3 Steps to Create a Quality Focused Life in an Increasingly Distracting World — Digital Minimalism
Your attention is a commodity; a commodity sought out by big tech to draw you in and keep you hooked. Engineered to keep you coming back through a trojan horse called a smartphone. Whether it be through social media, advertisements, video games, streaming, or whatever medium suits your fancy, your attention is being fought for to an extent incomparable to any other period in human history. In a world of constant distractions, it is easy to get pulled into habitual activities for hours on end; however, it is possible to take back control through a philosophy of technology called digital minimalism.
In his book Deep Work, Newport explains how even before the constant distractions of digital technology, Psychiatrist Carl Jung went to great lengths to focus deeply on his work. In 1922, Jung built a retreat in the village of Bollingen— a two-story stone house he called the Tower. He built a private office to which only he held a key and allowed no one else to enter without his permission.
Jung would wake up daily around 7 am, eat a big breakfast, and proceed onto two dedicated hours of undisturbed writing in his private office. His afternoons would typically consist of meditation or long walks in nature. Jung’s tower had no electricity, so his source of light was from oil lamps and his source of heat was a fireplace. He was consistently in bed by 10 pm.
Jung described his time at Bollingen Tower as intense repose and renewal from the start. The psychiatrist’s retreat to Bollingen was an action taken not for vacation from his work, but rather to further advance and deepen his work. With a similar goal, digital minimalism aims at creating rules and practices for rapid transformation into a more focused and meaningful life.
Digital Minimalism
In his book Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport explains the purpose of digital minimalism is to decide for ourselves what digital technologies we want to use, for what reasons, and under what conditions. Digital minimalism is a “less is more” philosophy of technology that emphasizes reducing the use of technology down to what is best for an individual’s values. Newport lays out a practice for a 30-day digital declutter within Digital Minimalism.
30-Day Digital Declutter Challenge
The 30-day Digital Declutter is a method of determining which technologies are beneficial for an individual’s values versus which are optional technologies. Optional technologies are technologies that if removed would not harm or disrupt the daily operation of an individual’s personal or professional life. During a digital declutter, the goal is to use only technologies that maximize an individual’s values while minimizing the unnecessary optional technologies.
3 Steps of the Digital Declutter
Step 1: Set the Rules
Determine your optional technologies. Once the optional technologies are determined, decide which optional technologies to remove. All new technologies are optional unless their temporary removal would be harmful or disruptive to your personal or professional life. Once the optional technologies are identified, determine the operating procedures specifying how and when you can use an optional technology.
Step 2: Take a 30 Day Break
Once your set of rules are determined, follow the rules for 30 days. To succeed in this phase, the crucial element is to rediscover what is important to you. Explore and rediscover high-quality leisure activities to replace your time on optional technologies. Some high-quality leisure practices could include fixing or building something or learning a new skill and starting a project.
The goal of the 30-day declutter is not just a temporary break from distraction, but rather a transformation to incorporate into a lifestyle. Creating high-quality leisure first makes it easier to minimize low-quality diversions later.
Step 3: Reintroduce Optional Technology
After the 30-day break from optional technology, beginning with a blank slate, it is time to reintroduce optional technologies through a digital minimalist screening process. Each reintroduced optional technology should pass through a digital minimalist screening check-list.
According to Newport, to pass the digital minimalist screening process the optional technology should:
- Serve something you deeply value (offering some value does not make the cut).
- Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if not, replace it).
- Have a standard operating procedure specifying how and when to use it.
As an alternative to completely cutting out optional technology failing the minimalist screening process, schedule time in advance to allow low-quality leisure — a specific time for activities such as web surfing, social media, streaming, and entertainment. During this scheduled period of low-quality leisure, anything goes, but outside of this period stick to your established rules.
Integrating the Transformation of Digital Minimalism
After the 30-day digital declutter is successfully completed, the goal is to continue with an ongoing lifestyle incorporating the benefits of the digital declutter. The idea is to replace the time usually spent on the low-quality leisure activities of optional technologies with high-quality leisure activities that involve exploration, creativity, and craftsmanship. Cal Newport lays out a method through a seasonal and weekly leisure plan.
Seasonal Leisure Plan
The seasonal leisure plan is broken into seasonal or quarterly periods throughout the year — depending on your preferred schedule. The seasonal periods are scheduled between the beginning of fall, the beginning of winter, and the beginning of summer (synchronous with a school semester schedule).
At the beginning of each season, establish a set of seasonal objectives and habits to pursue throughout the season.
Seasonal objectives should consist of goals, and strategies to accomplish the goal, that are concrete and specific. An example of a specific seasonal goal is to learn your five favorite songs on guitar. Some strategies to attaining this goal are restringing and tuning the guitar, printing out the chords to your five favorite songs, and setting aside an hour three days a week to practice.
Seasonal habits should consist of behavior rules to continue throughout the season. Some examples of seasonal habits are finishing two books a month, sticking to a consistent sleep schedule, a long walk in nature twice a week, and maintaining a healthy diet.
A weekly leisure plan considers how the seasonal objectives and habits will fit into the current week. This should be done at the beginning of each week.
“A life well-lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.” -Cal Newport
Solitude and Connection
Newport dedicates a chapter in Digital Minimalism to the immense benefits of solitude referring to the definition of solitude as described by Kethledge and Erwin, “a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.” Kethledge and Erwin elaborate that solitude is not about what is happening in the environment around you, but rather what is happening in your brain.
Henry David Thoreau emphasized the importance of solitude while also maintaining a healthy balance of connection and relationships. Newport references a 2005 essay from Historian W. Barksdale Maynard explaining how Thoreau was able to balance solitude and connection.
Thoreau retreated into the woods beyond Concord, Massachusetts to live in solitude with the intention of living more deliberately. Thoreau’s cabin was in a clearing near the woods, connected by a road about a 30-minute walk from his hometown of Concord. Although he spent much time in solitude, he would often return to Concord regularly for meals and social calls. His friends and family would visit regularly at his cabin. Maynard explains Thoreau’s balance of solitude and companionship was the whole point of living in the woods as he writes, “[Thoreau’s] intention was not to inhabit a wilderness, but to find wilderness in a suburban setting.”
Thoreau created for himself a balanced lifestyle that deeply supported his values while minimizing the distractions of his time. Similarly, the digital minimalist lifestyle aims to create a sustainable and balanced use of technology that best supports an individual’s values while minimizing the distractions of optional technology.
Last Word
For a Digital Minimalist lifestyle to truly have a lasting effect, the lifestyle should incorporate high-quality leisure activities that replace the time spent on unnecessary optional technology use. As Newport suggests, the goal of digital minimalism is to decide for ourselves what tools we want to use, for what reasons, and under what conditions. As the noise in the world continues to intensify, digital minimalism offers a pragmatic solution to a focused life rooted in the satisfaction of a life well-lived.
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