Business Book Review: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

This will change your every click, every opening of an app, every like and scroll. Learn to use technology’s value, without diminishing your own.

My Rating: ★★★★★

Length: 284 pages

Publisher: Portfolio

Released: 2019

Key Takeaway for Personal Branding

Digital Minimalism is a natural extension for Deep Work bestselling author, Cal Newport.

The Georgetown University Professor defines ‘digital minimalism’ as:

“A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”

He proposes technology companies optimise for behavioural addiction through:

• Intermittent positive reinforcement

• The drive for social approvals

Powerful forces your human brain is highly susceptible to.

Humans are wired to be social. Newport highlights just how true this is.

Psychologist Matthew Lieberman built on research regarding ‘the default network’ of our brain. It had showed in cognitive downtime, brains default to thinking about ourselves, others or both - in other words our social life. Lieberman’s further experiments showed this was true even in infants. Making the behaviour instinctual.

The loss of a social connection even triggers the same system as physical pain. But, is social media actually making us anti-social?

Conversation-centric versus Connection Communication

In an eye-opening conversation, Newport reframes the over-importance placed on social media ‘connection’.

MIT Professor Sherry Turkle advocates for conversation-centric communication. It’s anything involving nuanced analog cues, like facial expression and tone of voice.

Social media, texts and email are instead connection communication.

Connection communication has value in playing a logistical role in the relationship. It arranges the conversation connection (like the meeting location, time and event). Therefore, still makes use of technology as a modern-day tool for your social survival.

Reclaiming Leisure: High Value versus Low Value Downtime

Newport also proposes several alternatives to low-value downtime - like television, scrolling or the wish to ‘do nothing’. He suggests these things don’t need to be eliminated entirely, but could be intentionally scheduled.

Passive consumption can instead be replaced with demanding high-value alternatives,  with a particular focus on craftsmanship. Creating things, like our ancestors first did long ago.

Favourite Quotes

People don’t succumb to screens because they’re lazy, but instead because billions of dollars have been invested to make this outcome inevitable.

Cultivate a digital life in which new technologies serve your deeply held values as opposed to subverting them without your permission.

When you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you: the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, and to strengthen relationships.

We might tell ourselves there’s no greater reward after a hard day at the office than to have an evening entirely devoid of plans and commitments. But we then find ourselves, several hours of idle watching and screen tapping later, somehow more fatigued than when we began.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a local sporting league, a committee at your temple, a local volunteer group, the PTA, a social fitness group, or a fantasy gamers club: few things can replicate the benefits of connecting with your fellow citizens, so get up, get out and start reaping these benefits in your own community.

In the professional world, many high achievers are meticulous strategists. They lay out a vision for what they’re trying to accomplish on multiple different time scales, connecting high-level ambitions to decisions about daily actions…I want to suggest you apply this same approach to your leisure life, I want you, in other words, to strategize your free time.

If your personal brand of digital minimalism requires engagement with services like social media or breaking news sites, it’s important to approach these activities with a sense of zero-sum antagonism. You want something valuable from their network, and they want to undermine your autonomy - to come out on the other side of this battle requires both preparation and a ruthless commitment to avoid exploitation.

Digital Minimalism is not a lecture, but instead an invitation. To free yourself from becoming a slave to technology. Instead, leveraging all the value online technology has to offer you, and leaving behind any it doesn’t.

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport: Available on Amazon.