Digital Minimalism

participating in a declutter experiment too,” she told me,
“because he annoyingly watched his phone the whole
time we were talking.” She even kicked off a hunt for a
new home that she had been delaying due to a perceived
lack of time. By the end of the declutter, she had made an
offer on a house, which was accepted.
Kushboo finished five books during his declutter. This
was a big deal for him, as these were the first books he
had read voluntarily in over three years. He also
restarted his once cherished painting and computer
coding hobbies. “I loved these activities,” he explained,
“but I stopped doing them once I started school because
I thought I didn’t have enough time.” Caleb’s search for
intentional analog activities led him to start journaling
and reading before bed every night. He also started

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listening to records on a record player, from beginning to
end, with no earbuds in his ears or skip buttons to tap
when antsy—which turns out to be a much richer
experience than Caleb’s normal habit of firing up Spotify
and seeking out the perfect track. A full-time mom
named Marianna became so engaged in creative pursuits
during her declutter that she decided she would start her
own blog to share her work and connect with other
artists. An engineer named Craig reported: “Last week I
actually visited my local library again for the first time
since my kids have grown. . . . I was delighted to discover
seven different books that seemed interesting.”
Like several other parents who participated in my
experiment, Tarald invested his newfound time and
attention in his family. He was unhappy with how
distracted he was when spending time with his sons. He
told me about how, on the playground, when they would
come seeking recognition for something they figured out
and were proud of, he wouldn’t notice, as his attention
was on his phone. “I started thinking about how many of
these small victories I miss out on because I feel this
ridiculous need to check the news for the umpteenth
time,” he told me. During his declutter he rediscovered
the satisfaction of spending real time with his boys
instead of just spending time near them with his eyes on
the screen. He noted how surreal it can feel to be the only
parent at the playground who is not looking down.
Brooke also found herself “interacting more
intentionally” with her kids. For her, this change wasn’t
engineered, but was instead a natural side effect of the
declutter, which made her life feel “far less rushed and
distracted”—leaving room to gravitate toward more
important pursuits. She also ended up playing the piano
again and relearning how to sew—underscoring the sheer
quantity of the time that can be reclaimed when you
sidestep mindless digital activity to once again prioritize
the real you.

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Brooke captures well the experience many reported
about their monthlong declutter when she told me:
“Stepping away for thirty-one days provided clarity I
didn’t know I was missing. . . . As I stand here now from
the outside looking in, I see there is so much more the
world has to offer!”
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To summarize the main points about this step:
You will probably find the first week or two of your
digital declutter to be difficult, and fight urges to
check technologies you’re not allowed to check.
These feelings, however, will pass, and this
resulting sense of detox will prove useful when it
comes time to make clear decisions at the end of
the declutter.
The goal of a digital declutter, however, is not
simply to enjoy time away from intrusive
technology. During this monthlong process, you
must aggressively explore higher-quality activities
to fill in the time left vacant by the optional
technologies you’re avoiding. This period should be
one of strenuous activity and experimentation.
You want to arrive at the end of the declutter
having rediscovered the type of activities that
generate real satisfaction, enabling you to
confidently craft a better life—one in which
technology serves only a supporting role for more
meaningful ends.
STEP #3: REINTRODUCE
TECHNOLOGY

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After your thirty-day break comes the final step of the
digital declutter: reintroducing optional technologies
back into your life. This reintroduction is more
demanding than you might imagine.
Some of the participants in my mass declutter
experiment treated the process only as a classical digital
detox—reintroducing all their optional technologies
when the declutter ended. This is a mistake. The goal of
this final step is to start from a blank slate and only let
back into your life technology that passes your strict
minimalist standards. It’s the care you take here that will
determine whether this process sparks lasting change in
your life.
With this in mind, for each optional technology that
you’re considering reintroducing into your life, you must
first ask: Does this technology directly support
something that I deeply value? This is the only condition
on which you should let one of these tools into your life.
The fact that it offers some value is irrelevant—the digital
minimalist deploys technology to serve the things they
find most important in their life, and is happy missing
out on everything else. For example, when asking this
first question, you might decide that browsing Twitter in
search of distraction doesn’t support an important value.
On the other hand, keeping up with your cousin’s baby
photos on Instagram does seem to support the
importance you place on family.
Once a technology passes this first screening question,
it must then face a more difficult standard: Is this
technology the best way to support this value? We justify
many of the technologies that tyrannize our time and
attention with some tangential connection to something
we care about. The minimalist, by contrast, measures the
value of these connections and is unimpressed by all but
the most robust. Consider our above example about
following your cousin’s baby pictures on Instagram. We
noted that this activity might be tentatively justified by

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the fact that you deeply value family. But the relevant
follow-up question is whether browsing Instagram
photos is the best way to support this value. On some
reflection, the answer is probably no. Something as
simple as actually calling this cousin once a month or so
would probably prove significantly more effective in
maintaining this bond.
If a technology makes it through both of these
screening questions, there’s one last question you must
ask yourself before it’s allowed back into your life: How
am I going to use this technology going forward to
maximize its value and minimize its harms? A point I
explore in part 2 is that many attention economy
companies want you to think about their services in a
binary way: either you use it, or you don’t. This allows
them to entice you into their ecosystem with some
feature you find important, and then, once you’re a
“user,” deploy attention engineering to overwhelm you
with integrated options, trying to keep you engaging with
their service well beyond your original purpose.
Digital minimalists combat this by maintaining
standard operating procedures that dictate when and
how they use the digital tools in their lives. They would
never simply say, “I use Facebook because it helps my
social life.” They would instead declare something more
specific, such as: “I check Facebook each Saturday on my
computer to see what my close friends and family are up
to; I don’t have the app on my phone; I culled my list of
friends down to just meaningful relationships.”
Pulling together these pieces, here’s a summary of this
minimalist screening process.
The Minimalist Technology Screen
To allow an optional technology back into your life
at the end of the digital declutter, it must:

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1. Serve something you deeply value (offering
some
benefit is not enough).
2. Be the 
best
way to use technology to serve this
value (if it’s not, replace it with something better).
3. Have a role in your life that is constrained with a
standard operating procedure that specifies
when
and 
how
you use it.
You can apply this screen to any new technology that
you’re considering adopting. When you deploy it at the
end of a digital declutter, however, it becomes