Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Really helpful book – even better, I’d say, than his “Deep Work” book which I also read. I do believe that Social Media is addictive for certain people, myself among them. So looking for a way out of spending endless unproductive time with these apps on both my smartphone and my laptop, but needing a guide. His method is realistic because it’s not an all or nothing – Newport realizes most people don’t want to be Luddites about new technology and want to use it as a tool to benefit our lives without falling down the rabbit hole of overuse.
I’m currently on the Digital Declutter of 30 days, and then we’ll see if I can add back in some of the apps I eliminated for the month (for me these include Instagram, Grindr, Scruff and with use “rules” for those I elected to keep using during this month, which include Podcast Addict [appropos name eh?], YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime and Reddit). (I eliminated Facebook from my life on my own over a year ago.)
For me personally, perhaps the most valuable piece of advice was to consolidate news articles, “save” them for later, then spend an hour or two reading the news of the week on a weekend morning at a coffee shop. I just did this for the first week yesterday, using Google News to save the stories and it worked out great. One of the more unfortunate results of the 2016 Election was that the current moron in the WH lurches from crisis to crisis and this in itself is addicting for a news junkie. I’m hoping that through Digital Minimalism, I’ll find a middle ground, somewhere between keeping basically informed and going insane.