Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

Awedouble · Jan 9, 2020

I'm about half way through this book and thought people here might appreciate some of the ideas in there. He suggests a 30 day digital declutter, so not unlike a reboot, and then carefully selecting what you add back into your life. Here are the 3 principles and 3 steps:

Principle #1: Clutter is costly. Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.

Principle #2: Optimization is important. Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology.

Principle #3: Intentionality is satisfying. Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. This source of satisfaction is independent of the specific decisions they make and is one of the biggest reasons that minimalism tends to be immensely meaningful to its practitioners.
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The Minimalist Technology Screen
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To allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must:

Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough).

Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better).

Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

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Deleted Account · Jan 9, 2020

Thanks for sharing this!

Awedouble · Jan 11, 2020

Here’s another list of 3, this may sound like a lot of work but for example a board game could satisfy all 3 conditions, though it would not be as much manual dexterity:

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. Erecting barriers against the existential is not new—before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions—but the advanced technologies of the twenty-first-century attention economy are particularly effective at this task.

If you begin decluttering the low-value digital distractions from your life before you’ve convincingly filled in the void they were helping you ignore, the experience will be unnecessarily unpleasant at best and a massive failure at worse. The most successful digital minimalists, therefore, tend to start their conversion by renovating what they do with their free time—cultivating high-quality leisure before culling the worst of their digital habits.

Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.
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(using your hands)

Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.
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Awedouble · Jan 13, 2020

4 practices related to leisure activities:

PRACTICE: FIX OR BUILD SOMETHING EACH WEEK
PRACTICE: SCHEDULE YOUR LOW-QUALITY LEISURE
PRACTICE: JOIN SOMETHING
PRACTICE: FOLLOW LEISURE PLANS

SuperiorMan95 · Jan 13, 2020

I actually read some of this book. I have it on audible. It's pretty damn good. Thanks for the post. One thing I started doing is to purchase an old flip phone. I now have a smart phone and an old flip. So sometimes I go out and I only take my flip and I do this several days in a row. It forces you to declutter. It's the digital equivalent of leaving your dick at home so you can't possibly PMO or in this case distract yourself with useless apps.

OrganizeInformed · Jul 1, 2021

Not to spam since I receive no compensation but the eBook for Kindle is on sale for two bucks. Good book even if you pay more (or get it from the library) though, worth a bump just for the mention for people who may not be familiar.

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