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kshane1298's review against another edition
4.0
Digital Minimalism - Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
Introduction
The key to thriving in our high-tech world, they’ve learned, is to spend much less time using technology.
part1. philosophical underpinnings of digital minimalism
part2. importance of solitude and the necessity of cultivating high-quality leisure to replace the time most now dedicate to mindless device use
PART 1 Foundations
1. A Lopsided Arms Race
People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable
The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking
2. Digital Minimalism
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.
THE PRINCIPLES OF DIGITAL MINIMALISM
Principle #1: Clutter is costly.
Principle #2: Optimization is important.
Is this going to be helpful or is it going to be detrimental? Is it going to bolster our life together, as a community, or is it going to somehow tear it down?”
approaching decisions with intention can be more important than the impact of the actual decisions themselves.
Principle #3: Intentionality is satisfying.
3. The Digital Declutter
The Digital Declutter Process
1.Put aside a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life.
2.During this thirty-day break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful.
3.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.
30 Day Declutter
STEP #1: DEFINE YOUR TECHNOLOGY RULES
To summarize the main points about this step:
•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 some cases, you’ll abstain from using the optional technology altogether, while in other cases you might specify a set of operating procedures that dictate exactly when and how you use the technology during the process.
•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 prove key to its success.
STEP #2: TAKE A THIRTY-DAY BREAK
To summarize the main points about this step:
•You will probably find the first week or two of your digital declutter to be difficult, and fight urges to check technologies you’re not allowed to check. These feelings, however, will pass, and this resulting sense of detox will prove useful when it comes time to make clear decisions at the end of the declutter.
•The goal of a digital declutter, however, is not simply to enjoy time away from intrusive technology. During this monthlong process, you must aggressively explore higher-quality activities to fill in the time left vacant by the optional technologies you’re avoiding. This period should be one of strenuous activity and experimentation.
•You want to arrive at the end of the declutter having rediscovered the type of activities that generate real satisfaction, enabling you to confidently craft a better life—one in which technology serves only a supporting role for more meaningful ends
STEP #3: REINTRODUCE TECHNOLOGY
To summarize the main points about this step:
•Your monthlong break from optional technologies resets your digital life. You can now rebuild it from scratch in a much more intentional and minimalist manner. To do so, apply a three-step technology screen to each optional technology you’re thinking about reintroducing.
•This process will help you cultivate a digital life in which new technologies serve your deeply held values as opposed to subverting them without your permission. It is in this careful reintroduction that you make the intentional decisions that will define you as a digital minimalist.
PART 2 Practices
4. Spend Time Alone
THE VALUE OF SOLITUDE
they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.
Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be.
PRACTICE: LEAVE YOUR PHONE AT HOME
PRACTICE: TAKE LONG WALKS
PRACTICE: WRITE LETTERS TO YOURSELF
twelve black, pocket-size Moleskine notebooks
practice of thinking by writing
5. Don’t Click “Like”
rock paper scissors - sophisticated grasp of a much broader topic: human psychology
the ability to perform complicated social thinking
THE SOCIAL ANIMAL
The default network, in other words, seems to be connected to social cognition.
The loss of social connection, for example, turns out to trigger the same system as physical pain—explaining why the death of a family member, a breakup, or even just a social snub can cause such distress
THE SOCIAL MEDIA PARADOX
In this study, Burke and Kraut recruited a group of around 1,900 Facebook users who agreed to quantify their current level of happiness when prompted. The researchers then used the Facebook server logs to connect specific social media activities with these well-being scores. They found that when users received “targeted” and “composed” information written by someone they know well (e.g., a comment sent by a family member), they felt better. On the other hand, receiving targeted and composed information from someone they didn’t know well, or receiving a “like,” or reading a status update broadcast to many people didn’t correlate with improved well-being.
As argued earlier in the chapter, these offline interactions are incredibly rich because they require our brains to process large amounts of information about subtle analog cues such as body language, facial expressions, and voice tone
RECLAIMING CONVERSATION
PRACTICE: DON’T CLICK “LIKE”
PRACTICE: CONSOLIDATE TEXTING
PRACTICE: HOLD CONVERSATION OFFICE HOURS
6. Reclaim Leisure
THE BENNETT PRINCIPLE
FI stands for financial independence, which refers to the pecuniary state in which your assets produce enough income to cover your living expenses
I never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can’t stand tourist attractions, don’t sit on the beach unless there’s a really big sand castle that needs to be made, [and I] don’t care about what the celebrities and politicians are doing. . . . Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.
when individuals in the FI community are provided large amounts of leisure time, they often voluntarily fill these hours with strenuous activity.
Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.
ON CRAFT AND SATISFACTION
craft is a good source of high-quality leisure
Rogowski’s closing advice: “Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work.”
Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.
SUPERCHARGED SOCIALITY
Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.
THE LEISURE RENAISSANCE
PRACTICE: FIX OR BUILD SOMETHING EVERY WEEK
Every example below is something that either I or someone I know was able to learn and execute in a single weekend.
•Changing your own car oil
•Installing a new ceiling-mounted light fixture
•Learning the basics of a new technique on an instrument you already play (e.g., a guitar player learning Travis picking)
•Figuring out how to precisely calibrate the tone arm on your turntable
•Building a custom headboard from high-quality lumber
•Starting a garden plot
PRACTICE: SCHEDULE YOUR LOW-QUALITY LEISURE
work out the specific time periods during which you’ll indulge in web surfing, social media checking, and entertainment streaming
PRACTICE: JOIN SOMETHING
PRACTICE: FOLLOW LEISURE PLANS
The Seasonal Leisure Plan
A seasonal leisure plan is something that you put together three times a year: at the beginning of the fall (early September), at the beginning of the winter (January), and at the beginning of summer (early May).
A good seasonal plan contains two different types of items: objectives and habits that you intend to honor in the upcoming season. The objectives describe specific goals you hope to accomplish, with accompanying strategies for how you will accomplish them. The habits describe behavior rules you hope to stick with throughout the season.
Objective: Learn on the guitar every song from the A-side of Meet the Beatles!
Strategies:
•Restring and retune my guitar, find the chord charts for the songs, print them, and put them in nice plastic protector sheets.
•Return to my old habit of regularly practicing my guitar.
•As incentive, schedule Beatles party in November. Perform songs (get Linda to agree to sing).
Moving on, here are several examples of the other type of item found on seasonal leisure plans, the habits:
Habit: During the week, restrict low-quality leisure to only sixty minutes a night.
Habit: Read something in bed every night.
Habit: Attend one cultural event per week.
The Weekly Leisure Plan
At the beginning of each week, put aside time to review your current seasonal leisure plan. After processing this information, come up with a plan for how your leisure activities will fit into your schedule for the upcoming week. For each of the objectives in the seasonal plan, figure out what actions you can do during the week to make progress on these objectives, and then, crucially, schedule exactly when you’ll do these things
7. Join the Attention Resistance
PRACTICE: DELETE SOCIAL MEDIA FROM YOUR PHONE
PRACTICE: TURN YOUR DEVICES INTO SINGLE-PURPOSE COMPUTERS
PRACTICE: USE SOCIAL MEDIA LIKE A PROFESSIONAL
the Dunbar Number of 150—a theoretical limit for the number of people a human can successfully keep track of in their social circles
Twitter as an early detection radar for trending news or ideas
TweetDeck
PRACTICE: EMBRACE SLOW MEDIA
If you’re interested in politics, for example, and lean toward the left side of the political spectrum, this sequence might go from CNN.com, to the New York Times homepage, to Politico, to the Atlantic, to your Twitter feed, and finally to your Facebook timeline. If you’re into technology, Hacker News and Reddit might be in that list. If you’re into sports, you’ll include ESPN.com and team-specific fan pages, and so on.
when it comes to reporting and commentary, you should constrain your attention to the small number of people who have proved to be world class on the topics you care about.
PRACTICE: DUMB DOWN YOUR SMARTPHONE
Your [clock symbol] = Their [money symbol].
Conclusion
Introduction
The key to thriving in our high-tech world, they’ve learned, is to spend much less time using technology.
part1. philosophical underpinnings of digital minimalism
part2. importance of solitude and the necessity of cultivating high-quality leisure to replace the time most now dedicate to mindless device use
PART 1 Foundations
1. A Lopsided Arms Race
People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable
The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking
2. Digital Minimalism
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.
THE PRINCIPLES OF DIGITAL MINIMALISM
Principle #1: Clutter is costly.
Principle #2: Optimization is important.
Is this going to be helpful or is it going to be detrimental? Is it going to bolster our life together, as a community, or is it going to somehow tear it down?”
approaching decisions with intention can be more important than the impact of the actual decisions themselves.
Principle #3: Intentionality is satisfying.
3. The Digital Declutter
The Digital Declutter Process
1.Put aside a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life.
2.During this thirty-day break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful.
3.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.
30 Day Declutter
STEP #1: DEFINE YOUR TECHNOLOGY RULES
To summarize the main points about this step:
•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 some cases, you’ll abstain from using the optional technology altogether, while in other cases you might specify a set of operating procedures that dictate exactly when and how you use the technology during the process.
•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 prove key to its success.
STEP #2: TAKE A THIRTY-DAY BREAK
To summarize the main points about this step:
•You will probably find the first week or two of your digital declutter to be difficult, and fight urges to check technologies you’re not allowed to check. These feelings, however, will pass, and this resulting sense of detox will prove useful when it comes time to make clear decisions at the end of the declutter.
•The goal of a digital declutter, however, is not simply to enjoy time away from intrusive technology. During this monthlong process, you must aggressively explore higher-quality activities to fill in the time left vacant by the optional technologies you’re avoiding. This period should be one of strenuous activity and experimentation.
•You want to arrive at the end of the declutter having rediscovered the type of activities that generate real satisfaction, enabling you to confidently craft a better life—one in which technology serves only a supporting role for more meaningful ends
STEP #3: REINTRODUCE TECHNOLOGY
To summarize the main points about this step:
•Your monthlong break from optional technologies resets your digital life. You can now rebuild it from scratch in a much more intentional and minimalist manner. To do so, apply a three-step technology screen to each optional technology you’re thinking about reintroducing.
•This process will help you cultivate a digital life in which new technologies serve your deeply held values as opposed to subverting them without your permission. It is in this careful reintroduction that you make the intentional decisions that will define you as a digital minimalist.
PART 2 Practices
4. Spend Time Alone
THE VALUE OF SOLITUDE
they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.
Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be.
PRACTICE: LEAVE YOUR PHONE AT HOME
PRACTICE: TAKE LONG WALKS
PRACTICE: WRITE LETTERS TO YOURSELF
twelve black, pocket-size Moleskine notebooks
practice of thinking by writing
5. Don’t Click “Like”
rock paper scissors - sophisticated grasp of a much broader topic: human psychology
the ability to perform complicated social thinking
THE SOCIAL ANIMAL
The default network, in other words, seems to be connected to social cognition.
The loss of social connection, for example, turns out to trigger the same system as physical pain—explaining why the death of a family member, a breakup, or even just a social snub can cause such distress
THE SOCIAL MEDIA PARADOX
In this study, Burke and Kraut recruited a group of around 1,900 Facebook users who agreed to quantify their current level of happiness when prompted. The researchers then used the Facebook server logs to connect specific social media activities with these well-being scores. They found that when users received “targeted” and “composed” information written by someone they know well (e.g., a comment sent by a family member), they felt better. On the other hand, receiving targeted and composed information from someone they didn’t know well, or receiving a “like,” or reading a status update broadcast to many people didn’t correlate with improved well-being.
As argued earlier in the chapter, these offline interactions are incredibly rich because they require our brains to process large amounts of information about subtle analog cues such as body language, facial expressions, and voice tone
RECLAIMING CONVERSATION
PRACTICE: DON’T CLICK “LIKE”
PRACTICE: CONSOLIDATE TEXTING
PRACTICE: HOLD CONVERSATION OFFICE HOURS
6. Reclaim Leisure
THE BENNETT PRINCIPLE
FI stands for financial independence, which refers to the pecuniary state in which your assets produce enough income to cover your living expenses
I never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can’t stand tourist attractions, don’t sit on the beach unless there’s a really big sand castle that needs to be made, [and I] don’t care about what the celebrities and politicians are doing. . . . Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.
when individuals in the FI community are provided large amounts of leisure time, they often voluntarily fill these hours with strenuous activity.
Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.
ON CRAFT AND SATISFACTION
craft is a good source of high-quality leisure
Rogowski’s closing advice: “Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work.”
Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.
SUPERCHARGED SOCIALITY
Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.
THE LEISURE RENAISSANCE
PRACTICE: FIX OR BUILD SOMETHING EVERY WEEK
Every example below is something that either I or someone I know was able to learn and execute in a single weekend.
•Changing your own car oil
•Installing a new ceiling-mounted light fixture
•Learning the basics of a new technique on an instrument you already play (e.g., a guitar player learning Travis picking)
•Figuring out how to precisely calibrate the tone arm on your turntable
•Building a custom headboard from high-quality lumber
•Starting a garden plot
PRACTICE: SCHEDULE YOUR LOW-QUALITY LEISURE
work out the specific time periods during which you’ll indulge in web surfing, social media checking, and entertainment streaming
PRACTICE: JOIN SOMETHING
PRACTICE: FOLLOW LEISURE PLANS
The Seasonal Leisure Plan
A seasonal leisure plan is something that you put together three times a year: at the beginning of the fall (early September), at the beginning of the winter (January), and at the beginning of summer (early May).
A good seasonal plan contains two different types of items: objectives and habits that you intend to honor in the upcoming season. The objectives describe specific goals you hope to accomplish, with accompanying strategies for how you will accomplish them. The habits describe behavior rules you hope to stick with throughout the season.
Objective: Learn on the guitar every song from the A-side of Meet the Beatles!
Strategies:
•Restring and retune my guitar, find the chord charts for the songs, print them, and put them in nice plastic protector sheets.
•Return to my old habit of regularly practicing my guitar.
•As incentive, schedule Beatles party in November. Perform songs (get Linda to agree to sing).
Moving on, here are several examples of the other type of item found on seasonal leisure plans, the habits:
Habit: During the week, restrict low-quality leisure to only sixty minutes a night.
Habit: Read something in bed every night.
Habit: Attend one cultural event per week.
The Weekly Leisure Plan
At the beginning of each week, put aside time to review your current seasonal leisure plan. After processing this information, come up with a plan for how your leisure activities will fit into your schedule for the upcoming week. For each of the objectives in the seasonal plan, figure out what actions you can do during the week to make progress on these objectives, and then, crucially, schedule exactly when you’ll do these things
7. Join the Attention Resistance
PRACTICE: DELETE SOCIAL MEDIA FROM YOUR PHONE
PRACTICE: TURN YOUR DEVICES INTO SINGLE-PURPOSE COMPUTERS
PRACTICE: USE SOCIAL MEDIA LIKE A PROFESSIONAL
the Dunbar Number of 150—a theoretical limit for the number of people a human can successfully keep track of in their social circles
Twitter as an early detection radar for trending news or ideas
TweetDeck
PRACTICE: EMBRACE SLOW MEDIA
If you’re interested in politics, for example, and lean toward the left side of the political spectrum, this sequence might go from CNN.com, to the New York Times homepage, to Politico, to the Atlantic, to your Twitter feed, and finally to your Facebook timeline. If you’re into technology, Hacker News and Reddit might be in that list. If you’re into sports, you’ll include ESPN.com and team-specific fan pages, and so on.
when it comes to reporting and commentary, you should constrain your attention to the small number of people who have proved to be world class on the topics you care about.
PRACTICE: DUMB DOWN YOUR SMARTPHONE
Your [clock symbol] = Their [money symbol].
Conclusion
catbrigand's review against another edition
2.0
This book isn’t inherently bad. It’s not overly long. It’s just very difficult to expand a concise list of things that thoughtful people already know if they take the time to think about it and turn it into a book. Some could argue its anti-minimalist. So, to save you time, the crux:
- eliminate non-essential digital interaction for one month. Apps off phone and everything. Office hours for digital conversation if possible.
- select a few meaningful digital activities to add in after that month.
- take walks and cultivate an appreciation for solitude.
- enjoy your newfound sense of superiority over your fellow man, who are digital lemmings.
- eliminate non-essential digital interaction for one month. Apps off phone and everything. Office hours for digital conversation if possible.
- select a few meaningful digital activities to add in after that month.
- take walks and cultivate an appreciation for solitude.
- enjoy your newfound sense of superiority over your fellow man, who are digital lemmings.
ohcorrica's review against another edition
4.0
I read this book per the recommendation of the CEO at the tech startup where I work. It was a good collection of information on the importance of staying off of social media and similar platforms. If you feel like you are addicted to social media, read this book. If you enjoyed the movie "The Social Dilemma," you should read this!
o_ok3iii's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
A reflective book about how to live a more offline, fulfilling life without the constant need for a smartphone and connectivity. For the longest time I've been wanting to properly declutter my digital habits, this book provided me with the tools and insights that helped me achieve this. Two weeks into my digital declutter/detox and I already have so much more free time and go about my life with much more intention than I used to.
I reccomend this book to EVERYONE!
I reccomend this book to EVERYONE!
imonyourside's review against another edition
5.0
I was gobsmacked by this book, and found it to be the equivalent of a college course everyone should take before owning a smartphone. I learned an incredible amount and enjoyed Newport’s blend of history, science, philosophy and technology. He created a book I can’t recommend enough.. You won’t regret this read.
ahmed_suliman's review against another edition
5.0
I haven't overstated my five star rating, but I'm very biased towards my philosophy and convictions of communicating with own-spirit and humans, which the book gave a big part of.
__
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
__
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
kdabbler's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
4.5
I truly enjoyed Cal Newport’s treatment of this subject. Readers need to overlook that he doesn’t have any personal social media accounts. I argue that because of this, he’s able to deliver a somewhat, more objective, point of view. He covers our relationship to social media, apps and digital gaming. He asks his readers to define the value of the technology to their lives.
I may come back to give this five stars. Five star ratings are for books that I keep referring to and are timeless. Since this was published in 2019, much of what he references is surprisingly still relevant.
I may come back to give this five stars. Five star ratings are for books that I keep referring to and are timeless. Since this was published in 2019, much of what he references is surprisingly still relevant.
philsen's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
relaxing
medium-paced
4.5