Digital Minimalism
by Cal Newport
Thoughts
This book was released in 2019, but I avoided it for the longest time. As a software engineer, I thought it's not for me, as I can't be a "digital minimalist".
However, the book's message became so much more important in recent years. It feels like the tech giants are creating products that are more and more addictive and harmful.
My main takeaway from it is that attempts to gradually change our habits around technology will often fail. Radical changes often work better. This is what I've done so far since the beginning of June 2026:
- Uninstalled Instagram, which was the only social media app I still had installed - I'm surprised how little I missed it
- Set up NoScroll and BlockSite apps to block the websites I was visiting most often for news and sports - same here, I got used to it quickly and I can still get my news when I'm back at my laptop.
Highlights
Few want to spend so much time online, but these tools have a way of cultivating behavioral addictions. The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life.
I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.
What he needs—what all of us who struggle with these issues need—is a philosophy of technology use, something that covers from the ground up which digital tools we allow into our life, for what reasons, and under what constraints. In the absence of this introspection, we’ll be left struggling in a whirlwind of addictive and appealing cyber-trinkets, vainly hoping that the right mix of ad hoc hacks will save us.
Digital Minimalism - 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.
In my experience, gradually changing your habits one at a time doesn’t work well—the engineered attraction of the attention economy, combined with the friction of convenience, will diminish your inertia until you backslide toward where you started.
We justify many of the technologies that tyrannize our time and attention with some tangential connection to something we care about. The minimalist, by contrast, measures the value of these connections and is unimpressed by all but the most robust.
Many have come to accept a background hum of low-grade anxiety that permeates their daily lives.