In late May I picked up Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, and found myself agreeing with a lot of what he had to say. At the simplest level it came down to the following three principles:
1) Clutter is costly
2) Optimization is important
3) Intentionality is satisfying
Looking at my technology usage overall I found there were a lot of things that were taking up more and more of my time with less and less return for my effort.
So, I decided to follow the author's advice and spend a month (June) in a state of declutter - I dramatically dropped my (non-work) time online, cut myself off from video games, YouTube, Facebook, and cut down TV watching to a pretty low level (for me).
The result was to find that I'd been spending much more time on being passively entertained than I was comfortable with. So it's time to make some priority changes.
Luckily for the readers of this blog - it actually was one of the big things I really missed - writing out to all of you is a fun part of my week and something I definitely want to make a higher priority for myself - so thanks for all the reading over the years!
The book itself is a pretty simple to follow guidebook on how to cut down your technology use in your day-to-day life, and my only actual complaint was that the author should have ended each chapter with key points or added an appendix putting them all together at the end. Readers can do this for themselves (I know I did), but it's much simpler if it's all spelled out in a way that can easily remind you what the goals are.
Well worth reading and full of advice I'm hoping to take going forward, Digital Minimalism was a pretty great read!
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