#Things to consider

  • Establish a philosophy for which digital tools you allow into your life, and under what constraints.
  • Experiment and find out how to best use the technology you have—you want to maximize its value and minimize its harm.
  • We all benefit from regular doses of solitude—you need a space to slow down all input from the world around you.
  • The original notification badge for Facebook was blue but nobody clicked it. They changed it to red and the clicks skyrocketed.
  • The smartphone is a slot machine.
  • Intention trumps convenience.
  • Techno-maximalism believes more is better.
  • Write letters to yourself.
  • Don’t replace conversation with connection. Conversation-centric communication in contrast to connection-centric.
  • Steve Jobs was famous for his long strolls around the tree lined neighborhood where he lived.
  • Cultivate high-quality leisure. Prioritize demanding activities over passive consumption. Think about the seasonal leisure plan. What activities do you want to plan out for the season? Which objectives and habits do you intend to honor?

#Reading log

2022-05-23: Over the last few weeks I’ve been listening to this book again. It always helps me to clean up, get rid of the digital clutter that I’ve assimilated over the years. It puts my mind in a good place for handling technology. And for that this book is very meaningful to me.

#Establish your philosophy of technology use

You need to move beyond tweaks and instead rebuild your relationship with technology from scratch. Your deeply held values need to act as foundation. You need a philosophy of technology that covers from the ground up which digital tools you allow into your life, for what reasons, and under what constraints. Digital minimalism is such a philosophy. If a new technology offers little more than a trivial convenience or minor diversion, you as a minimalist will happily ignore it.

Always ask: is this the best way to use technology to support this value? You have to work backward from your deep values to your technology choices. That way you transform all these technological innovations from a source of distraction into tools that support a life well lived. Carefully curate your tools to deliver massive benefits. Don’t mind missing out on small things. How much is enough for stimulating ideas and information without letting online media dominating your time and toying with your mood?

#Optimization is important

Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology. Most people’s personal technology processes currently exist on the early part of the return curve—the location where additional attempts to optimize will yield massive improvements.

One of the biggest optimizations you can do is to remove social media apps from your phone. You have to eliminate the ability to browse/check things as a knee-jerk response to boredom. Remember that the large attention economy that introduced many of these new technologies don’t want us thinking about optimization. Think of these services as offering a collection of features that you can carefully put to use to serve specific values. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use these new technologies.

#Clutter is costly

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 cost of a thing is the amount of life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

#The digital declutter

Gradually changing your habits one at a time doesn’t work well—the engineered attraction of the attention economy will diminish your inertia and will make you backslide to where you started.

  1. Put aside a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life.
  2. During this thirty-day break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful.
  3. At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank slate. For each technology you reintroduce, determine what value it serves in your life and how specifically you will use it so as to maximize this value.

#Define your technology rules

During the 30 days you’re supposed to take a break from “optional technologies” in your life. You need to define what falls into this “optional” category. A pretty good rule to follow: consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm the daily operation of your professional or personal life. Use operating procedures when confronting a technology which is mostly optional. These procedures specify exactly how and when you use a particular technology.