Digital Minimalism

Objective:
Learn on the guitar every song from the A-side of 
Meet the Beatles!
Strategies:
Restring and retune my guitar, find the chord charts for the songs, print them, and
put them in nice plastic protector sheets.
Return to my old habit of regularly practicing my guitar.
As incentive, schedule Beatles party in November. Perform songs (get Linda to
agree to sing).
Notice the use of specificity in the objective description. If our hypothetical leisure
planner had instead written, “play guitar more regularly,” she would have been less likely
to succeed, as the goal is vague and too easy to ignore. She instead identified a concrete
accomplishment that has clear criteria for completion and that can reasonably fit within a

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season. By pursuing this accomplishment, of course, she’ll be forced to act on her vaguer
commitment to play her guitar more regularly.
Also notice that the strategies for achieving the objective include an incentive:
scheduling a party that will require her to have learned the songs. This isn’t mandatory, but
it’s always helpful to give yourself a deadline when possible. Finally, notice that she doesn’t
get too specific about the scheduling details of the ongoing strategies. She notes she needs
to regularly practice, but doesn’t specify when she’ll do this practice each week, or how long
the sessions will last. The details of this scheduling are best left to the weekly planning
process described below.
Moving on, here are several examples of the other type of item found on seasonal leisure
plans, the habits:
Habit:
During the week, restrict low-quality leisure to only sixty minutes a night.
Habit:
Read something in bed every night.
Habit:
Attend one cultural event per week.
Each of the habits describes an ongoing behavior rule. They’re not dedicated to a
particular objective, but instead are designed to maintain a background commitment to
regular high-quality leisure in the planner’s life.
The boundary between habits and objectives is porous. In our above examples, our
hypothetical planner might have added “practice guitar twice a week” to her habit list
instead of including it in her Beatles-themed objective. Similarly, she might have
transformed her “read every night” habit into an objective about reading a specific group of
books during the season, an objective that would end up requiring daily reading to
accomplish.
This porousness is unavoidable in this exercise and should not be a major source of
concern. A good seasonal plan will have a small number of interesting and motivating
objectives, coupled with a small number of tractable habits designed to ensure a regular
patina of quality. How you shift specific leisure ideas between these two categories is less
important than keeping them reasonable and balanced for the season ahead.
The Weekly Leisure Plan
At the beginning of each week, put aside time to review your current seasonal leisure plan.
After processing this information, come up with a plan for how your leisure activities will
fit into your schedule for the upcoming week. For each of the objectives in the seasonal
plan, figure out what actions you can do during the week to make progress on these
objectives, and then, crucially, schedule exactly when you’ll do these things.
Let’s return to our above example about the Beatles-themed guitar objective. The weekly
leisure plan is when you’ll figure out how this practice will fit into your schedule. Let’s say
our hypothetical planner schedules the gym from 7:30 to 8:30 a.m. before work on
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She might then decide in the upcoming week that she’ll
use this 7:30–8:30 slot for guitar practice on Tuesday and Thursday. Maybe on another
week, however, a series of early morning meetings makes this timing unavailable. She
might then identify some empty evenings for her weekly practice.
If you’re already in the habit of creating detailed plans for your week (which I highly
recommend), you can just integrate your weekly leisure plan into whatever system you
already use for planning. The more you see these leisure plans as just part of your normal
scheduling—and not some separate and potentially optional endeavor—the more likely you
are to succeed in following them.
Finally, when you are done with this schedule, take time to review and remind yourself
of the habits included in your seasonal plan. These reminders will prevent you from
forgetting these commitments in the week ahead. It can also be useful to briefly reflect on

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your experience with the habits in the week that just ended. Some people like to keep
simple scorecards throughout the week of how often they stuck with the rules specified by
these habits, and review the scorecard as part of this reflection. The goal here is twofold.
First, knowing that you will soon review your performance makes you more likely in the
moment to stick with your habits. Second, this reflection allows you to identify issues that
might need resolving. If you’re consistently failing to execute a given habit, regardless of
your efforts to cajole yourself into action, there might be an issue with the habit itself that
makes it difficult to satisfy.
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You might be concerned that injecting more systematic thinking into your leisure life will
rob it of the spontaneity and relaxation you crave for the time left over after your
professional and family obligations. I hope to convince you that this concern is overblown.
The weekly leisure planning process itself requires only a handful of minutes, and
scheduling in advance some high-quality leisure activities hardly removes all spontaneity
from your free time.
In addition, I’ve noticed that once someone becomes more intentional about their
leisure, they tend to find more of it in their life. The weekly planning ritual can lead you to
begin fighting for more leisure opportunities. Seeing, for example, that Thursday is a light
schedule, you might decide to end work at 3:30 that day to go on a hike before dinner.
These types of invented opportunities are rarer when you’re not planning ahead. Becoming
more systematic about your leisure, in other words, can significantly increase the
relaxation you enjoy throughout your week.
Finally, in justifying this planning approach, I want to underscore the foundational
argument delivered throughout this chapter: doing nothing is overrated. In the middle of a
busy workday, or after a particularly trying morning of childcare, it’s tempting to crave the
release of having nothing to do—whole blocks of time with no schedule, no expectations,
and no activity beyond whatever seems to catch your attention in the moment. These
decompression sessions have their place, but their rewards are muted, as they tend to
devolve toward low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and half-hearted binge-
watching. For the many different reasons argued in the preceding pages, investing energy
into something hard but worthwhile almost always returns much richer rewards.

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7
Join the Attention Resistance
DAVID AND GOLIATH 2.0
In June of 2017, Facebook launched a blog series titled “Hard Questions.” The
announcement for this series, written by their vice president for public policy and
communications, admitted that as “digital technologies transform how we live, we all face
challenging questions.” The series, he explained, would be a chance for Facebook to explain
how they are grappling with these questions.
In the period between that initial announcement and the winter of 2018, Facebook
published fifteen articles, tackling a variety of topics. In June, they explored the issues
surrounding the identification of hate speech in a global community. In September and
October, they discussed the Russian Facebook ads that played a role in the 2016
presidential election. In December, they pushed back on general fears surrounding facial
recognition technology, which Facebook uses for purposes like auto-tagging photos.
“Society often welcomes the benefit of a new innovation while struggling to harness its
potential,” they wrote, before helpfully noting that in 1888 some people were worried about
Kodak cameras.
At the time, I tepidly applauded Facebook for being more open about their thinking on
these questions, but for the most part wasn’t that interested in this corporate
communication exercise. That is, until they published an article tackling a more significant
prompt: “Is Spending Time on Social Media Bad for Us?” Written by two Facebook
researchers named David Ginsberg and Moira Burke, this article, which we briefly touched
on in an earlier chapter when we discussed what science teaches us about social media’s
harm and benefits, opens with the observation that “a lot of smart people are looking at
different aspects of this important issue.” Taking advantage of this reality, the authors then
survey the academic literature for more clarity on what are the “good” and “bad” ways to
engage with social media, concluding: “According to the research, it really comes down to
how you use the technology.”
As I’ll argue, this post represented a momentous shift in how Facebook talks about itself
—a shift that might turn out to be a major folly for the social media giant, and perhaps even
mark the beginning of the end of its current moment of cultural ubiquity. More
importantly, as I’ll show, it inadvertently reveals an effective strategy for maintaining your
autonomy in a period when numerous digital forces want to diminish it.
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To understand my claim about Facebook’s folly, we must first step back to understand the
attention economy in which it operates. It’s important to know that the “attention
economy” describes the business sector that makes money gathering consumers’ attention
and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers. This idea is not new. Columbia Law
professor and technology scholar Tim Wu (who wrote a book on this topic titled The