Book review #1: Cal Newport - Digital Minimalism

In summer of 2024 I went to Turkey for summer holidays. We were in Alanya and unfortunately (or fortunately) the WiFi was pricey. Not only that but given that we were in Asian part of Turkey, it meant that my mobile internet was simply not working. This made my phone regress entirely to... being a phone again.

Background

For a while I had these thoughts that my time spent on my phone is actively hurting me. I couldn't exactly put my finger on what was making me feel bad about it, all I knew is that I got slightly annoyed every time my phone had notification.

This vacation made me realise that once my phone had no internet connection, I had 0 interest in having it with me. It was useless. I don't get calls or SMS on a daily basis, other than one time letting my mom know that I am alive, the phone did nothing for the entire trip. I couldn't check discord, I couldn't browse reddit, I couldn't swipe instagram and... I loved it.

I felt so much better. Less anxious about someone or something wanting me to do stuff. I was relieved that I was unreachable. Instead browsing my phone on the beach, being worried that it might be stolen from my bag or be thrown into a sand, I was just reading the newspaper. Then a collection of short crime stories. Then entire book! I found out that I can still focus for hours while reading. My attention wasn't divided.

Coming back home I wasn't ready to give that up.

Having not read about Digital Minimalism community, I came up with a rules of mine own:

• Ban apps from my phone that contain scrollable short videos - Youtube/Instagram
• Disable notifications for everything with few exceptions. SMS, whatsapp and slack (for work) still had functional notifications, but that's it. No messenger notifications and no discord notifications.
• Every new app starts with a default of notifications being disabled.
• I was the one choosing when replying to friends on social media apps, and not them deciding they want to reach me through notifications.

I still had however, some games on my phone, still had reddit and Facebook.

This has worked and I felt the difference, for example by being able to read technical documentation and not be bored halfway through one article, however I felt like it was not enough.

This is where I found myself reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.

What is it about?

I think the quote that best describes what (or rather who) digital minimalist is, is this one:

Mr. Newport put into writing exactly how I felt about the technology but couldn't word it precisely enough. I felt validated while reading through it. Given that I am programmer and I very meticulously set up my development environment to look as decluttered as possible ( my .dots ) it felt extremely familiar to hear that:

• Clutter is costly - too many apps doing too many things, multiple ways of doing the same task.
• Intentionality and optimisation is important - how we engage with our phone, apps and services. Picking which one is necessary and which can be skipped.

In general - be picky at what you install on your devices. Don't have everything. Ask yourself if this will benefit you in the long run or make you spend more time on your phone.

I now happily recommend this to anyone who wants to listen to me rambling about modern internet.

Digital practises however, was not aimed at me, as in a sense, I already did that and implemented it before reading this book. This form was just more formalised version of what I was already doing. With an exception of...

Solitude & High Quality Leisure

Those section are by far the most important ones in the book for me. First of all, it never occurred to me that there is something as beneficial solitude. It makes complete sense in retrospect, that one must give himself time to process his life, his choices and his path but I never realised how much I've been depraving myself of it. Author gives a strong stance that we as a society are deeply lacking it.

I like to listen. I listen to podcasts, I listen to the music and I listen to audiobooks. In fact, thanks to audiobooks, I've listened to a lot more books than I would have read, had I been just trying to read them. I used to do it on every opportunity. Going to the shop? Listening. Gym? Listening. Walking somewhere by myself? Listening. Shower? Believe it or not, also listening through a speaker. Not once did I have a moment to be confronted by my own thoughts.

Thanks to Mr. Newport this has been addressed and changed. I still listen quite a bit, but I do it every now and then. I force myself to be with myself more and this actually made me realise that this allows me to think about stuff that needs to be solved. I found myself getting to solutions to every day problems, scheduling, or simply planning my week ahead. Remembering stuff better and be more aware of what's upcoming for me.

High quality leisure is also something I did not fully consider. Author argues that it's important for us to cultivate high quality leisure, which will make it easier to minimise low quality diversions. To seek physical / analog skills.

I am a programmer and a gamer at heart. This means that a lot of what I like to do is digital unfortunately. As a somewhat creative and problem solver myself, I found myself getting joy out of creating something, but given that my time was mostly spent on something digital, I never really developed any skill to do something in a physical world. Chapter about leisures made me realise that I should do something that combines the love of digital with the love of making, but force it to make it physical.

The quest to discover what would that be, led me to realise that I don't exactly need to make it physical, but rather I need to be intentional about what kind of leisure I have. So from that I came to a following:

• Force myself to try new things - new music albums, listened from A to Z, not skipping any song. Read new books, try cooking new recipes. See new places.
• Schedule more IRL time with friends and families rather than keeping up with them. This is also what the author recommends doing in Chapter 5.
• Combine my love of programming with something physical... and get into embedded programming! I actually have an eye on a project I could start soon.
• Continue and expand my love for sports but with expansion on trying to go Skiing / Hiking more often.
• Get deeper into board games! I used to love watching my brother paint LotR figures and playing imaginary battles with him later on.

As about seasonal and weekly leisure plan. My week is kind of already packed, but my seasonal plan is to just travel more. City breaks, small museums, you name it.

Not exactly digital minimalism

I enjoy the competetive aspect of online games. I like the community, I like the events and I used to compete. Often I found myself not exactly playing the game that I am actively playing. So for this leisure time, I will leave you out with something a dear french friend of mine Turaxy said - be a gamer. Don't circle around dalaran fountain. Queue up or log out. Running around jumping, waiting for something to happen is wasting time of a wasting time. That's not even playing the game. Don't endlessly watch streams while changing tabs to run around and coming back to streams. Rinse and repeat. It's terrible. Play the game yourself or leave and do something else.

My personal Attention Resistance

My feelings, once shy, now fully validated are in a full swing. I have since improved upon my decluttering of my devices. Here is a list of things I did to help myself be focused more.

• Absolute and non negotiable ban on "shorts". I blocked shorts on my PC using browsers extensions. No Youtube, Instagram app on phone.
• Using browser extension I blocked myself from seeing recommended videos on youtube. This made actually quite a bit of impact, since I used to drown in scrolling youtube.
• Using browser extension to block access to Twitter and reddit/r/all. I do however, have an access do /r/worldnews and /r/news but the key insight is that they are not attractive for me. I generally go there, see political news, read 1 - 2 articles and bounce away. Similarly to HackerNews. I do not scroll these. Given that the quality of information I receive from them, I opted to keep both.
• Uninstall reddit, games, Facebook, twitter, youtube and instagram from my phone. I even experimented with making my phone very unattractive by swapping out default android launcher to Minimalist Phone: Launcher but my nature for things looking just right did make me go back to Niagara. I tweaked it to make it look slick and minimal, while also providing smooth funcionality.

• Rather than scrolling, I introduced RSS feed reader and subscribed to my favourite tech blogs. Notice that there is no algorithm that decides what to show me. I've chosen them myself. This list is personal and I am choosing when I want to read what they created.
• Okay and I kept myself one game... Chess! I am horrible at it, but I still like to play it from time to time. I quickly get bored of it, so no issue of staying over the phone again.
• Putting my phone away from where I work and away from where I sleep. This makes me more focused at work and reach for book rather than phone when going to bed.

Conclusion

The book is lengthy for what it's trying to convey. I feel like some of the stuff leaned more into pragmatism and life coaching, rather than pure digital minimalism. That being said, most if not all the advice in the book is worth taking in. If you are a digital consumer in this day and age, you definetely should incorporate intention to your devices. We are all fighting upheal battle and it's getting increasingly more difficult, but I do feel like the resistance is there. Listen to your local hacker. Be mindful of your own privacy. And if you are feeling braver than I do, perhaps try to DeGoogle as a next step?