The key ideas

Digital Minimalism

Cal Newport, 2019

You pick up your phone for a minute, and when you look up, it's already dark outside. Cal Newport explains why it's so easy to lose an evening to a feed, and offers a philosophy in which you first decide what you value and only then let technology into your life. Thirty days of decluttering, solitude without the incoming stream, and leisure that truly fills you up.

Who it is for

For anyone whose evenings get eaten by their phone: you look up and it's already night. For those who want their time back without giving up technology altogether.

Digital minimalism is 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.

What the book is about

A familiar scene: after dinner you pick up your phone “for a minute,” scroll your feed, reply in group chats, watch one more video. Then you look up, and it's already dark outside. The evening is over, but there's almost nothing to remember from it.

Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University, believes the problem may not be weak willpower. In “Digital Minimalism,” he explains why your phone so easily takes over your free time, and instead of yet more screen-time tips, he offers a whole philosophy: first decide what you value, and only then let technology into your life.

Ahead of you: a philosopher who measured the cost of things in hours of life, an experiment with sixteen hundred volunteers, a president who hid from the noise in a small cottage, and the question of what to actually fill a freed-up evening with.

Idea 1. Nobody signed up for this

Newport reminds us how it all began. Many people bought the first iPhone in 2007 to have music and calls in one device. Facebook was a fun novelty at first. Nobody consciously decided they'd check their phone dozens of times a day.

In 2016, the well-known American writer Andrew Sullivan published a long essay in New York magazine titled “I Used to Be a Human Being.” He described how the constant stream of news and messages had literally worn him out. Newport sees in this piece the voice of many people: tools they picked up for convenience gradually took up far more space than they ever meant to give them.

Someone installs a messaging app to coordinate everyday things with their family. A year later, there are forty chats in it, and the evening goes to “keeping up.”

Part of the problem may be that nobody consciously chose the role technology plays in their life. It took shape on its own, little by little.

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About the author

Cal Newport is an American computer scientist and a professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of books about work and attention, including “Deep Work.”

All books by this author: Cal Newport

Terms from the book

  • Intermittent reinforcement
  • Digital minimalism: A philosophy of technology use proposed by Newport: your online time is focused on a few chosen activities that support what you value.
  • Digital declutter: The author's method: set aside optional technologies for thirty days, find offline activities, then bring technologies back one at a time and with rules.
  • Solitude deprivation: The author's concept: a state in which almost no time is left free from other people's thoughts and the incoming stream. An image from the book, not a diagnosis.
  • Attention resistance: An image from the book: people who use technology on their own terms, not on the terms of the attention industry.

All terms

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