Email, chat apps, social media, and other tools can be just as productive as they can be distracting.&nbsp;How do we get the most out of the good parts of technology while protecting ourselves from the bad? 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.

The Distraction of Digital Technology

Self Improvement

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.

How technology became so exhausting

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.”

Digital minimalism defined

<ol><li>Choice and intention. You’re still using technology, but only what you want and only in ways that connect to your values.</li><li>Optimizing the tools you use. What you allow into your life needs to work for you. This means separating the good from the bad.</li><li>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.</li></ol>

Elements of a digital minimalist lifestyle

<ul><li>Set aside a 30-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life.&nbsp;Work email is not optional. Twitter probably is.</li><li>During this break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors you find satisfying and meaningful.</li><li>And after the 30 days are up, reintroduce the optional technologies you want back into your life.</li><li>Determine the value it brings you and how specifically you can use it to maximize that value.</li><li>Bing optional technologies back by first creating rules on how exactly you’ll use them and when.</li></ul>

How to do a Digital Declutter

Ways to rediscover non-digital activities you love that will support your newfound digital autonomy.<ul><li>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.</li><li>Don’t Click Like&nbsp;or allow yourself to be always available.</li><li>Reclaim Leisure. One of the reasons we lean so heavily on digital technologies is that we’ve lost our hobbies and leisure activities.&nbsp;</li><li>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.</li></ul>

Maintaining a Digital Minimalist lifestyle

It's easy to feel overwhelmed at work these days. Between schedules packed with emails, meetings, and catchups and the constant pull of social media and the 24-hour news cycle, it feels like we never have time to do anything meaningful.

Digital Minimalism 101: How to become a digital minimalist

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 well as to the home: Having deep work at the office, but digital addictions at home, is hardly a victory.

Digital minimalism

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: <ul><li>First allow for a period of abstinence.</li><li>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.</li></ul>

Taking Leisure Seriously

They go hand-in-hand.Addiction seems to be the inevitable consequence of our culturally-created environment changing faster than our biologically-hardwired brains.

Addiction and Modernity

It is probably not possible to safely evaluate your media consumption, while you’re in the midst of it.&nbsp;Steppring away for a month may be necessary to see your habits objectively.

Digital addiction

My long-time friend and mentor, Cal Newport, has just released a new book, Digital Minimalism. The basic premise is one you've heard before: digital addictions, from social media to constant texting, have invaded our attentions, reduced our productivity and made our lives worse. The antidote isn't to smash your smartphones and live as the Amish ...

Digital Minimalism | Scott H Young

It means using technology with more intention and purpose.It's a “philosophy of technology use” rooted in reclaiming control and intention back from the devices and platforms that have hijacked it.&nbsp;You figure out what's valuable to you.&nbsp; And then you happily miss out on everything else.

It promtes the basic idea that technological innovations can bring value and convenience into your life.It just looks at the positives. And it's view is more is better than less, because more things that bring you benefits means more total benefits.&nbsp;

Techno-maximalism

If you want to maximize the amount of value you feel in your life, you want to put as much of your time and effort as possible into the small number of things to give you huge rewards.&nbsp;When you think about it that way, fear of missing out looks like, just mathematically speaking, a really bad strategy.

Putting FOMO into perspective

A Q+A with the computer scientist about his new book Digital Minimalism, why future workplaces may go email-free, and why tech backlash is about to go mainstream. In 2004, when Cal Newport was still an undergrad at Dartmouth, all his friends were making accounts on a new website called Facebook.

digitalminimalism

The Distraction of Digital Technology

Digital Minimalism 101: How to become a digital minimalist

Digital minimalism

Digital Minimalism | Scott H Young