Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport 🔗
Digital Minimalism - or as I like to think of it, “Finding serenity in an ocean of digital noise”.
The modern world is gripped by a chronic use of the internet: the average daily time spent on social media is now over 2h20m a day. 1 2
Aside from being a chronic waste of time, social media use is also correlated to increased anxiety. 3
Not only are we wasting our time on social media, we’re damaging our mental health.
This book positions itself as the antidote.
To start off with a negative, the book has quite a bit of padding , especially at the start. There is a lot of “story telling”, which plagues modern books in this genre, and ideas which are unnecessarily repeated a few paragraphs after they were initially discussed.
While this was frustrating, I would still recommend reading this book once - and hi-lighting the important sections on your e-reader so that you can revisit the golden nuggets.
I’ll follow my usual format for a review, giving the key points then my experience of implementing them - because if you aren’t going to implement, you’re wasting your time reading.
Key Points 🔗
This quote near the start sums up the book:
“Digital Minimalism: A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimised activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”
- Cal Newport
This idea bears some resemblance to the ideas from 80/20 Marketing, where we want to make sure that our time is being used as effectively as possible.
To revisit the numbers we quoted at the start, the average person is wasting 2h20m a day on social media. This equates to over 16 hours a week. What could you accomplish with 16 hours a week?
The answer is quite a lot!
How We Reached The Current Levels Of Media Consumption 🔗
The book opens with some background on how the world reached its current level of social media consumption, with some brief background on the iPhone, and also an interesting nugget of psychology:
rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern. Something about unpredictability releases more dopamine
This is why gambling is so addictive. Social media is effectively gambling with your attention, and it is purposefully engineered to be as addictive as possible.
The other reason social media is so addictive is that we’re wired for social interaction and social media gives a low cost way way to trick our brain into thinking that we’re being social, but it is a very low quality interaction. A few higher quality social events are better than all day on social media.
The idea of a lower frequency, higher quality event being of greater worth than a high frequency low quality event is an idea that comes up a few times in this book.
Another key part of being human is that we need solitude. This is an idea that Newport explores in detail in his book Deep Work.
Social media take the addictive nature of an unpredictable reward and our need for social interaction, and mixes them together into a digital concoction that destroys our solitude (and in the process, our productivity and mental health).
In order to regain our productivity, mental health and serenity, it’s imperative that we get our social media use, doom scrolling, and phone-time under control.
The book is broken into two parts, Part 1 covers Foundations, and Part 2 covers Practices, which gives some principles and examples. If you’re wanting to save time, you can probably skip Part 1, the applicable stuff is in Part 2.
In Part 2, Newport gives three core principles:
- Delete social media from your phone
- Turn your devices into single use computers
- Use social media like a professional
To summarise these points, well point 1 is self explanatory. You do not need Facebook and Twitter on your phone. Get rid of them. Then block the websites. And all other social media apps.
Use your devices for a specific purpose. Newport gives some examples of people downgrading their phones to dumb phones that do calls and texts… and nothing else. Whether or not you go this far is up to you, but it could be worth giving a go. Some people get a dumb phone and a camera to take on holiday with them.
Finally, using social media like a professional means to schedule and control your use of it. Have a set amount of time each week to log on and check your networks. Be purposeful with it. Get rid of all those random connections that you don’t need (I find the birthday reminder on Facebook particularly useful for reminding me about people I can delete or unfollow). You’re not missing out on anything.
Newport also gives three key principles of leisure time:
- Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption
- Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world
- Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions
The first principle outlines an idea I’ll write about in the future about the difference between art and entertainment, but it boils down to ‘do something that takes a bit of effort’. Watching Netflix all night or scrolling Facebook doesn’t take any effort. Watching a performance of Tosca, reading Dante’s Inferno, or something else along those lines, does take a bit of effort. But it is also more rewarding. This isn’t to say you have to force yourself to sit through opera or read classical literature (although giving them a go wouldn’t hurt), but it’s to draw a distinction between high quality and low quality leisure time.
High quality leisure time leaves you feeling rewarded. Low quality leisure time leaves you feeling empty.
This isn’t to say that you should never have low alit leisure time, but be aware of it and plan it.
The second principle is advocating doing things in the “real” world - playing a guitar, building a shelf etc. The final principle is pretty self explanatory.
The last two principles are ideas that Tal Tsfany advocates in his Happiness Team workshops (I’ve taken one of these and they’re excellent). A quote I love from Tal is “Bringing values down to Earth”. You have to get out into the real world and do something. Build something around the house. Play an instrument. Join a club, sports team, war-games, reading group; anything.
To get back to Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport outlines four practices to achieve his three principles of leisure:
Practices:
- Fix or build something every week
- Schedule your low quality leisure
- Join something
- Follow leisure plans
To briefly go over these four ideas, the first talks about doing something “analogue”. Build something. Fix something that’s been lying around the house broken. The second idea is to restrict your low quality leisure time, if you want to binge netflix or doomscroll on Facebook, do so, but in planned time - plan out 30mins to do so and afterwards turn it off -the app Freedom is great for this. Join something - find a club or a group of people that share an interest, a board games cafe, mountain climbing club, Dungeons and Dragons, whatever. Meetup is a great tool for finding local activities.
The final practice advocates sitting down 3-4 times a year and planning out the high quality leisure activities you are going to enjoy.
As with anything, these are not to be taken dogmatically and exceptions apply.
Newport isn’t preaching to stop using technology in its various forms, but he is advising to be purposeful in how it is used. You should proactively decide how a particular device or service is going to enhance your life, rather than become a passive slave to it.
Digital Minimalism in Practice 🔗
There is no point reading these books if you’re not going to go and do something with the advice that you’re reading. So here are a few changes I have made after reading the book:
- Deleted social media apps from my phone and my tablet
- Blocked social media websites on my phone
- Installed Freedom. All websites and email blocked until 2pm, open use from 2pm-5pm, distracting websites blocked from 5pm. Free use on Fridays.
- Built a shelf for my desk
- Planning high quality leisure time
The first three have been fantastic. I keep my mornings reserved for practising and composing, and since following those three practices my mornings are much more focussed and productive, I really love it. Any social media I “need” to do can be done in the 2pm-5pm window. I could probably restrict this window further. In my evenings, I find myself working on something productive, like writing these posts or doing some composing, rather than mindlessly scrolling through rubbish. In fact, the green screen of blocking coming up is a good reminder to set my mind to something useful. If I want to google something during the time that websites are blocked, I make a note of it and google it later.
Since using Freedom, I’ve had one or instances where I absolutely had to use the internet to recover a file I accidentally deleted from my cloud backup. In that rare instance, it’s easy to disable Freedom, get the file, and re-enable it. And I’ve since started using Time Machine to prevent this problem from reoccurring.
I’ve also tried to be a bit more “handy”, sort of following the first practice I built a shelf to help organise my desk, which has been a big improvement. See before and after pictures of my desk below:
Building that shelf was a rewarding task. In the past I’d have dismissed doing something like that as a waste of time, but it was enjoyable and has been incredibly practical, creating a big quality of work life improvement for me. The great thing with building things is that you get something that is made to measure and perfectly fits the task it’s designed for.
When it comes to planning high quality leisure time, I would recommend finding a couple of websites that aggregate/review events you’re interested in, whether it’s music, art, philosophy, science etc; if you’re in (or near) a city, there will be concerts, talks, exhibitions, all sorts of things going on. Keeping an eye on these sites will allow you to plan for events coming up. If there are museums or galleries you particularly enjoy, get on their mailing list and keep an eye out for their events.
I’ve been making more effort to attend high quality events, attending a museum exhibition and next up is a classical music concert which I’m looking forwards to.
Something that is scary with implementing these practices is how often I find myself reaching for my phone, or going to a social media website to “just check” what is happening. I thought I had those habits under control… but I have some work left to do. It’s almost subconscious how my brain “reaches out” for these things.
Future things I’ll be working on with my adjustment to digital minimalism:
- Pro-actively organising social activities with friends
- Building more things, creating practical solutions to improve my life (constantly rewiring my guitar rack is filling this need!)
- Seeking out and planning high quality activities in advance
Conclusion 🔗
I’ve tried to cover the key points from the book and how I’ve approached implementing the book’s concepts into my life. It’s a good book, it’s a fast read, but I wouldn’t read it a second time.
Implementing a couple of the ideas can lead to big quality of life improvements.
Recommendation: Read once, take notes, implement some ideas.