Digital Minimalism

Key Concepts

Digital Minimalism, defined

“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.” (p. 28)

Principles

“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.” (p. 35)

“Principle #2: Optimization is important. Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly exact its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology.” (p. 36)

“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.” (p. 36)

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.” (p. 60)

Leisure Lessons

“Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.” (p. 177)

“Leisure Lesson #2: Use skill sets to produce valuable things in the physical world.” (p. 182)

“Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.”

Quotables

“What he needs—what all of us who struggle with these issues need—is a philosophy of technology use, something that covered from the ground up which digital tools we allow into our life, for what reasons, and under what constraints. In the absence of this introspection, we’ll be left struggling in a whirlwind of addictive and appealing cyber-trinkets, vainly hoping that the right mix of ad hoc hacks will save us.” (p. 28)

“...minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.” (p. 30)

“This is why clutter is dangerous. It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life.” (p. 42)

“...solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.” (p. 93)

“Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.” (p. 109)

“The studies that found positive results focused on specific behaviors of social media uses, while the studies that found negative results focused on overall use of these services.” (p. 140)

“To succeed with digital minimalism, you have to confront this rebalancing between conversation and connection in a way that makes sense to you.” (p. 146)

“If you begin Declutter it 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.” (p. 169)