PDF Summary:Digital Minimalism, by Cal Newport

Many of us are glued to our smartphones, tablets, and laptops, to the point that we’ve lost control of how we spend our time and attention. We feel overpowered and exhausted by the multitude of digital tools at our fingertips, including smartphones and tablets, websites, addictive apps, and social media platforms. Meanwhile, tech companies continue to invest major resources into making their products and services addictive so that we’ll continue scrolling and tapping.

This book explains how you can transform your tech habits by adopting digital minimalism, which aims to maximize the benefits of technology and avoid the pitfalls by identifying your values and determining how to use technology to support them. Learn how tech companies use human psychology to make their apps addictive, how likes and comments are weakening your relationship, and why trading your smartphone for a dumb phone could change your life.

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Strategies for Reclaiming Solitude

It’s difficult to disconnect in a hyper-connected world, but there are some simple strategies you can use to get a little solitude.

1. Get away from your phone for a while. If you go out to a movie or meet a friend for dinner, leave your phone at home or in the car. If that feels too extreme, ask your friend to put your phone in her pocket or purse—whatever you can do to make the phone less accessible to you. Try to regularly get some time away from your phone.
2. Take long, quiet walks. Try to make time for leisurely walks that give you the opportunity for quiet reflection. Resist the urge to talk on the phone or listen to a podcast—just be with your thoughts.
3. Write down your thoughts. Writing is a form of productive solitude, and writing a journal entry or a letter to yourself is a valuable way to process your thoughts. You don’t necessarily need to write daily—simply use writing as an outlet to work through difficult problems and big emotions.

Reclaim Your Relationships

Just as important as humans’ need for solitude is their need for meaningful social interaction. The human brain evolved to be extremely sophisticated in navigating social interactions because relationships have always been vital to humans’ health and survival. When you communicate with people face-to-face, on the phone, or over a video call—any means that’s not text-based—it stretches your mental muscles for social connection, such as reading body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions. However, digital communication has replaced much of people’s face-to-face and phone conversations, but texts, comments, and emails fail to feed people’s deep psychological social needs.

Rich, face-to-face communication draws on humans’ evolutionary social skills and is a meaningful experience because:

• It requires you to practice listening and interpreting nonverbal communication.
• It allows you to feel heard and understood.
• It helps you to develop empathy.

Despite the benefits of non-text interaction, people gravitate toward digital communication because—in addition to being wired for social connection—humans evolved to seek out the most efficient ways of doing things, despite the trade-offs. This leads to behaviors such as compulsively checking your phone even while carrying on a conversation with the person sitting in front of you, spending all your time on digital devices and leaving none for richer forms of interaction, and mistakenly assuming that digital communication is a substitute for face-to-face conversation. But, when you replace most of your conversations with digital, text-based communication, you eventually lose your social skills and become unable to satisfy your deep-seated social needs. For example, some adolescents have a hard time being empathetic because they haven’t had enough practice reading facial expressions to interpret what other people are feeling.

In order to maintain your communication skills and fulfill your social needs, you must not only incorporate more conversation into your life, but also change the way you use digital communication tools. Merely supplementing your digital connections with real-life conversations won’t create the fundamental shift you need for significant, sustained changes—rather, harness digital tools and use them to promote meaningful interactions, rather than replace them.

To shift the balance between your connections and your conversations, use digital (text-based) communication for only two purposes:

1. Planning and coordinating conversations
2. Sharing simple logistical information

When you adopt these practices, the number of people you actively communicate with will almost certainly shrink, because you won’t have enough time to keep up meaningful communication with everyone you follow on social media. You might initially feel lonely as you watch your social circle appear to shrink, but you’ll soon notice that the relationships that survive this shift will become stronger. Instead of maintaining constant connection with a large network of weak ties and acquaintances, you’ll enjoy meaningful communication with a smaller group of close friends.

Strategies for Strengthening Your Relationships

Shifting the way you think about and use your digital communication tools can be difficult, especially when those tools are already an established part of your relationships. Here are some strategies that can help you make the transition:

1. Stop clicking “like” and leaving social media comments. These are shallow forms of interaction that don’t feed your need for social connection, and they create the illusion that you’re communicating. As a result, these actions actually undermine your effort to strengthen your relationships through meaningful interactions.
2. Text only during certain times and for specific purposes. Use text messages only to exchange logistical information, such as setting up a time for a phone conversation or face-to-face meeting. Additionally, keep your phone on Do Not Disturb mode so that you don’t receive text notifications, and then designate times when you’ll check and respond to text messages. If you need to, adjust your phone settings to allow calls to come through from certain people.
3. Designate days and times for conversations. Just like college professors hold office hours, during which students can drop by their office to discuss assignments and issues, set aside days and times to have conversation office hours. When people try to instigate a conversation via text or email, simply tell them you’d love to continue the discussion, and that they can call or meet you during your conversation office hours. This strategy prevents anyone from hesitating to call you for fear of interrupting something, and it blocks out time for you to invest in meaningful conversation.

Reclaim Your Leisure Time

In order to successfully reduce your digital habits, you need to first identify the meaningful leisure activities that will take their place. While scrolling and tapping on your devices may feel like a pleasant way to decompress, they are low-quality leisure activities—they don’t contribute much value to your life and they don’t energize you. When you cut down on your digital use and deliberately fill that time with meaningful activities, the high-quality leisure will leave you feeling more energized and fulfilled than your digital habits.

As you think of the ways you could fill your newfound free time, consider the following three lessons about what defines high-quality leisure activities.

1. Demanding activities are more rewarding than passive ones. Dedicating your leisure time to demanding activities actually energizes you more than idly passing the time. When you learn a new skill or finish a task, it leaves you feeling uniquely proud and accomplished. The more energy you invest in your leisure, the more value you’ll gain.
2. Humans get satisfaction and self-worth from making things with their hands. High-quality leisure includes craft—which entails using a skill to practice or create something. In other words, by this definition, crafts encompass building a DIY headboard as well as practicing a song on the guitar.
3. In-person, structured social activities are rejuvenating. Certain leisure activities—like competitive games and sports—create an environment for supercharged socializing, where the people involved can interact more intensely than they would in normal conversations. For example, it would be inappropriate to yell encouraging words and chest bump at a cocktail party, but these displays are encouraged in a kickball game with friends. Supercharged socializing is an energizing and rewarding way to spend your leisure time.

In the spirit of digital minimalism, there is a growing movement of people using technology to support leisure activities instead of relying on technology to be the activity. First, you can go online to find communities of people who share your interests so that you can connect with them in person. Second, if you’re picking up a new skill or hobby, you can find detailed instructions, how-to videos, and sources for obscure materials and tools.

Strategies for Upgrading Your Leisure

From woodworking to volunteering, you have a wide array of high-quality leisure options to fill your time. Consider these strategies to get the most out of your downtime:

1. Build or fix something new each week. For six weeks, make a commitment that each week, you will learn a new skill and then use that skill to fix, create, or learn something new. These projects could include changing the oil in your car, building a headboard, or learning a new technique on an instrument. Start with relatively easy skills and projects. Each success will boost your confidence and motivation to continue learning and taking on increasingly challenging projects.
2. Schedule time for low-quality leisure. Decide in advance how much time you’ll spend on low-quality leisure activities, such as browsing social media or watching Netflix. This strategy has two benefits: First, creating time limits for your low-quality leisure prevents those activities from stealing time away from high-quality leisure. Second, this allows you to continue using your digital devices, while still protecting your commitment to incorporate more high-quality activities.
3. Join a group. Enjoy the benefits of regular, structured social interactions by joining a church group, volunteer organization, fitness club, or some other association—whether the unifying mission is serious or playful. Connecting with other people in pursuit of a common goal is uniquely rewarding.
4. Be strategic about your leisure time. Create seasonal and weekly leisure plans, so that when you have free time, you already know how you want to spend it. For your seasonal plan, identify goals you want to reach and habits you want to maintain during the coming season (this can be done every quarter, semester, or other interval). For example, your objective may be to learn how to play your favorite Beatles songs on the guitar, and your habit might be reading every night. For your weekly leisure plan, start each week by reviewing your seasonal plan as well as your calendar for the upcoming week. Schedule time to work on each of your seasonal objectives. Additionally, review your habits—even if you don’t schedule time for your habits, revisiting them keeps them front-of-mind so that you can remember to follow through with them as the week goes on.

Reclaim Your Attention

Since tech companies have a vested interest in keeping you addicted to your devices, reclaiming control of your attention requires strong conviction and thorough planning. The key to digital minimalism is to change how you view and use technology so that you use only the tools that benefit you, and forego the rest of the distractions. Here are some strategies to help you achieve this:

1. Delete your social media apps. These apps are designed to be more addictive than the web versions, and they’re always with you when they’re on your smartphone, making it almost impossible to resist checking them when you have a few free moments. If you have to log onto a computer to access those platforms, it will naturally limit how often you use them, and you’ll be more selective about when and why you log on.
2. Limit your smartphone’s capabilities. Block all distracting apps, websites, and functions on your digital devices, ideally by default or on a set schedule—for example, during work hours—and then unblock certain services when you need them. There are several digital tools that help you to create these blocks, such as Freedom and SelfControl. The goal is to turn your smartphone, tablet, or computer into a single-purpose device as much as possible.
3. Use social media strategically. When it comes to being intentional about digital use, take a cue from social media professionals—they have to be smart about avoiding distractions, or they’d get nothing done. Consider strategies such as keeping a short friend list on Facebook, following a small number of accounts on Instagram and Twitter, and creating separate Twitter accounts for professional needs and personal interests.
4. Transition to “slow media.” The Slow Media movement encourages people to shift their media consumption to high-quality sources over convenient, low-quality media. For example, if you used this approach for your news consumption, you would forego checking various social media and news sites throughout the day, and instead check a reliable source once or twice a day. You might also save longer articles that you come across throughout the week and spend a quiet Saturday morning reading them with a cup of coffee.
5. Get a “dumb” phone. Trading your smartphone for a cell phone that can only make calls and send texts is the most effective action you can take in resisting tech addiction and overuse. As tablets and laptops become lighter and more portable, you can rely on those devices for internet access. Alternatively, if you need your smartphone for work or other logistical reasons, you can get a tethered dumb phone: When you want to have some time without your smartphone, activate your tethered phone to have texts and phone calls forwarded from your smartphone.

Digital minimalists aren’t anti-technology—rather, they want to be intentional about how they use technology in order to maximize its benefits. Digital minimalists are content to miss out on low-value digital experiences because they’ve chosen to invest only in high-value experiences, in both the virtual and real worlds. If you decide to adopt this philosophy, you have to put in time and effort, and you’ll probably falter along the way, but you’ll be on the path to a higher quality of life.