Why do we need such radical behavioural changes to achieve results? Newport’s personal experiences led him to believe that. The digital declutter process is daunting yet necessary - it involves taking a break from optional technologies (smartphones, laptops, gaming consoles, etc) for 30 days cold turkey, using this time to explore and rediscover meaningful activities then re-introduce optional technologies into your life at the end of the 30 days, starting from a blank slate. One of the fascinating and admirable aspects of Newport’s approach is that he does not sugar coat the radical and aggressive methods to achieve drastic change in our behavioural patterns. Sounds great in theory - but how does one implement it in practice? Vague resolutions are not sufficient by themselves to tame the ability of new technologies to invade your cognitive landscape - the addictiveness of their design and the strength of the cultural pressures supporting them are too strong for an ad hoc approach to succeed.Īlthough we are aware that the app store wants our souls and the purpose of digital devices is to infiltrate our lives and generate more revenue, how do we actually re-establish an intentional approach to our digital lives? Newport’s brand of digital minimalism draws from the concept that less is more - it’s a philosophy of technological use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support the things you value, then happily miss out on everything else.

Many of us fall victim to social media addiction but Newport doesn’t play the blame game, arguing that rather than lack of self-control, humans are ill-equipped to fight back: One of the most striking revelations from the first chapter of Newport’s book is the irony that technologies were initially added to the periphery of our existence for minor reasons however we woke one morning to discover that they had colonized the core of our daily lives. If you are interested in reducing your reliance on digital devices and lessen social media consumption, keep reading! This book is highly readable and deeply provocative for anyone who wishes to achieve balance in their social media use and break their enslavement to the social-validation feedback loop.

Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World offers a refreshing and unapologetically practical method to initiate our digital detox in order to rediscover what really matters (hint: it’s not the number of Instagram followers you have).

It’s 2020 and we live a modern hyper-connected existence, most of us floundering in a digitally saturated post-modern predicament, one of our own creation.

Digital minimalism newport