Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

the best digital life is formed by carefully curating their tools to deliver massive and unambiguous benefits. They tend to be incredibly wary of low-value activities that can clutter up their time and attention and end up hurting more than they help.

“Amish communities are not relics of a bygone era.13 Rather, they are demonstrations of a different form of modernity.”

optimizing how we use technology is just as important as how we choose what technologies to use in the first place.

removed the web browser from her phone—a nontrivial hack. “I figured I didn’t need to know the answer to everything instantly,” she told me. She then bought an old-fashioned notebook to jot down ideas when she’s bored on the tube.

Once you break free from this mind-set, however, and begin seeing new technologies simply as tools that you can deploy selectively, you’re able to fully embrace the second principle of minimalism and start furiously optimizing—enabling you to reap the advantages of vaulting up the return curve.

Put aside set times on set days during which you’re always available for conversation. Depending on where you are during this period, these conversations might be exclusively on the phone or could also include in-person meetings. Once these office hours are set, promote them to the people you care about. When someone instigates a low-quality connec

a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.

Generally, too many operating procedures might make the declutter experiment unwieldy, but most people required at least a few of these more nuanced constraints.

He also started listening to records on a record player, from beginning to end, with no earbuds in his ears or skip buttons to tap when antsy—which turns out to be a much richer experience than Caleb’s normal habit of firing up Spotify and seeking out the perfect track.

you’re more likely to succeed in reducing the role of digital tools in your life if you cultivate high-quality alternatives to the easy distraction they provide. For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life. Reducing the easy distraction without also filling the void can make life