In One Sentence

Focus and attention are this century’s gold and if you are not mindful about the attention economy, it will rob you of your life time.

Top 3 Takeaways

1. Technologies such as the internet and smartphones are great as long as their usage is mindful and intentional. Most people do not consciously think about how they use their time and are unaware on how online services consume their life. While social media apps add little benefit to the user, they are generating nice paychecks for the big internet companies.
2. You really do not need all of these fancy services and functionality other people seem to be using constantly. Once you get over the FOMO, you do not miss anything and wouldn’t want to go back.
3. It’s quite insane how technology and social media is able to manipulate people («attention engineering»), but this problem will hopefully solve itself with time, as people become more aware and learn how to use these services effectively.

Who Should Read This Book?

I would say this book is a good read for anyone interested about how social media became as big as it is today and how it influences the individual users on a daily basis.

It’s also interesting if you notice that you spend more and more time online on any kind of social media site or similar platforms which take a lof of time but do not really bring much value to your life.

Even if you don’t have social media or use it very infrequently, it could still be interesting to just become aware of this phenomenon and its consequences.

If this topic interests you, I would recommend watching «Social Dilemma» on Netflix and also check out the song «Welcome to the Internet» by Bo Burnham.

How The Book Impacted Me

I was already trying to lessen the time I «waste» on the computer and I do not have any social media accounts, but this book helped or inspired me in some ways to do these things:

• Cleaned up my phone (save only relevant data, delete the rest) and «dumbed» it down by deleting a lot of apps I practically never used anyways. I do not really want to spend time on my phone, it should just be a tool to communicate or to quickly look something up.
• From time to time, I spent way to much time on Reddit, reading the news and playing Sudoku (lol). So I got rid of these and only very occasionally have a look at a particular subreddit or the news.
• I also uninstalled all games I had on my computer. I tend to get very serious and sucked in to some games and then later regret spending the whole evening on it.
• It’s not directly correlated to the book, but I deleted WhatsApp and now mostly use Signal. I am trying to be more mindful about the tools I use and try to not spend my time with stuff I do not approve of (in this case WhatsApp).
• Still trying to find out how to resist going down the classic YouTube-spirals, that’s a tough one for me…

Update 3 years later:

• I still regularly “spring clean” my phone and computer for apps and data I do not use anymore.
• I don’t really use Reddit anymore except for very specific subreddits that I check from time to time. After starting to read the news daily for a while, I stopped again as it just is too much irrelevant negativity and clickbait. I still play my daily Sudoku 😂. Also I started to use Instagram while traveling, at first I started to notice how it sucked me in and I checked it a lot. But I now use it only for what I wanted to use it for, namely sharing my travel pictures. I don’t (often) get sucked into doom scrolling all the reels and recommended posts. From time to time, check who you are following and if that account really adds value to your life.
• Uninstalling and quitting games also did not last forever, it’s just so much fun for me and a nice way to relax. But I am not really interested into the big time-consuming competitive online games anymore. I now mostly play small indie games or some fun party games with friends.
• The Signal experiment also came to an end sadly. It simply did not spread to enough people, looks like WhatsApp is here to last…
• YouTube for me got even bigger in the last three years, but I’d say in a good and controlled way. I don’t really watch TV or Netflix or something like that, I mostly consume my stuff on YouTube. But there I also regularly review my subscriptions and what type of content I consume. I’d say most of the channels I follow are interesting educational channels, with only a few entertainment channels mixed in. I also started to listen/watch to podcasts a lot more, and I get them also from YouTube. But I turned off recommendations and my start-page are my subscriptions. This way I only check if there are new videos from channels that I want to watch, I don’t start to randomly get sucked into irrelevant rabbit holes that I only clicked on because of click-bait.
• The book talks a lot about how we need solitude and boredom to be creative and to be able to reflect about our life. While traveling I got a new grasp about how important this really is and how right the author is with these claims. The best ideas and deep thoughts come to me on hikes or on long bus rides when I listen to podcasts or to music. In these situations, my brain does not get interrupted by constant notifications and is able to get into a kind of flow state. When I am back from traveling I need to figure out how to implement more boredom into my daily life.
• In general, my “digital life” is not always perfectly the way I want it to be, but I often remember things from this book and then work on it again. Slow but steady progress 😉.

Best Quotes

Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable.

They are programming people. Technology is not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that’s how they make money.

Tristan Harris

The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.

Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.

Edward Gibbon

Be aware how the attention economy works: companies want to make you think that you either use their service or you don’t. No in between, no occasional usage. Once you’re a user, their developed attention engineering tactics will try to overwhelm you and keep you engaging with their service and spend as much time as possible on their platform, even when you only wanted to know when your friend’s birthday was.

In earlier years, solitude was nothing special. But today, where technology dominates our everyday life, it becomes very rare that you are in true solitude. With your smartphone you can break any boring moments that would lead to solitude at any given moment, with just a quick glance. If you want, it’s is now possible to completely banish solitude and boredom from your life.

Humans have maintained rich and fulfilling social lives for our entire history without needing the ability to send a few bits of information (likes, emoji-reactions, …) each month to people we knew briefly during high school.

Attention economy: making money by gathering the attention of consumers and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers. You gather a crowd, and you’re not interested in that crowd for it’s money, but because you can resell them to someone else who wants their attention.
Attention engineering: The smartest minds of the country go to the best colleges, only to then go into the silicon valley and work on new algorithms so that you spend a few more minutes on their shitty ad-platform.

Your time = their money

Summary & Notes

DISCLAIMER:
The following notes are my raw notes for each chapter in the book. They are meant to be used as a quick overview and not to be read as fully fleshed-out and thought-out sentences.

01 – A Lopsided Arms Race

• The basic idea of social media is very nice and not damaging. Also, not having to carry multiple devices but having everything in our pocket via phone is wonderful. In 2007, you wouldn’t have thought that this would lead to two hours average screen time in adults and having to check your phone 85 times per day.
• «They had colonized the core of our daily life.»
• «Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable.»
• The discussion should not be about usefulness of digital technology, but about autonomy and free will in using such products.
• «Checking your likes is the new smoking.» – Bill Maher
• «They are programming people. Technology is not neutral. They want you to use it in particular ways and for long periods of time. Because that’s how they make money.» – Tristan Harris
• «The attention economy drives companies like Google into a race to the bottom of the brain stem.» – Tristan Harris
• Two Forces:
  • Intermittent positive reinforcement:
    • Rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern.
    • Users are gambling every time they post something on social media: will you get likes (bright dings of pseudo-pleasure) or will it languish with no feedback?
  • The drive for social approval:
    • A lot of likes make us feel like the tribe is showing it’s approval, the lack of positive feedback on the other hand creates a sense of distress.
    • Tagging people is a effortless, no-brainer motion that shows other people that you «thought about them» and generates a lot more traffic for the companies and further strengthens that gambling feeling in the tagged users (how many people have tagged me and where etc.).
    • It’s like hacking a vulnerability in human psychology.

02 – A Minimal Solution

• Cal Newport first notes that he thinks that the problem of digital clutter cannot be solved through tips and tricks alone. While tips like «Disable all notifications» are certainly nice and helpful, it is not really solving the problem, but just fighting the symptoms. That’s where his philosophy of digital minimalism comes into play: 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.
• This philosophy stands in strong contrast to the the maximalist philosophy that most people default to (any potential benefit justifies the use of a technology). This is tightly coupled with FOMO, the fear of missing out. What if all your friends use a certain technology and you do not?
• Minimalists do not get FOMO. They do not mind missing out on small things with little value just because of social pressure. Minimalists are worried much more if they do not have enough time to go after the things that they already know for sure make a good and rich life for them.
• So deciding to quit social media because it does not enrich your life or does not align with your values is a «backward approach». You work backwards from your deeply held values and based on them decide how you want to live your life and which technology has space in your life.

The principles of minimalism

Clutter is costly

Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.

«But sometimes I have a cool conversation or see something inspiring on Twitter!». Maybe, but is it worth the 10 hours you spend weekly on Twitter? For these limited benefits there’s surely better things to invest your time into. Also, 10 hours a week is like working another day, keep that in mind.

Time is the most valuable substance we possess, make sure to think about how much of your life you want to trade for the various activities that claim your time.

Optimization is important

Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology.

With just a little bit of carefully selecting your tools and optimizing how you use them, you can get a lot of value. Think of the pareto (80/20) principle. Do not just use the first app that you see on a certain task you want to solve. Take a few minutes to compare at least a few alternatives to make sure you select an app that suits you well.

Tip 1: Do not allow yourselves to watch Netflix alone. -> Not wasting time binge watching random series anymore, but instead it becomes a social activity.

Tip 2: Remove social media apps from your phone, but if you want to still use them, just access them on your computer. -> Not wasting time randomly checking social media whenever you have 2 minutes of nothing to do.

Be aware of the attention economy that exists today. While the internet and all these new technologies are novel and fun and exciting, people mostly do not think about the consequences or about the specific value these things provide.
Do not forget that companies make more money the more time you spend engaged with their (mostly free, but paid with attention) products.

Intentionality is satisfying

Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. This source of satisfaction is independent of the specific decisions they make and is one of the biggest reasons minimalism tends to be immensely meaningful to its practitioners.

Be like the Amish. Open to try out and think about new technology but skeptical and analytical whether this technology adds more value in your life than it consumes your time.

«The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that persists.»

03 – The Digital Declutter

The declutter process

1. For 30 days, take a break from optional technologies.
2. During these 30 days, explore and rediscover activities and behaviours you find satisfying and meaningful.
3. After the 30 days, reintroduce optional technologies which align with your values. Determine if the technology adds enough value and how you can maximize it.

Traps:

• Technology restriction rules that are too strict or too vague.
• Not planning on how to replace the removed technologies. This leads to boredom and anxiety.

Step 1: Define your technology rules

Optional technologies can include: apps, websites, digital tools that are meant to either entertain, inform or connect you.
Maybe also video games, because especially for young men, they are addictive in an unhealthy way similar to how other people feel about the optional technologies they want to remove.
Also: compulsive blog checking/reading.

On Netflix and YouTube: «I have so many ideas I’d like to implement, but every time I sat down to work in them, somehow Netflix/YouTube appeared on my screen.»

Consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life. Don’t, however, confuse «convenient» with «critical».

Step 2: Take a thirty-day break

At first, life without optional technologies can feel challenging. Your mind has developed certain expectations about distractions and entertainment, and these expectations will be disrupted when you remove optional technologies from your daily experience.

Step 3: Reintroduce technology

The care you take in this step will determine whether this digital declutter sparks any lasting change in your life.

Once you decide to reintroduce a technology, ask yourself if this particular technology is the best one available to get to that value it provides.
Example: I want to stay in touch and know what happens to people I care, so I use Instagram again. But maybe it would be much better if you would just call the people you actually care about once in a while or meet them in person.

Be aware how the attention economy works: companies want to make you think that you either use their service or you don’t. No in between, no occasional usage. Once you’re a user, their developed attention engineering tactics will try to overwhelm you and keep you engaging with their service and spend as much time as possible on their platform, even when you only wanted to know when your friend’s birthday was.

The Minimalist Technology Screen
To allow an optional technology back into your life at the end of the digital declutter, it must:

1. Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough).
2. Be the best way to support that value.
3. Have a role and a place in your life that is defined and you know when and how to use it.

Tips and potential rules:

• Remove the web browser from your phone.
• Set a time of usage. Example: I do not use my phone from 21:00 until 08:00.
• Only allowed to check two websites regularly.
• Buy a watch, so you don’t check your phone for the time and then get distracted by notifications.

04 – Spend Time Alone

Definition of solitude and benefits

Solitude is about what is happening in your brain, not the environment around you. It is a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.

Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences – wherever you happen to be.

The biggest benefit you get from solitude is the insight and emotional balance that comes from unhurried self-reflection.
«Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.» – Edward Gibbon.
Solitude and deep thought attracts innovation and gives clarity on existing thoughts.
You also become closer to the people you value, as you will appreciate the social interactions with them even more, when you are not constantly around other people.

Solitude deprivation

In earlier years, solitude was nothing special. But today, where technology dominates our everyday life, it becomes very rare that you are in true solitude.
With your smartphone you can break any boring moments that would lead to solitude at any given moment, with just a quick glance.
If you want, it’s is now possible to completely banish solitude and boredom from your life.

Cal calls this the “solitude deprivation”:

A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.

This new solitude deprivation that is brought by technologies such as the smartphone can be well examined by looking at the health of the youngest generation. Anxiety became very wide spread when before it was decently rare to occur.
Also, rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed, claims psychology professor Jean Twenge.

Practice: Leave your phone at home

Young people, for example, worry that even temporary disconnection might lead them to miss out on something better they could be doing (FOMO – Fear of missing out). Parents worry that their kids won’t be able to reach them in an emergency. Travelers need directions and recommendations for places to eat. Workers fear the idea of being both needed and unreachable. And everyone secretly fears being bored.

Life without a cell phone can be occasionally annoying, but to regularly spend time away from your phone should not make you anxious.

Practice: Take long walks

Hard to make the time, but helps immensely to get into solitude and to clear the mind.

05 – Don’t Click Like

The social animal

Humans are social animals. They are built to automatically think about our social life whenever there is some downtime or boring moment. Social connections are of fundamental importance to human well-being.

One aspect of the human social life are conversations.
Just a simple face to face conversation in a store with an employee makes the mind process massive amounts of data and use a lot of neuronal computational power. We use this to read the various little clues about the situation and the person in front of us: who is that person? What are they like? What do all the little facial expressions mean in the split second that they occur? What, how and in which tone is that person talking? What are their intentions? how are they feeling?

The social media paradox

All this data we humans need in meaningful face-to-face conversations can never occur in an online connection where a few messages are exchanged.
On one side, you have a gazillion bytes of information we take in in person, and on the other hand you have the like button on that photo your old classmate from school you almost never spoke with and never ever saw again uploaded – that like button only has one bit of information, it’s either a 0 or a 1 (like or no like). If most of your social life occurs online and you exchange so little meaningful information and the people you connect with are not the ones you actually care about in your life, your social life can suffer a lot and make you unhappy. Likes on a post can not replace another voice or a cup of coffee with a friend.
«Replacing your real-world relationships with social media use is detrimental to your well-being.» – Holly Shakya, University of California

Our primal instinct to socially connect is very strong. That is why many people can not not-check their phones if it blinks and vibrates and rings during a conversation with someone right in front of them. The brain does not distinguish if the connection is in real life or online, all seem equally important. But these interruptions reduce the quality of the richer conversation right in front of you.

Critics have also highlighted the ability of social media to make us feel ostracized or inadequate, as well as to stoke exhausting outrage, inflame our worst tribal instincts, and perhaps even degrade the democratic process itself.

Reclaiming conversation

Connection: low-bandwidth, online interactions between a human and preferably another human, but also sometimes a machine
Conversation: high-bandwidth, rich, real-world encounter between humans

Digital minimalism is not anti-technology, it’s pro-conversation.
Social media, email, text, instant messaging – all of these do not count as conversation. But they fill a logistical role in helping us to transfer practical information (e.g. meeting location and time). Connection is not an alternative to conversation, but its supporter.

Note that this approach will probably mean some sacrifices: the number of people you have an «active» relationship with, will likely decline. Real conversation takes time, and the number of people for which you can uphold this standard will be significantly less than the number of people you can follow, retweet, like, and occasionally leave a comment on a photo.
But this will actually make you happier, as you only interact with people you actually care about and who want to invest the time to be with you. No more superficial relationships.

Practice: Don’t click like

Don’t worry about upsetting people or falling out of touch with people you like. Actually visiting the new mom with her baby will return significantly more value to both of you rather than adding a short «aww!» to a scroll of comments on a posted social media photo. The people you will fall out of your social orbit will be the ones that only exist over social media, is that a bad thing?

«Humans have maintained rich and fulfilling social lives for our entire history without needing the ability to send a few bits of information each month to people we knew briefly during high school.» – Cal Newport

Practice: Consolidate texting

Keep your phone in «do not disturb» mode by default. Only allow notifications from emergency contacts and close people like family. Only check your texts 2-3 times a day at set times.

Benefits

1. Clearer mind in texting, as it is more intentional and not just a multi-tasked stream of checking messages every 10 minutes and dragging the discussion over 30 messages in 3 hours.
2. Less disruptions, more time for yourself, better productivity.
3. More meaningful relationships, because you do not participate in pseudo-conversations, but only intentional texts.

06 – Reclaim Leisure

A life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.

The important difference in ones leisure time is that some spend their time with high-quality leisure and others with low-quality leisure.

Often, low-quality digital distractions play a more important role in people’s lives than they imagine or like to admit.

Successful minimalists tend to their high-quality leisure before they go after their worst digital habits. They describe a phenomenon where they previously felt that this low-quality leisure is essential and important to their life, but once this spot was filled by high-quality leisure, this seems as time wasted and this kind of distraction is no longer needed.

Passive leisure activities are for example: video games, watching sports, web surfing, binge-watching shows.

Expending energy in high-quality leisure can end up energizing you more (sounds counter-intuitive but is often the case).

Leisure lessons

1. Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.
2. Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.
3. Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.

Use your hands!:
Many people experience the world largely through a screen now, we live in a world that is working to eliminate touch as one of our senses, to minimize the use of our hands to do things except poke at a screen.
Building something is an outlet for self-worth and demonstrating skill which is very satisfying and good for mental health.
Just posting a picture of some event you attend but don’t really contribute something yourselves is described here as a «digital cry for attention». But these are poor substitutes for recognition generated by real handicraft, because they are not earned through work and learned skill and are thus recognized by others as just «the boasts of a kid». Craft allows an escape from this shallowness and provides instead a deeper source of pride.

Traits of high-quality social leisure activities

• Require you to spend time with other people in person.
• Provides some sort of structure for the social interaction (regular meetings in the same places).

Practice: Schedule your low-quality leisure

It’s too easy to be good-intentioned about adding some quality activity into your evening, and then, several hours of rabbit hole clicking and binge-watching later, realize that the opportunity has once again dissipated.
So schedule in advance the time you spend on browsing the web, social media checks, entertainment streaming, etc.
When you are in that scheduled time, anything goes, no restrictions. But outside your schedule: stay offline.
This normally works pretty good because you don’t have to fully give up on these activities. When you go cold turkey and «relapse» once, your commitment to restriction will crumble and you’ll be thrown back into a state of unrestricted and compulsive use.
You’re not quitting anything or losing access to any information, you’re simply being more mindful of when you engage with this part of your leisure life.

“Doing nothing to relax” is overrated: most of the time you will just spend your time mindlessly swiping through your phone and half-heartedly binge-watch just another show.
Investing energy into something hard but worthwhile almost always returns much richer rewards.

07 – Join the Attention Resistance

Attention economy: making money by gathering the attention of consumers and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers. You gather a crowd, and you’re not interested in that crowd for it’s money, but because you can resell them to someone else who wants their attention.

Attention engineering: The smartest minds of the country go to the best colleges, only to then go into the silicon valley and work on new algorithms so that you spend a few more minutes on their shitty ad-platform.

The problem started with the smartphone: now it was possible to deliver advertisements to users at all points during their day, as well as to track their data, because they always have their phone on them.

Just like WhatsApp:

Facebook has in recent years presented itself as a foundational technology, like electricity or mobile telephony – something that everyone should just use, as it would be weird if you didn’t. This status of cultural ubiquity is ideal for Facebook because it pressures people to remain users without having to sell them on concrete benefits. An atmosphere of vagueness leads people to sign into the service with no particular purpose in mind, which, of course, makes them easier targets for the attention engineers’ clever hooks and exploits – leading to the staggering amounts of usage time that Facebook needs to sustain its equally staggering $500 billion evaluation.

Practice: Delete social media from your phone

• Apps are much more efficient at hijacking your attention (notification, always available, infinite-scroll, swipe down to refresh (slot machine like) etc.) than accessing the service via web browser on a computer.
• You will start to only sign into these services if you actually need something and save a lot of time on mindless scrolling.

Practice: Turn your devices into single-purpose computers

• The power of a general-purpose computer is in the total number of things it enables the user to do, not the total number of things it enables the user to do simultaneously.
• The way to think about these services is that they are blocked by default and are made available to you on an intentional schedule (with blocking software).

Practice: Use social media like a professional

• On stories: «it’s broadcasting moments of your life, it’s reality TV starring your friends.» This feature was introduced to increase the amount of content users generate, and therefore the amount of time they spend consuming this content (attention time). But is there actual value added by these stories for anyone?
• Dunbar Number: 150 – a theoretical limit for the number of people a human can successfully keep track of in their social circle.

Practice: Embrace slow media

Slow media cannot be consumed casually, but provoke the full concentration of their users. Slow media measures themselves in production, appearance and content against high standard of quality and stand out from their fast-paced and short-lived counterparts.

• Breaking news, for example, is almost always much lower quality than the reporting that’s possible once an event has occurred and journalists have had time to process it.
• Important aspect of slow news consumption: you decide how and when this consumption occurs. Schedule it.
• Use browser-plugins or aggregation tools that can present articles stripped clean of advertisements and clickbait.

Practice: Dumb down your smartphone

Declaring freedom from your smartphone is probably the most serious step you can take toward embracing the attention resistance. This follows because smartphones are the preferred Trojan horse of the digital attention economy. The spread of these always-on, interactive billboards that allowed this niche sector to expand to the point that they now enjoy as dominant players in the worldwide economy. Given this reality, if you’re not carrying a smartphone, you fall of the radar of these organizations, and as a result, you’ll find your efforts to reclaim your attention significantly simplified.

Dumbing down your phone, of course, is a big decision. Our attraction to these devices goes well beyond their ability to provide distraction. For many, they provide a safety net for modern life – protection against being lost, feeling alone, or missing out on something better. Convincing yourself that a dumb phone can satisfy enough of these needs so that its benefits outweigh its costs is not necessarily easy. Indeed, it might require a leap of faith – a commitment to test life without a smartphone to see what it’s really like.

Your time = their money
You should feel empowered to instead invest this value in things that matter more to you.