Digital Minimalism

replace these technologies with during the declutter
period—leading to anxiety and boredom. Those who
treated this experiment purely as a detox, where the goal
was to simply take a break from their digital life before
returning to business as usual, also struggled. A
temporary detox is a much weaker resolution than trying
to permanently change your life, and therefore much
easier for your mind to subvert when the going gets
tough.
Given the reality of this second conclusion, I will
dedicate the remainder of this chapter to providing
clarifying explanations and suggestions for the three
steps of the declutter process summarized above. For
each of these steps, I’ll provide detailed examples from
participants in my mass digital declutter experiment to

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help you avoid common pitfalls and tweak your
experience to maximize your probability of success.
STEP #1: DEFINE YOUR
TECHNOLOGY RULES
During the thirty days of your digital declutter, you’re
supposed to take a break from “optional technologies” in
your life. The first step of the declutter process,
therefore, is to define which technologies fall into this
“optional” category.
When I say technology in this context, I mean the
general class of things we’ve been calling “new
technologies” throughout this book, which include apps,
websites, and related digital tools that are delivered
through a computer screen or a mobile phone and are
meant to either entertain, inform, or connect you. Text
messaging, Instagram, and Reddit are examples of the
types of technologies you need to evaluate when
preparing for your digital declutter; your microwave,
radio, or electric toothbrush are not.
An interesting special case brought to my attention by
many participants during the mass declutter experiment
is video games. These can’t be neatly classified under the
“new technology” label as they’ve been around for
decades before the digital network and mobile
computing revolutions of the past twenty years. But
many people—especially young men—feel an addictive
pull to these games that’s similar to what they experience
from other new technologies. As a twenty-nine-year-old
business owner named Joseph told me, he feels “restless
without video games to occupy my downtime.” He ended
up classifying these games alongside his compulsive blog
consumption as factors in his digital life that were
wearing him down. If, like Joseph, you think these games
are a nontrivial part of your life, feel free to put them on

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the list of technologies you’re evaluating when figuring
out your declutter rules.
Another borderline case is television—which, in an age
of streaming, is a vague term that can cover many
different visual entertainments. Prior to the mass
declutter experiment, I was somewhat ambivalent as to
whether streaming Netflix, and its equivalents, was
something to consider as a potentially optional
technology. The feedback I received from participants,
however, was near unequivocal: You should. As a
management consultant named Kate told me: “I have so
many ideas I’d like to implement, but every time I [sat]
down to work on them, somehow Netflix [appeared] on
my screen.” These technologies, participants like Kate
insisted, should be included when defining your personal
declutter rules.
Once you’ve identified the class of technologies that
are relevant, you must then decide which of them are
sufficiently “optional” that you can take a break from
them for the full thirty days of the declutter process. My
general heuristic is the following: consider the
technology optional unless its temporary removal would
harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your
professional or personal life.
This standard exempts most professional technologies
from being deemed optional. If you stop checking your
work email, for example, this would harm your career—
so you can’t use me as an excuse to shut down your inbox
for a month. Similarly, if your job requires you to
occasionally monitor Facebook Messenger to help recruit
students (as was the case for a music professor named
Brian who participated in my experiment), then, of
course, this activity is not optional either.
On the personal side, these exemptions usually apply
to technologies that play a key logistical role. If your
daughter uses text messaging to tell you when she’s
ready to be picked up from soccer practice, then it’s okay

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to still use text messages for this purpose. Similar
exemptions also apply when a technology’s removal
might cause serious harm to relationships: for example,
using FaceTime to talk with a spouse deployed overseas
with the military.
Don’t, however, confuse “convenient” with “critical.”
It’s inconvenient to lose access to a Facebook group that
announces campus events, but in a thirty-day period,
this lack of information won’t cause any critical damage
to your social life, and it might expose you to interesting
alternative uses for your time. Similarly, several