Review: ‘Digital Minimalism’ by Cal Newport
An Overview
Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism (2019) argues that 1) most of us have blithely sacrificed significant chunks of our wellbeing to social media and other digital tools that capitalize on our attention, and 2) we can use these digital tools against the grain of how they're designed to be used–which mostly is to get us spending as much time as possible clicking around and putting our eyeballs on more ads. Newport makes a powerful case for carefully evaluating what digital tools we actually want to let in our lives and being vigilant about how we use them, and he lays out a clear roadmap for how to do that.
For those interested in regaining some control from Big Tech over their digital lives, Newport lays out a two part plan: a one month digital detox followed by an evaluation and reintroduction of digital tools that add real benefits to your life.
The rules for the digital detox are pretty simple: cut out all optional digital technologies for a month, and use that time to reinvest in other leisure activities. If you have to use a technology (like email for work or texting to coordinate picking up kids from school), then schedule time to use it and/or set up a do not disturb that only lets in the notifications you really need. Delete all social media and other unnecessary apps from your phone.
Through his blog, Newport found around 1600 people to pilot the digital detox, and he draws upon their experiences as he gives advice about this process in the book. It is well worth reading in full to learn from some of those insights if you want to do the digital detox. Crucially, you must have some compelling leisure activities to replace phone and browser habits during the detox period. Newport shares examples of people reading books, going to plays, playing instruments, listening to records, doing house projects, and meeting up with family or friends.
After a month without compulsive browsing and refreshing, Newport argues, you will have more clarity about what you actually miss from social media and other digital tools. From that knowledge, you can strategically reincorporate the things that will actually add value to your life. It doesn’t really matter what choices you make here, according to Newport, so long as you are intentional: the process will lead to higher levels of satisfaction and meaning in your life, and may also reduce the anxiety and depression that our digital lives often seem to foster.
I will just note here that Newport seems to think that his suggestions can be more or less universally applied, and though he tries pretty hard to attend to limit cases, there are some that he doesn’t acknowledge or explore as fully as he could. That isn’t what the book is about, though. If you find yourself with a lot of space to reflect and have the wherewithal to attempt some pretty significant behavior change, though, I think this book has a lot to offer.
Digital Minimalism: Nicole’s Version
I’ve read Digital Minimalism twice, first in the summer of 2022 shortly after my daughter was born, and then again at the start of this new year. A family member introduced me to Newport’s work starting with Deep Work, which was hugely a helpful resource for me during graduate school, and then later gave me their copy of this book. I toggled between the print book and an audiobook from the library, and I enjoyed both.
I did the digital detox during my first read. I didn’t think that I had a huge phone problem, but I did check Instagram pretty much first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and I was thinking a lot about what I would post next about the baby, and I was trying to read email while breastfeeding. As I read this book, I started looking at these habits and being uncomfortable with how they were distracting me from being present to my family, and I think were also contributing to a sense of general unease and sense of being public and on all the time which I didn’t love. As a part of the digital detox, I made several changes that stuck:
Deleting Instagram from my phone and only checking it on my desktop if I’m trying to figure out the next time the Corner Club, our local coffee shop/bar, has karaoke.
Deleting Goodreads and Letterboxd from my phone.
Deleting email apps from my phone.
Rearranging my phone so that the first window had the apps I could / should use regularly–like the Libby and Kindle apps–and hiding the ones I needed on there but found distracting–like Safari.
I also initially deleted Chrome from my phone, which I’ve added back now that I’m reselling because Google image search is clutch. But I broke the habit of searching for every little thing on my phone, and I generally don’t use Chrome to browse the Internet, so I am glad that I had the break.
The main thing that I tried to replace my unstructured phone time with was reading in my Kindle app. That and trying not to check my phone when watching movies (which had become embarrassingly difficult!!) were my only two, really. And I do think it majorly upped my reading game!
I wanted to reread it this year because I had been thinking about the Financial Independence community he writes about and wanted to revisit that, but it did also help me to reevaluate my systems for checking 1) email, texts, and What’s app (which is on my phone but doesn’t send me notifications, so sometimes I forget to check it for a loooong time), 2) reselling apps (which I look at too often), and 3) the status of my $10 worth of Yum China stock that I bought on Cash App, which has TANKED and is steadily dropping. I probably should go check that again right now…
But maybe the biggest surprised from this reread was a breakthrough with something I haven’t been able to figure out–the news.
Too Minimal?
After deleting Instagram, I found that that was where I had been learning most of what I knew about what was going on in the world. As a teacher who theoretically models digital literacy as a part of good citizenship, I do feel like I have an ethical or moral obligation to read the news. It seems like a really important part of living in a democracy, at least in theory. At the same time, I just have very little intrinsic motivation and no good systems for checking the news. I find it tempting to use digital minimalism as an excuse to avoid things I just would rather not think about. I have all of my news-related newsletters skip my inbox and go to a folder, and I’m pretty sure that I haven’t checked that folder in at least four months and for sure am not going to wade through that backlog now. I feel so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things happening in the world and by how reductive my understanding is of the historical and political context of most news stories, so unless someone tells me to look something up, or I'm on the New York Times front page (on my way to the games) and notice an irresistible headline, I often miss what’s going on.
Newport is a huge advocate of scheduling the time we spend online or doing email. I had planned to spend the last half hour-ish of my workday on Friday going through the folder that I’d set up with local news outlets’ newsletters, but I almost always skipped it in favor of doing other things.
My big insight was that I might be too attached to the idea of reading news articles or listening to long in-depth daily podcasts, and my resolution for 2024 is to try to not worry about them. Instead, I have a two-part plan: 1) Listening to our community radio station more consistently when I’m in the car. They feature a pretty good mix of national and regional news. Along with headlines, the station has a lot of call-in shows and interviews with people in the community involved with important issues, plus they carry some of the national NPR shows, so I suspect I can learn a lot there even though I don’t spend all that much time in the car. And the music shows are consistently good and satisfyingly eclectic in a way Spotify will never be. 2) Doing the NYT weekly news quiz. The couple of weeks that I’ve been doing these two things, I’ve been pretty surprised by how different the coverage is from these two spaces. It isn’t going to give me a comprehensive sense of what’s going on in the world, but I’m hoping it’ll be better than the extremely sparse diet of news media I’ve been living off of since I got off Instagram.
Thanks, Cal!
My favorite thing about Digital Minimalism is that it validates my disinclination to live online. I don’t like email, I don’t like texting, I don’t like the pressures of social media, and I really appreciate the permission that Newport gives to let go of feeling like I should make myself like them. I have gone so far as to copy Newport’s model from Deep Work of aspiring to a reputation of being slow at responding to texts and emails, and I think I’ve mostly succeeded at this. So far, no one has fired me, nor have any friends or family dumped me, and I don’t think I’ve missed out on anything I would have cared too much about. If you, too, hate the pressure of being always online, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. If you read it and do the detox, let me know how it goes!
