Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. Principle #3: Intentionality is satisfying.

To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology. Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. 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.

The average Facebook user, by contrast, uses the company’s products a little over fifty minutes per day.‍ 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. ‍ĭigital Minimalism: 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 notification symbol for Facebook was originally blue, to match the palette of the rest of the site, “but no one used it.” So they changed the color to red-an alarm color-and clicking skyrocketed.

Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.Īddiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences. The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. The key to thriving in our high-tech world, they’ve learned, is to spend much less time using technology. They downloaded the apps and set up accounts for good reasons, only to discover, with grim irony, that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that made them appealing in the first place: they joined Facebook to stay in touch with friends across the country, and then ended up unable to maintain an uninterrupted conversation with the friend sitting across the table.

Digital minimalism by cal newport