TOW#539 — Digital minimalism
While reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, I realized that the way I use technology already fits in with the principles he describes and recommends. Some of the things he mentions in the book I wasn’t doing before, but I’ve started doing them since.
I came up with my own methods because of the pressure I was feeling from the amount of information I was ‘absorbing’ through apps and social media. So I kept experimenting in order to find the right balance between what’s useful and what’s damaging. This book helped me to understand why wasting time on social media was creating problems in my head, and how I could improve my approach.
Because, as the book says, “checking your ‘likes’ is the new smoking”. And it’s true! It creates addiction and has a huge impact on the way our brains work.
What does digital minimalism mean?
Simply put — it’s a way of using technology only for a smaller number of carefully selected activities that support your values and what’s important to you, and excluding everything else.
The tenet of digital minimalism is that clutter is costly and that cluttering our time with piles of apps and social media has a negative impact, erasing everything that’s good and useful about every app or network. That’s why it’s important to think about how we use technology, that is, to know for what purpose we’re using it. Time’s important, and we should treat every available minute as the most important thing we have. Therefore, we must be careful with what we do to fill our time.
How can we implement digital minimalism in our lives?
Cal Newport recommends three steps in the process of switching to this more limited use of technology. Personally, I didn’t need to make big changes because, as I said, the way I use technology is already minimalist for the most part, and I was mainly agreeing with the many things that are in the book.
Nonetheless, I’ll outline the three steps here for those of you who’d like to try to change some of your habits.
1. 30-day digital detox
During this period you cut out everything that you can live without, but without harming or significantly disrupting your normal life. That means cutting out all social media for 30 days. However, if it’s important for you to be in a Facebook group for work, then keep it, but disable scrolling down the newsfeed and reading your friends’ statuses. A tip from my own experience — delete all applications from your phone, access FB from your computer, and do what you need for your work.
2. Introduce activities and behaviors that fulfill you
This means that during these 30 days you need to find activities that will fill your time offline, such as going for coffee with friends (when this pandemic passes) or cooking, or a painting course, hiking, reading books — whatever, as long as it’s something you’ve always wanted to do and haven’t had time for.
3. Keep only the things from technology that truly serve your life and values, discard the rest
This last point is where you really have to be honest with yourself. Cal did this experiment with over 1600 participants and many of their experiences are in the book. Many of them said that they realized, for example, that they’re no longer interested in reading FB statuses, because they figured out that they were doing it out of boredom during breaks and that it didn’t in fact bring any enjoyment into their lives.
Many deleted the social network, which they realized was just wasting their time and not helping them in any way.
In essence, the distance helped them to better understand their time, and to ask themselves what they’d actually gained from everything they’d been using up until then.
I believe the same thing will happen with you. I, for example, use more or less all social media, but I have rules that I stick to for each of them. But more about that at the end.
The importance of being alone
The book pays a lot of attention to solitude, and I myself have long recognized it as something very important in life.
Solitude refers to the time you spend alone with your thoughts. It’s what happens in your brain, not in your surroundings. This means that you could be in a packed cafe, but on your own, sitting, watching passers-by, not talking to anyone, and not reading or listening to anything.
As Cal writes: “Solitude requires you to avoid reacting to the information created by others and instead focus on your own thoughts and experiences.”
Three crucial benefits of solitude: new ideas, an understanding of the self, and closeness to others.
We live in a time when we are constantly exposed to information. We’re either talking or listening to music or reading everything in sight — from posters and newspapers to books and social media. This means that we’re constantly putting information in our heads and very rarely allow ourselves the freedom to be alone with our thoughts. The fact is that it’s not always a simple thing to do, because it’s not easy to listen to yourself and face what’s in your head. Many people consciously run away from it and deliberately avoid this kind of solitude.
However, it’s the only way to reach higher states of creativity and understand who we are and what we need. And learn to be good to ourselves.
That’s why many people recommend meditation because it’s a period when you disconnect from everything. But it doesn’t always have to be meditation. For starters, try going to the toilet without taking your phone with you, or without reading what’s written on the tube of toothpaste. Go for a walk or a run without music, a podcast, or an audiobook in your ears. Drink a coffee on your own, without looking at any screen or listening to the radio. Not to mention knitting, drawing, or any other creative activity you can do on your own in silence.
How I live as a digital minimalist
I don’t look at my phone from 8 in the evening to 8 in the morning. I haven’t had FB or Messenger on it for years, so I only use those two apps when I’m on a computer. I turned off all notifications — except for calls, Viber, and WhatsApp. I have them because I want to be available for urgent matters, and above all for my husband, parents, and brother. I use the app Digital Wellbeing (which is for Android, but iOS has Screen Time) to limit my time on Instagram (25 minutes), which I open only once a day. I literally log out when I’m done. I limited my phone’s search engine to 5 minutes and I only use it if I really need some information.
I use Twitter on the computer, but I also limit it to twice daily (morning and evening), 30–40 minutes in total. Finally, when I’m working on the computer, I block all social media and news sites with the help of a program called SelfControl.
When I’m having a dilemma about all of this, I remember a quote in the book from a woman who’d implemented digital minimalism: “I really don’t think that we should be in touch with so many people so often.”
When you think about it, she’s right — the number of people we’re close with and connected to can’t be too big. It’s just not realistic.
I generally don’t read the news at all, which is something I stopped doing when I realised how much stress all of this news of the pandemic was causing me. Nevertheless, if I do decide to read something, then once a day I’ll open the state media like BHRT or FTV. They don’t have headlines or links that are essentially clickbait, and they focus more on things that are actual news. I really don’t need to know which celebrity said what and which one of them got married or divorced. I’m interested in things that could potentially affect me and my life, and that type of news is best found on news sites that still don’t depend so much on the number of readers or viewers. Yes, the TV licence is worth it, and yes I pay it regularly.
Overall, I like it better this way for the moment, and I have to admit that my head is calmer and I’m more productive. I wrote more texts and did more work, and I’m better organised about everything.
Now, during this period of isolation and sitting at home, it’s even more important to pay attention to what we ‘let into’ our heads. That’s why I’d recommend to everyone to think carefully and try to introduce some changes in their way of using technology — for themselves, because the thing that big companies trade and make the most money from is our attention. Constantly looking at your phone and checking who liked which post is precisely what they set out to achieve when they created all those programmes and apps. And most importantly — they created them with a lot of help from psychologists in order to make them addictive.
I, on the other hand, still think that each of us deserves much more in life than to be a product that makes money for someone else.
If you have any questions about this topic, feel free to contact me by email or on social media. I’d be happy to share my experiences with you. And if anyone’s interested in the book, I found it on Amazon, though it doesn’t seem that it’s been translated into any of our languages yet.
Wishing you success with the change to come,
Hana Kazazović, Bosnia-Herzegovina
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