Digital Minimalism ← We Can Solve This

I published a book titled Deep Work. It was about the underappreciated value of intense focus and how the professional world’s emphasis on distracting communication tools was holding people back from producing their best work.

online discussion seems to accelerate people’s shift toward emotionally charged and draining extremes. The techno-philosopher Jaron Lanier convincingly argues that the primacy of anger and outrage online is, in some sense, an unavoidable feature of the medium: In an open marketplace for attention, darker emotions attract more eyeballs than positive and constructive thoughts. For heavy internet users, repeated interaction with this darkness can become a source of draining negativity—a steep price that many don’t even realize they’re paying to support their compulsive connectivity.

Long before Henry David Thoreau exclaimed “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,” Marcus Aurelius asked: “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?”

This process requires you to step away from optional online activities for thirty days. During this period, you’ll wean yourself from the cycles of addiction that many digital tools can instill, and begin to rediscover the analog activities that provide you deeper satisfaction. You’ll take walks, talk to friends in person, engage your community, read books, and stare at the clouds. Most importantly, the declutter gives you the space to refine your understanding of the things you value most.

Steve Jobs was initially dismissive of the idea that the iPhone would become more of a general-purpose mobile computer running a variety of different third-party applications. “The second we allow some knucklehead programmer to write some code that crashes it,” Jobs once told Grignon, “that will be when they want to call 911.”

The techno-apologists are right in their claims, but they’re also missing the point.

“This thing is a slot machine,” Harris says early in the interview while holding up his smartphone. “How is that a slot machine?” Cooper asks. “Well, every time I check my phone, I’m playing the slot machine to see ‘What did I get?’” Harris answers. “There’s a whole playbook of techniques that get used [by technology companies] to get you using the product for as long as possible.”

If lots of people click the little heart icon under your latest Instagram post, it feels like the tribe is showing you approval—which we’re adapted to strongly crave.* The other side of this evolutionary bargain, of course, is that a lack of positive feedback creates a sense of distress. This is serious business for the Paleolithic brain, and therefore it can develop an urgent need to continually monitor this “vital” information.

Notice, this minimalist philosophy contrasts starkly with the maximalist philosophy that most people deploy by default—a mind-set in which any potential for benefit is enough to start using a technology that catches your attention. A maximalist is very uncomfortable with the idea that anyone might miss out on something that’s the least bit interesting or valuable. Indeed, when I first started writing publicly about the fact that I’ve never used Facebook, people in my professional circles were aghast for exactly this reason. “Why do I need to use Facebook?” I would ask. “I can’t tell you exactly,” they would respond, “but what if there’s something useful to you in there that you’re missing?”

“Some of my work clients have noticed a change in me and they will ask what I am doing differently,” he told me. “When I tell them I quit social media, their response is ‘I wish I could do that, but I just can’t.’ The reality, however, is that they literally have no good reason to be on social media!”

Dave explained to me, his own father wrote him a handwritten note every week during his freshman year of college. Still touched by this gesture, Dave began a habit of drawing a new picture every night to place in his oldest daughter’s lunchbox. His two youngest children watched this ritual with interest. When they became old enough for lunchboxes, they were excited to start receiving their daily drawings as well. “Fast-forward a couple of years, and I’m spending a decent chunk of time every night doing three drawings!” Dave told me with obvious pride. “This wouldn’t have been possible if I didn’t protect how I spend my time.”

Near the end of March in 1845, Henry David Thoreau borrowed an ax and walked into the woods near Walden Pond. He felled young white pine trees, which he hewed into studs and rafters and floorboards. Using more borrowed tools, he notched mortise and tenon joints and assembled these pieces into the frame of a modest cabin.

In July, Thoreau moved into the cabin where he then lived for the next two years. In the book Walden, he wrote about this experience, famously describing his motivation as follows: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Thoreau’s purpose in these tables is to capture precisely (not poetically or philosophically) how much it cost to support his life at Walden Pond—a lifestyle that, as he argues at length in this first chapter, satisfies all the basic human needs: food, shelter, warmth, and so on. Thoreau then contrasts these costs with the hourly wages he could earn with his labor to arrive at the final value he cared most about: How much of his time must be sacrificed to support his minimalist lifestyle? After plugging in the numbers gathered during his experiment, he determined that hiring out his labor only one day per week would be sufficient.

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

“I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, house, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of.”

Thoreau’s new economics, however, demands that you balance this profit against the costs measured in terms of “your life.”

What impresses is the form of the argument. For Thoreau’s obsession with calculation runs deep. . . . He says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain, or lose?

Max Brooks quipped in a 2017 TV appearance, “We need to reevaluate [our current relationship with] online information sort of the way we reevaluated free love in the 80s.”

Brooke captures well the experience many reported about their monthlong declutter when she told me: “Stepping away for thirty-one days provided clarity I didn’t know I was missing. . . . As I stand here now from the outside looking in, I see there is so much more the world has to offer!”

for each optional technology that you’re considering reintroducing into your life, you must first ask: Does this technology directly support something that I deeply value? This is the only condition on which you should let one of these tools into your life.

The day the declutter was over, I raced back to Facebook, to my old blogs, to Discord, gleeful and ready to dive back in—and then, after about thirty minutes of aimless browsing, I kind of looked up and thought . . . why am I doing this? This is . . . boring? This isn’t bringing me any kind of happiness. It took a declutter for me to notice that these technologies aren’t actually adding anything to my life.

The desk I saw in Lincoln’s cottage is a replica, as the original was moved to the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House. This is ironic because almost certainly Lincoln would have struggled much more with this historical task if he had been forced to grapple with it amid the bustle and distraction of his official residence.

Kethledge and Erwin decided to co-write a book on the topic of solitude. It took them seven years, but their efforts culminated in the 2017 release of Lead Yourself First.

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.

King’s subsequent nomination to be the leader of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association, which occurred in a church meeting in late 1955, caught King off guard. He agreed only reluctantly, saying, “Well if you think I can render some service, I will.”

“Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.”

Edward Gibbon: “Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.”

Storr notes that the need to spend a great deal of time alone was common among “the majority of poets, novelists, and composers.” He lists Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein as examples of men who never had families or fostered close personal ties, yet still managed to lead remarkable lives. Storr’s conclusion is that we’re wrong to consider intimate interaction as the sine qua non of human thriving. Solitude can be just as important for both happiness and productivity.

Harris argues, perhaps counterintuitively, that “the ability to be alone . . . is anything but a rejection of close bonds,” and can instead affirm them. Calmly experiencing separation, he argues, builds your appreciation for interpersonal connections when they do occur.

May Sarton explored the strangeness of this point in a 1972 diary entry, writing: I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone . . .

Thoreau demonstrated similar concern, famously writing in Walden that “we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate

The iPod succeeded not just by selling lots of units, but also by changing the culture surrounding portable music. It became common, especially among younger generations, to allow your iPod to provide a musical backdrop to your entire day—putting the earbuds in as you walk out the door and taking them off only when you couldn’t avoid having to talk to another human.

Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

What’s remarkable about these concerns is how recently we started really caring about them. People born before the mid-1980s have strong memories of life without cell phones. All of the concerns listed above still existed in theory, but no one worried much about them.

Before I had my driver’s license, for example, if I needed someone to pick me up from school after sports practice, I’d use a payphone: sometimes my parents were home, and sometimes I had to leave a message and hope they got it.

In 1889, as Friedrich Nietzsche’s fame began to spread, he published a brief introduction to his philosophy. It was called Twilight of the Idols, and it took him only two weeks to write.

in maxim 34, that we find the following strong claim: “Only thoughts reached by walking have value.” To underscore his esteem for walking, Nietzsche also notes: “The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit.”

Thoreau labels this activity a “noble art,” clarifying: “The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise . . . but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.”

Nietzsche emphasized this point when he contrasted the originality of his walk-stimulated ideas with those produced by the bookish scholar locked in a library reacting only to other people’s work. “We do not belong,” he wrote, “to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books.”

productive aloneness.

I’m quickly gaining a reputation as that odd professor who seems to be constantly wandering up and down the Takoma Park streets.

I use these walks for multiple purposes. The most common activities include trying to make progress on a professional problem (such as a math proof for my work as a computer scientist or a chapter outline for a book) and self-reflection on some particular aspect of my life that I think needs more attention.

The details of this practice are simple: On a regular basis, go for long walks, preferably somewhere scenic. Take these walks alone, which means not just by yourself, but also, if possible, without your phone. If you’re wearing headphones, or monitoring a text message chain, or, God forbid, narrating the stroll on Instagram—you’re not really walking, and therefore you’re not going to experience this practice’s greatest benefits.

It also helps if you learn to broaden your definition of “good weather.” You can walk on cold days, or when it’s snowing, or even during light rain (during my MIT commutes I learned the value of good rain pants). I once even took my dog for a short walk while a hurricane worked its way past Washington, DC, though, in retrospect, this was probably not a smart decision.

These efforts are hard, but the rewards are big. I’m quite simply happier and more productive—by noticeably

These efforts are hard, but the rewards are big. I’m quite simply happier and more productive—by noticeably large factors—when I’m walking regularly. Many others, both today and historically, enjoy the same benefits that come from this substantial injection of solitude into an otherwise hectic life. Thoreau once wrote: I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. Most of us will never meet Thoreau’s ambitious commitment to ambulation. But if we remain inspired by his vision, and try to spend as much time as is reasonable on foot and engaging in the “noble art” of walking, we too will experience success in preserving our health and spirits. PRACTICE: WRITE LETTERS TO YOURSELF I have a stack of twelve black, pocket-size Moleskine notebooks on the top shelf of a bookcase in my home office. A thirteenth notebook is currently in my work

The hardest part of this habit is making the time. In my experience, you’ll probably have to invest effort to clear the necessary hours from your schedule—they’re unlikely to arise naturally.

It also helps if you learn to broaden your definition of “good weather.” You can walk on cold days, or when it’s snowing, or even during light rain

its way past Washington, DC, though, in retrospect,

These efforts are hard, but the rewards are big. I’m quite simply happier and more productive—by noticeably large factors—when I’m walking regularly.

The early entries in this first notebook are mainly focused on professional topics. In addition to graduate student issues, it also includes quite a few notes about marketing my first book, How to Win at College, which was published in early 2005. These entries are interesting today mainly for their humorously dated cultural references (one such entry solemnly declares, “take a page from [Howard] Dean’s campaign: empower people,” while another—and I swear I’m not making this up—references both UGG boots and the hit early 2000s reality show The Osbournes).

Dwight Eisenhower leveraged a “practice of thinking by writing” throughout his career to make sense

Dwight Eisenhower leveraged a “practice of thinking by writing” throughout his career to make sense of complicated decisions and tame intense emotions.

In 2007, ESPN aired what has to be one of the strangest sporting events to ever appear on the channel: the national championship of the USA Rock Paper Scissors League. The title match, which is preserved on YouTube, begins with the play-by-play announcers excitedly describing the two “RPS phenoms” (RPS being short for rock paper scissors) that will be competing, declaring with deadpan seriousness that the audience is about to witness the “greatest duel in sports.”

The first contestant wears glasses and is dressed in khaki pants and a short-sleeve, button-down shirt. He trips on the ropes trying to climb into the ring. His nickname, we’re told, is “Land Shark.” The second contestant, nicknamed “the Brain,” arrives, also dressed in khakis. He makes it into the ring without falling over. “That bodes well,” the announcer helpfully explains.

he noted that people naturally have a strong interest in their own social life, so it’s not surprising that this is what they like to think about when bored. As Lieberman continued to study different aspects of social cognition, however, his opinion shifted. “I have since become convinced that I had the relationship between these networks backward,” he writes. “And this reversal is tremendously important.” He now believes “we are interested in the social world because we are built to turn on the default network during our free time.”

The problem, then, is not that using social media directly makes us unhappy. Indeed, as the positive studies cited above found, certain social media activities, when isolated in an experiment, modestly boost well-being. The key issue is 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

he tells them that he’s always available to talk on the phone at 5:30 p.m. on weekdays. There’s no need to schedule a conversation or let him know when you plan to call—just dial him up.

If you write him with a somewhat complicated question, he can reply, “I’d love to get into that. Call me at 5:30 any day you want.” Similarly, when I was visiting San Francisco a few years back and wanted to arrange a get-together, he replied that I could catch him on the phone any day at 5:30, and we could work out a plan. When he wants to catch up with someone he hasn’t spoken to in a while, he can send them a quick note saying, “I’d love to get up to speed on what’s going on in your life, call me at 5:30 sometime.”

Put aside set times on set days during which you’re always available for conversation. Depending on where you are during this period, these conversations might be exclusively on the phone or could also include in-person meetings. Once these office hours are set, promote them to the people you care about.

Coffee shop hours are also popular. In this variation, you pick some time each week during which you settle into a table at your favorite coffee shop with the newspaper or a good book. The reading, however, is just the backup activity. You spread the word among people you know that you’re always at the shop during these hours with the hope that you soon cultivate a rotating group of regulars that come hang out.

The conversation office hours strategy is effective for improving your social life because it overcomes the major obstacle to meaningful socializing: the concern, mentioned above, that unsolicited calls might be bothersome. People crave real conversation, but this obstacle is often enough to prevent it. If you remove it by holding conversation office hours, you’ll be surprised by how many more of these rewarding interactions you can now fit into your normal week.

embrace pursuits that provide you a “source of inward joy.”

Erecting barriers against the existential is not new—before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions

Harris felt uncomfortable, in other words, not because he was craving a particular digital habit, but because he didn’t know what to do with himself once his general access to the world of connected screens was removed.

If you want to succeed with digital minimalism, you cannot ignore this reality. If you begin decluttering the low-value digital distractions from your life before you’ve convincingly filled in the void they were helping you ignore, the experience will be unnecessarily unpleasant at best and a massive failure at worse.

Pete and Liz emphasize a perhaps surprising observation: when individuals in the FI community are provided large amounts of leisure time, they often voluntarily fill these hours with strenuous activity.

Arnold Bennett took up the cause of active leisure in his short but influential self-help guide, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.

these arguments all build on the same general principle that the value you receive from a pursuit is often proportional to the energy invested.

Crawford took a quintessential knowledge-work job, running a think tank in Washington, DC. He soon grew disenchanted with the oddly disembodied and ambiguous nature of this work, so he did something extreme: he quit to start a motorcycle repair business.

The most successful social leisure activities share two traits. First, they require you to spend time with other people in person.

The second trait is that the activity provides some sort of structure for the social interaction, including rules you have to follow, insider terminology or rituals, and often a shared goal.

What differentiates this club from similar organizations is the books themselves, which are custom printed in a compact booklet that’s roughly the height and width of a smartphone. This size is intentional. The philosophy behind a Mouse Book is that it can fit into your pocket next to your phone. Whenever you feel the urge to pull out your phone for a quick hit of distraction, you can instead pull out the Mouse Book and read a few pages of something deeper. The company describes their goal as “mobilizing literature,” and likes to point out that their portable entertainment devices “never run out of battery life, their ‘screens’ never crack, and they don’t ring, buzz, or vibrate.”

FIX OR BUILD SOMETHING EVERY WEEK

“Damn! . . . If this guy is billing out his metalworking time at $75.00 an hour, that’s a sign that I need to finally learn the craft myself,” Pete recalls thinking at the time. “How hard can it be?” In Pete’s hands, the answer turned out to be: not that hard.

Pete is an example of someone who is handy, in the sense that he’s comfortable picking up a new physical skill when needed.

The simplest way to become more handy is to learn a new skill, apply it to repair, learn, or build something, and then repeat.

My suggestion is that you try to learn and apply one new skill every week, over a period of six weeks. Start with easy projects like those suggested above, but as soon as you feel the challenge wane, ramp up the complication of the skills and steps involved.

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.

When Franklin returned from London to Philadelphia in 1726, he faced a barren social life. Having grown up in Boston, Franklin had no family roots in his adopted home, and his skepticism of religious dogma eliminated the option of joining a ready-made community through the church. Undeterred, he decided he would simply start the social organizations he desired from scratch.

Perhaps most amazingly, all of this social activity took place before his retirement from the printing business in 1747, which, in Franklin’s recounting, was the turning point after which he could finally get serious about his leisure time.

imagine that Facebook started charging you by the minute. How much time would you really need to spend in the typical week to keep up with your list of important Facebook activities? For most people, the answer is surprisingly small; somewhere around twenty to thirty minutes.

This American approach to information is much like our approach to healthy eating, which focuses more on aggressively eliminating what’s bad than celebrating what’s good.

As the two men discussed potential uses for this new medium, they stumbled across a remarkable insight. As Morse recalls thinking: “If the presence of electricity can be made visible in any part of the circuit, I see no reason why intelligence may not be transmitted by electricity.”

These changes crept up on us and happened fast, before we had a chance to step back and ask what we really wanted out of the rapid advances of the past decade. We added new technologies to the periphery of our experience for minor reasons, then woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily life. We didn’t, in other words, sign up for the digital world in which we’re currently entrenched; we seem to have stumbled backward into it.

digital minimalist, which means maximizing convenience is prioritized much lower than using technology to support his values. As a father, teaching his kids an important lesson about embracing life beyond the screen was far more important than faster typing.

why would you add hours of extra labor in the fields to obtain a wagon? It’s true that it takes more time to walk to town than to ride in a wagon, Thoreau notes, but these walks still likely require less time than the extra work hours needed to afford the wagon. It’s

she emphasized the importance of being present with her daughter, even when bored,

something we now see would have been almost impossible to obtain in the White House: time and space to think.

“I have read abundance of fine things on the subject of solitude. . . . I acknowledge solitude an agreeable refreshment to a busy mind.”

Here’s my suggestion: schedule in advance the time you spend on low-quality leisure. That is, work out the specific time periods during which you’ll indulge in web surfing, social media checking, and entertainment streaming. When you get to these periods, anything goes. If you want to binge-watch Netflix while live-streaming yourself browsing Twitter: go for

Without a well-considered approach to your high-quality leisure, it’s easy for your commitment to these pursuits to degrade due to the friction of everyday life.

Habit: Attend one cultural event per week.