Digital Minimalism, by Cal Newport

Another excellent book from Cal Newport, one full of his signature objective analysis combined with actionable protocols to address the issues.

He was way ahead of the pack with many of these ideas. Cal has been vocally anti-social media (probably since he was born), much before it became socially acceptable and commonplace.

"As Clark incredulously pointed out, no matter what immediate benefits these services might provide the users, the net impact on their productivity and life satisfaction must be profoundly negative if all these users do is engage the service. You can’t, in other words, build a billion-dollar empire like Facebook if you’re wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook."

There’s plenty of tough love from Cal here too: a lot of great advice that is difficult, but that we probably need to hear more — it's simple not easy.

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Digital minimalism

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.

The most important idea behind digital minimalism is to only use technology that aligns with our values of living a better life (which means different things to different people). Digital minimalists will constantly perform cost benefit analysis regarding their tools, asking the following questions:

1. Does this technology directly support something that I deeply value?

2. Is this technology the best way to support this value?

3. How am I going to use this technology going forward to maximize its value and minimize its harms?

Remember how Cal talked about the traps of the Any-Benefit approach in Deep Work?

The three principles of digital minimalism are as follows:

1. Clutter is costly: cluttering your time and attention creates huge costs

2. Optimization is important: you must carefully think about what parts of a particular technology are worth using

3. Intentionality is satisfying: your choices give your life meaning

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Banishing solitude

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit in a room alone." — Blaise Pascal

Cal Newport says that the 21st century is a watershed moment, since for the first time in human history, we can essentially banish solitude. This is bad because regular doses of solitude are essential to flourishing as a human, and allowing us to spend time alone with our thoughts and to think.

Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin define solitude as a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds. Notably, this deviates from the standard conception of solitude which has a standard of physical isolation. Instead, solitude is all about what is happening in your own brain, rather than depending on the environment around you. Therefore, even if you're by yourself reading a book or listening to a podcast, this does not qualify as solitude.

The importance of framing solitude in this way is because solitude requires you to move past reacting to things, and instead focusing on your own thoughts and experiences.

As Cal writes:

"The smartphone provided a new technique to banish these remaining slivers of solitude: the quick glance. At the slightest hint of boredom, you can now surreptitiously glance at any number of apps or mobile-adapted websites that have been optimized to provide you an immediate and satisfying dose of input from other minds. It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life."

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Conversation v. connection

Cal Newport borrows a distinction between conversation and connection from MIT professor Sherry Turkle. Conversation is the rich, high bandwidth communication that defines real-world encounters between humans (with nuanced analog cues, non-verbal cues, facial expressions, etc.), whereas connection is the low-bandwidth interactions in our online social lives.

There are a wide variety of studies that each seem to arrive at conflicting conclusions on whether social media is good for us. Essentially, there are studies showing certain behaviors in social media can modestly boost well-being, and also studies that show social media has a net negative effect on happiness.

To reconcile this difference, it turns out that "using social media tends to take people away from the real-world socializing that’s massively more valuable. As the negative studies imply, the more you use social media, the less time you tend to devote to offline interaction, and therefore the worse this value deficit becomes—leaving the heaviest social media users much more likely to be lonely and miserable. The small boosts you receive from posting on a friend’s wall or liking their latest Instagram photo can’t come close to compensating for the large loss experienced by no longer spending real-world time with that same friend."

Social media is all about connection, which is a much weaker form of conversation.

Another way of thinking about this is that connection is a necessary but not sufficient condition for conversation — we should use our high-tech tools to faciliate conversations, but not let low-quality connection define our relationships. In Digital minimalism, conversation is the only form of interaction that counts towards maintaining a relationship.

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Deep reset

While the deep reset concept isn’t introduced directly in Digital Minimalism, Cal introduces it later in his podcast series. I wrote a bunch of notes on this from a previous piece (section here), but thought I’d include it here for completeness:

Silence for solitude: create silence to allow solitude and create enough space to think about what matters to you:

• consolidate the sources of news you consume, and drastically cut out the noise

  find at least one activity that provides value to other people; this allows you to remind yourself that you can provide value elsewhere

  find at least one activity that aims only at improving and empowering yourself

Resonance sampling: identifying aspects that resonate with your ideas of a deep life (look at real-life, documentaries, books)

• identify the major areas of your life that matter

  • craft: what you produce (professionally, non-professionally) that provides value

    community: relationships with people and groups

    constitution: health

    contemplation: drive to have philosophical/ethical engagement with the world

  sample examples of people who do things that resonate with you in each of these categories

Heaven and hell exercise: often, jumping into concrete goals is a risky strategy — it’s hard to find a good goal that is both achievable and inspiring — so the heaven and hell exercise can be useful.

• hell part: write down a description of your life right now of things that aren't working, then imagine that you kept doing those things, and project that into the future

• heaven: write down a description of your life as it could be, if you actually acted upon all these resonating areas

  • first person narrative: "this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm feeling"

• from this foundation, you can launch many different goals and strategies, and it's fine to have false starts

  • the heaven imagery is going to help give you staying power because you're working for yourself towards something that truly resonates

• you should review this document every single quarter/month; and feel free to edit and update it

  • for each month or quarter, explicitly detail out what you're working on this quarter that will move you from hell to heaven

Concrete action: this is the concrete action on getting away from the hell image and towards heaven.

• trying to do too much all at once will short circuit any progress

  • better to be sequential than parallel

  • one major change in each of the buckets of your life at most

• when identifying a milestone, it should have a concrete measurement of completion

  • try to identify a physical component of the objective to do first, which then springboards into the behavioral component

  • e.g. work towards building a deep work shed, thus giving you momentum for the goal of "90 minutes of deep work first thing in the morning"

Deep resets for career changes: if you feel you need to change your career.

• from So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport: people overestimate the impact of the content of their work on their happiness (my notes on the book here)

• career capital theory: relationship between work and satisfaction is more "transactional": as you build up rare and valuable skills (career capital), you can use those skills as leverage to move towards things in your career that resonate more

  • without the leverage of career capital, it's difficult to have the ability to move towards things that you resonate with you

  • therefore, the focus should be on building rare and valuable skills, rather than following your passion

• when you're pivoting careers, try to shift to something that preserves the career capital that you've already built, as this will make the path shorter and easier

The previous piece is linked here:

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