On Digital Minimalism
Metadata
- Author: Study Hacks
- Full Title: On Digital Minimalism
- Category:articles
- Published Date: 2016-12-18
- Summary: Digital minimalism is about questioning the value of digital tools in your life and focusing on what truly matters. It involves clearing away low-value online activities to improve your overall well-being. By prioritizing quality over quantity, you can make the most of technology while reducing stress and increasing satisfaction.
- URL: https://calnewport.com/on-digital-minimalism/
Highlights
- Minimalists tend to spend much less money and own many fewer things than their peers. They also tend to be much more intentional and often quite radical in shaping their lives around things that matter to them. (View Highlight)
- Minimalism is a lifestyle that helps people question what things add value to their lives. By clearing the clutter from life’s path, we can all make room for the most important aspects of life: health, relationships, passion, growth, and contribution. (View Highlight)
- Note: A definition of minimalism by The Minimalists
- Digital minimalism is a philosophy that helps you question what digital communication tools (and behaviors surrounding these tools) add the most value to your life. It is motivated by the belief that intentionally and aggressively clearing away low-value digital noise, and optimizing your use of the tools that really matter, can significantly improve your life. (View Highlight)
- Note: Cal Newport’s definition of digital minimalism.
- To be a digital minimalist, in other words, 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. (View Highlight)
- Missing out is not negative. (View Highlight)
- Less can be more. (View Highlight)
- This is a basic 80/20 analysis: doing less, but focusing on higher quality, can generate more total value. (View Highlight)
- Start from first principles. (View Highlight)
- A more productive approach is to start by identifying the principles that you as a human find most important — the foundation on which you hope to build a good life. (View Highlight)
- The best is different than the rest. (View Highlight)
- For a given core principle, there may be many activities that can offer some relevant value, but you should focus on finding the small number of activities that offer the most such value. The difference between the “best” and “good enough” in this context can be significant. (View Highlight)
- Digital clutter is stressful. (View Highlight)
- Attention is scarce and fragile. (View Highlight)
- hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested into companies whose sole purpose is to hijack as much of your attention as possible and push it toward targets optimized to create value for a small number of people in Northern California. (View Highlight)
- this is my main concern with large attention economy conglomerates like Twitter and Facebook: it’s not that they’re worthless, but instead it’s the fact that they’re engineered to be as addictive as possible. (View Highlight)
- Many of the best uses of the online world support better living offline. (View Highlight)
- Be wary of tools that solve a problem that didn’t exist before the tool. (View Highlight)
- Activity trumps passivity. (View Highlight)
- Some of the most fulfilling online activities, therefore, are those that involve you creating things, as oppose to simply consuming. (View Highlight)
- Digital minimalism, for example, has helped me better understand some of the decisions I’ve made in my own online life (such as my embrace of blogging and rejection of major social media platforms) (View Highlight)
- a simple, carefully curated, minimalist digital life is not a rejection of technology or a reactionary act of skepticism; it is, by contrast, an embrace of the immense value these new tools can offer…if we’re willing to do the hard work of figuring out how to best leverage them on behalf of the things we truly care about. (View Highlight)