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Are you spending too much time on your phone or social media? Here is the Digital Minimalism book review you need!
Read also: Ego is the Enemy Book Review | 11 Lessons + Quotes
Book Review
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport is a great book for everyone who spends a lot of time on their phone and social media. Firstly, the book is very convincing on why we should do something about this habit. Secondly, it gives the reader the necessary ‘detox’ tools which go deeper than most ‘hacks’ you find online.
For someone who rarely spares a glance at social media and uses her phone for less than the average person, many of the book’s arguments and tips were not new to me. Still, I’ve gotten enough value out of the book so that it’s been an interesting read.
Lessons
1. Small changes are unlikely to stick; you have to do a hard detox
“Digital 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.”
– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)
I’m not entirely agreeing with this first lesson. I believe that with enough discipline, small changes can leave a lasting impression on your phone use.
However, I can see why it is easier for many people to do a hard detox, as Cal Newport found with his feedback.
So consider doing a two-week or one-month digital detox to override the bad habits you’ve developed.
2. Do the detox for the sake of lasting change
“The goal is not to simply give yourself a break from technology, but to instead spark a permanent transformation of your digital life. The detoxing is merely a step that supports this transformation.”
– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)
A digital detox can induce a lasting and significant change in your habits and, therefore, the quality of your life.
However, it’s harder to reap these rewards if you view the detox as nothing else than a one-week/one-month break.
Yes, it’s also meant to give you some time away from your phone and social media accounts. But much more important is the effect the detox can have in the long run for you.
So start it with the goal in mind of forever changing your relationship to digital tools. That way, your motivation to see it through to the end will be much higher.
3. After the detox, many lose their taste for the platform they’d obsessed over
“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.”
– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)
“An interesting experience shared by some participants was that they eagerly returned to their optional technologies only to learn they had lost their taste for them.”
– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)
Sometimes we can be discouraged from trying a digital detox because it feels as if we could never maintain enough self-discipline outside of detox to truly use our social media and phone less.
So why try it if we are just going to fall back into our old habits afterward?
Fortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, many people realize that post-digital detox, they have slightly lost their taste for the social media they’ve been so obsessed with.
On the first day after the detox, they excitedly open up Instagram or Facebook only to aimlessly scroll and tap around a bit. Quickly they lose interest and close the app in favor of spending their time more satisfyingly.
4. Mental solitude is crucial for a happy and high performing life
“Everyone benefits from regular doses of solitude, and, equally important, anyone who avoids this state for an extended period of time will, like Lincoln during his early months in the White House, suffer.”
– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)
“Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be.”
– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)
Humans are not meant to be constantly surrounded by social input, be it in the form of participating in or just hearing a conversation, social media captions, podcasts, movies, or books.
We need time away from all this input to have the solitude to sort through our thoughts, gain insights, and healthily process our emotions.
We need moments to just BE instead of constantly having to REACT what others throw at us.
5. Constant connection with the online world causes anxiety
“Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.”
– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)
“The sudden rise in anxiety-related problems coincided with the first incoming classes of students that were raised on smartphones and social media.”
– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)
“Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.”
– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)
Another reason why mental solitude is so important is that being constantly connected has proven the afflict big parts of a whole generation with anxiety.
Mental health professionals have noticed a clear correlation between the arrival of smartphones with their instant access to social media and messaging apps and a big spike in the recorded cases of anxiety.
And it makes sense, doesn’t it? Time on social media or messaging apps creates a lot of comparisonitis, FOMO, and the need to uphold a certain persona.
No wonder a constant exposure to this feeds into the anxiety of a whole generation.
6. Digital connections don’t come even close to replacing in-person interactions despite what it might feel like
Our species has thrived in large parts because of our superior social skills.
We can peacefully live and work together in greater numbers than any other species on earth. We can diplomatically solve conflicts when they arrive and leave the situation better than when we entered it. And we can feel empathy and detect lies.
All these skills have been honed for many thousand years. Our brains have evolved to notice minuscule cues in tone, choice of vocabulary, physiognomy, and more to analyze social interactions accurately.
Nobody should be surprised that digital messaging can’t ever come close to replacing in-person relationships.
Of course, it’s great to be able to keep up a relationship even while you’re a great distance away from each other. There are undoubtedly many benefits to modern communication.
However, the relationships you create or maintain digitally won’t ever satisfy our human need for social contact to the extent in-person relationships do.
That’s why you should always spend more effort on the in-person relationship than your digital one. Instead of commenting on posts of 20 of your online ‘friends,’ use that time to meet a friend at a café or stroll the park.
7. Reducing your digital presence has the lovely side effect of getting rid of your shallow/fake ‘friends.’
“Being less available over text, in other words, has a way of paradoxically strengthening your relationship even while making you (slightly) less available to those you care about.”
– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)
It might be the introvert in me, but I have absolutely no desire to maintain shallow online ‘friendships.’
I like having a couple of close friends, who I meet in person once in a while, and only with them, I am willing to keep up a digital connection as well.
A digital detox can help you sort out the shallow relationships and keep the true ones. Any friend who can’t deal with you not answering their texts within a day is no real friend at all.
Still, you can give all your regular contacts a quick warning that you will be less quick to answer in the future.
8. You will be able to reap the benefits of social platforms while avoiding the disadvantages if you set up clear rules for their use
“They would never simply say, “I use Facebook because it helps my social life.” They would instead declare something more specific, such as: “I check Facebook each Saturday on my computer to see what my close friends and family are up to; I don’t have the app on my phone; I culled my list of friends down to just meaningful relationships.””
– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)
Think about the social media benefits Facebook, Instagram & Co. advertise with. It’s about connecting with your friends and family no matter where you are, keeping up to date on what happens with them, and effectively marketing your business.
We can undoubtedly get all these benefits from using social media. However, if you are honest with yourself, you will quickly realize that you can reap all these benefits in a fraction of the time you spend on social media.
Checking in once or twice a week is enough to see whether or not something important has happened to your close ones.
You can block out an hour or two in your weekly schedule to reply to DM’s or comment on any posts.
You can also block out time to schedule your business content or free a slot for when you plan to go live.
All these benefits of social media don’t require you to scroll through your feed on an hourly basis. They don’t even need you to look into your account every day. Once in a while is already enough.
Everything beyond that brings more disadvantages than advantages, especially since opening social media once makes it so easy to get sucked into it for longer than you’ve planned.
If you set up clear rules and a thought-through schedule, you can reap the advantages and avoid the attention traps the founders have integrated.
9. Stop using social media on your phone and only use it on your laptop
“if you’re going to use social media, stay far away from the mobile versions of these services, as these pose a significantly bigger risk to your time and attention.”
– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)
“First, a nontrivial percentage of people who deleted the apps discovered that they essentially stopped using social media altogether. Even the small extra barrier of needing to log in to a computer was enough to prevent them from making the effort—revealing, often to their admitted surprise, that services they claimed were indispensable were in reality providing nothing more than convenient hits of distraction.”
– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)
Mobile apps bring social media companies the biggest number of eyeballs and, therefore, the most revenue.
Unsurprisingly, they spend more resources on optimizing these apps than on optimizing the web versions. Everything about the apps is tweaked to perfection to capture and entrap your attention.
And since you carry your phone constantly with you wherever you go, it’s incredibly easy to enter these apps full of traps.
The easiest way to avoid this is by defeating the apps on your phone and only using them on your laptop or tablet.
The more effort it takes to enter the app, the less likely you are to do so. And the less smooth the user experience, the less likely you are to stay in the app.
Use that to your advantage for the time during and after your digital detox.
10. Doing ‘nothing’ in your free time is grossly overrated
The easiest way to get sucked into attention traps like social media, digital games, Netflix, etc., is by being bored.
Once you are bored, you’ll get drawn to the easy entertainment these services provide.
And the easiest way to get bored is by doing ‘nothing’ in your free time.
I get it; I really do
11. Carefully curate a handful of high-quality sides you follow for a certain topic
I’m sure you have a few go-to sites for the topics that interest you, be it news, sports, celebrity gossip, recipes, or styling advice.
Chances are also that you haven’t spent all too much time and thought on selecting these sites.
Most likely, you just stumbled over them and then kept coming back because they might have a tiny piece of additional information that wasn’t covered on the other sites.
The time it takes to gain such a small piece of additional information is clearly wasted.
You are much better off by carefully preselecting a handful of high-quality sites that cover your chosen topic most thoroughly.
That way, you can stay up to date and inspired in a fraction of the time it used to take you.
Have you tried a digital detox before? If so, did you go through with it, and did it leave lasting change?
I’m curious to hear from you!
Until next time, Felicity Seeker!
