The final step is reintroducing optional technologies back into your life.The goal is to start from a blank slate and only let back into your life technology that passes your strict digital standards.To allow an optional technology back into your life, it must:<ol><li>Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough)</li><li>Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it's not, replace it with something better)</li><li>Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it</li></ol>

#3 Reintroduce Technology

The first step is defining which "new technologies" fall into this "optional" category.Make sure to evaluate the right technologies. Text messaging, Instagram or Facebook are examples of the types of technologies you need to evaluate; your microwave, fridge are not.After the evaluation decide which of them are sufficiently "optional" that you can take a break for 30 days during the declutter process.Consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal could harm your professional or personal life.Example: If you stop checking your work email, it would harm your career.

#1 Define your Technology rules

<ol><li>Put aside a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life.</li><li>During this thirty-day break, explore and rediscover activites and behaviours that you find satisfying and meaningful.</li><li>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.</li></ol>

The Digital Declutter Process

“How do you simplify your digital life?” became very quickly the question of our generation. Between packed calendars, fulled out E-Mail inboxes, and the constant pull of social media and news it can feel like you really can't control your online time.There is a particular rapid process to help you break your online bad habits and values - the digital declutter.

Make Technology serve only a supporting role in your life

The second step is to follow your new technology classification, by disconnecting, for 30 days, from your "optional" technologies. You will find life without optional technologies challenging at first. But these feelings of discomfort fade after a week or two.The goal is to spark a permanent transformation of your digital life and aggressively explore higher-quality activities to fill in the time left vacant by the optional technologies.At the end of the declutter you should already have rediscovered the type of activites that generate real satisfaction, enabling you to craft a better life.

#2 Take a Thirty-Day Break

"It's official: excessive "internetting," smartphoning, and social media make us miserable. But it doesn't have to be that way. Over the last decade, recognized journalist Blake Snow rigorously researched, tested, and developed several connectivity strategies for finding offline balance in an online world, which resulted in this, his first book. In Log Off: How to Stay Connected after Disconnecting, Snow passionately, succinctly, and sometimes humorously explains how to hit refresh for good, do more with less online, live large on low-caloric technology, increase facetime with actual people, outperform workaholics in half the time, and tunefully blend both analog and digital lives with no regrets. If the "offline balance movement" is real, this is its playbook." -- Back Cover

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Productivity

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Psychology

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Personal Development

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Technology & The Future

A New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today bestseller "Newport is making a bid to be the Marie Kondo of technology: someone with an actual plan for helping you realize the digital pursuits that do, and don't, bring value to your life."--Ezra Klein, Vox Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It's the key to living a focused life in an increasingly noisy world. In this timely and enlightening book, the bestselling author of Deep Work introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives. Digital minimalists are all around us. They're the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones. They can get lost in a good book, a woodworking project, or a leisurely morning run. They can have fun with friends and family without the obsessive urge to document the experience. They stay informed about the news of the day, but don't feel overwhelmed by it. They don't experience "fear of missing out" because they already know which activities provide them meaning and satisfaction. Now, Newport gives us a name for this quiet movement, and makes a persuasive case for its urgency in our tech-saturated world. Common sense tips, like turning off notifications, or occasional rituals like observing a digital sabbath, don't go far enough in helping us take back control of our technological lives, and attempts to unplug completely are complicated by the demands of family, friends and work. What we need instead is a thoughtful method to decide what tools to use, for what purposes, and under what conditions. Drawing on a diverse array of real-life examples, from Amish farmers to harried parents to Silicon Valley programmers, Newport identifies the common practices of digital minimalists and the ideas that underpin them. He shows how digital minimalists are rethinking their relationship to social media, rediscovering the pleasures of the offline world, and reconnecting with their inner selves through regular periods of solitude. He then shares strategies for integrating these practices into your life, starting with a thirty-day "digital declutter" process that has already helped thousands feel less overwhelmed and more in control. Technology is intrinsically neither good nor bad. The key is using it to support your goals and values, rather than letting it use you. This book shows the way.

Cal Newport is Provost’s Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, and the author of seven books. His ideas and writing are frequently featured in major publications and on TV and radio.From his website: "I write about the intersection of digital technology and culture. I’m particularly interested in our struggle to deploy these tools in ways that support instead of subvert the things we care about in both our personal and professional lives."

The Digital Declutter Process

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