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Digital Minimalism 101: How to become a digital minimalist
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The Distraction of Digital Technology
To be a digital minimalist means you accept the idea that new communication technologies have the potential to massively improve your life, but also recognize that realizing this potential is hard work.
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How technology became so exhausting
We spend all day staring at screens, read books on Kindles or iPads, and come home to relax by watching a movie or TV.
Digital technologies lump together the good with the bad.
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Digital minimalism defined
As Cal Newport defines it, Digital minimalism is:
“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.”
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Elements of a digital minimalist lifestyle
- Choice and intention. You’re still using technology, but only what you want and only in ways that connect to your values.
- Optimizing the tools you use. What you allow into your life needs to work for you. This means separating the good from the bad.
- Accepting you won’t be everywhere all the time. Tech companies survive on FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). But digital minimalists are happy to miss out on the things they know don’t bring value to their lives.
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How to do a Digital Declutter
- Set aside a 30-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life. Work email is not optional. Twitter probably is.
- During this break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors you find satisfying and meaningful.
- And after the 30 days are up, reintroduce the optional technologies you want back into your life.
- Determine the value it brings you and how specifically you can use it to maximize that value.
- Bing optional technologies back by first creating rules on how exactly you’ll use them and when.
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Maintaining a Digital Minimalist lifestyle
Ways to rediscover non-digital activities you love that will support your newfound digital autonomy.
- Spend Time Alone without your digital technology. Try leaving your phone at home while you go for a walk, journaling, or simply spending more time alone.
- Don’t Click Like or allow yourself to be always available.
- Reclaim Leisure. One of the reasons we lean so heavily on digital technologies is that we’ve lost our hobbies and leisure activities.
- Join the Attention Resistance. Reduce the number of entry points. Try deleting social media off your phone or treat it like a professional task—something you do as needed and not more.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Digital minimalism
Digital minimalism is 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 val...
The principles of digital minimalism
- Clutter is costly. Digital minimalists recognise 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.
- Optimisation is important.To truly extract the full potential benefit of a technology, it’s necessary to think carefully about how you’ll use it.
- Intentionality is satisfying. Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies.
Our relationship with technology
"The underlying behaviours we hope to fix are ingrained in our culture, and […] they’re backed by powerful psychological forces that empower our base instincts. To re-establish control, we need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild our relationship with technology from scratch, using our deeply held values as a foundation." - Cal Newport
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Digital minimalism
This philosophy is guided by the idea that we should be in control over what kinds of media we consume, not have our habits dictated to us by technology.
This applies to the office as ...
Taking Leisure Seriously
Instead of defaulting into the low-quality obsessions that leave us wondering where the time has gone, we should cultivate high-quality hobbies that lead to lasting satisfaction.
Re-evaluate your relationship to technology:- First allow for a period of abstinence.
- Follow this by a selective re-introduction of only those tools and technologies that pass a more rigorous cost-benefit analysis than you typically impose.
Addiction and Modernity
They go hand-in-hand.
Addiction seems to be the inevitable consequence of our culturally-created environment changing faster than our biologically-hardwired brains.
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Surviving Screens In Isolation
There are many people self-isolating due to the escalating pandemic, with their phones being the essential link to the outside world. Technology becomes a double-edged sword, connecting and isol...
The Distraction Spiral
Technology, just like the mind, is a very good slave, but a bad master. The technologies by itself are life-giving and useful, but if we are spending the whole day on Twitter, fighting with whoever we don’t agree with, we are ruining our psychological health.
We tend to spiral into the news black hole for hours, but just looking at the front page of the New York Times or Washington Post once or twice a day should be enough.
Accidental Benefits Of Technology
Technology is neutral by itself, and how we use that tool matters.
- An email is a great tool, which completely transformed how an office works, though it wasn’t designed for offices.
- Similarly, the Facebook Like button was designed as a shortcut to writing a good comment, but it unexpectedly turned out to be a tool to measure the popularity of a post.