lot of our current political coverage, allowing De to stay
up to speed without the spike in anxiety.
Kate solved this same problem by replacing reading
news with listening to a news roundup podcast each
morning—keeping her informed without providing her
the opportunity to mindlessly browse. Mike, by contrast,
found it effective to replace all online news with an older
technology: the radio. He discovered that putting on
NPR in the background while working on manual tasks
kept him sufficiently up to speed and saved him from
many of the worst features of internet news. Ramel also
embraced an older technology: instead of checking social
media
feeds to stay up to date, he now has a newspaper
delivered to his NYU dorm.
Perhaps predictably, many of the participants in my
mass declutter experiment ended up abandoning the
social media services that used to take up so much of
their time. These services have a way of entering your life
through cultural pressure and vague value propositions,
so they tend not to hold up well when subjected to the
rigor of the screen described above. It was also common,
however, for participants to reintroduce social media in a
limited manner to serve specific purposes. In these cases,
they were often quite rigorous in taming the services
with strict operating procedures.
Marianna, for example,
now restricts herself to
checking her remaining social media services once a
week, during the weekend. A sales engineer named
Enrique told me that “Twitter is what caused me the
most harm,” so he also restricted himself to checking his
feed only once a week, on the weekend. Ramel and
Tarald decided it was sufficient to take their remaining
social media apps off of their phones. The extra difficulty
involved in accessing these services through a web
browser on their desktop computers seemed sufficient to
concentrate their use to only the most important
purposes.
An interesting experience shared by some participants
was that they eagerly
returned to their optional
technologies only to learn they had lost their taste for
them. Here, for example, is how Kate described this
experience to me:
The day the declutter was over, I raced back to
Facebook, to my old blogs, to Discord, gleeful
and ready to dive back in—and then, after about
thirty minutes of aimless browsing, I kind of
looked up and thought . . . why am I doing this?
This is . . . boring? This isn’t bringing me any
kind of happiness. It took a declutter for me to
notice that these technologies aren’t actually
adding anything to my life.
She hasn’t used those services since.
Several participants discovered
that eliminating the
point-and-click relationship maintenance enabled by
social media requires that you introduce alternative
systems for connecting with your friends. A digital
advertiser named Ilona, for example, set up a regular
schedule for calling and texting her friends—which
supported her most serious relationships at the cost of
some of the more lightweight touches many have come to
expect. “In the end, I just accepted the fact that I would
miss some events in their lives, but that this was
worthwhile for the mental energy it would save me to not
be on social media.”
Other participants
settled on unusual operating
procedures during the reintroduction process. Abby, a
Londoner who works in the travel industry, removed the
web browser from her phone—a nontrivial hack. “I
figured I didn’t need to know the answer to everything
instantly,” she told me. She then bought an old-
fashioned notebook to jot down ideas when she’s bored
on the tube. Caleb set a curfew for his phone: he can’t use
it between the hours of 9 p.m. and 7 a.m., while a
computer engineer named Ron gives himself a quota of
only two websites he’s allowed to regularly check—a big
improvement over the forty or more sites he used to
cycle through. Rebecca transformed her daily experience
by buying a watch. This might sound trivial to older
readers, but to a nineteen-year-old like Rebecca, this was
an intentional act. “I estimate that around 75 percent of
the time I got sucked
down a rabbit hole of un-
productivity was due to me checking my phone for the
time.”
■
■
■
To summarize the main points about this step:
Your monthlong break from optional technologies
resets your digital life. You can now rebuild it from
scratch in a much more intentional and minimalist
manner. To do so, apply a three-step technology
screen to each optional technology you’re thinking
about reintroducing.
This process will help you cultivate a digital life in
which new technologies serve your deeply held
values as opposed to subverting them without your
permission. It is in this careful reintroduction that
you make the intentional decisions that will define
you as a digital minimalist.
