiction - moderate compared to substance abuse, but still addictive. And they’re carefully engineered design features
- Intermittent variable rewards to keep us hooked
- The drive for social approval
Digital minimalism: A philosophy of tech use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support the things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.
Even if it does support one of your values, is it the best way to support it?
- Quitting digital tools and replacing them with less addictive ones (Twitter → Online magazines)
- Modifying the tool / the way you use it to be less addictive (follow only the friends you need for a specific purpose, bookmark a Facebook group to bypass the feed)
Principles of digital minimalism
- Clutter is costly
- Think of cost in terms of hours of your life (Thoreau). Tech use tends to compound to hours per week. Weigh the cost/benefit of using the tech–what value are you actually getting vs how much time are you spending?
- Optimization is important
- Diminishing returns of optimizations: once you make the first few steps to optimize a tech process, you’ve already reached the later part of the return curve. Most people don’t take those few steps.
- Examples: replace social media feeds with Instapaper, review them once a week; only watch Netflix with others; remove social media apps from phones
- View technology as a set of features that you can carefully put to use to serve specific values
- Intentionality is satisfying
- Amish tech use: they don’t eschew all technology, but they weigh whether the tech will be helpful to their lifestyle.
- e.g. can own a solar panel or generator but can’t connect to the power grid (connecting them too strongly to the outside world)
- Intention trumps convenience
- Techno-maximalism outsources your autonomy
- Amish tech use: they don’t eschew all technology, but they weigh whether the tech will be helpful to their lifestyle.
Digital declutter
- Put aside thirty days away from optional technologies
- Define specific rules. Exactly how and when will you use a specific technology that you must keep for a few use cases
- Keep critical, not convenient
- Explore other activities and behaviors you find meaningful
- It will be hard at first, but it will get better
- Redirect time towards more meaningful activities
- Aggressively explore higher-quality activities to fill the void. “strenuous activity and experimentation”
- Reintroduce technologies, one at a time
- Start at a blank slate. Minimalist technology screen:
- Does it directly support something I deeply value?
- Is this the best way to support that value?
- How am I going to use this technology going forward to maximize its value and minimize its harms? Maintain standard operating procedures