Digital Minimalism

Vive la résistance!
PRACTICE: DELETE SOCIAL MEDIA FROM YOUR PHONE
Something big happened to Facebook starting around 2012. In March of that year, they
began, for the first time, to show ads on the mobile version of their service. By October, 14
percent of the company’s ad revenue came from mobile ads, making it into a small but
nicely profitable piece of Mark Zuckerberg’s growing empire. Then it took off. By the spring
of 2014, Facebook reported that 62 percent of its revenue came from mobile, leading the
technology website The Verge to declare: “Facebook is a mobile company now.” This
statement has continued to prove accurate: by 2017, mobile ad revenue rose to 88 percent
of their earnings, and is still climbing.
These Facebook statistics underscore a trend true of social media more generally:
mobile pays the bills. This reality has important implications for the attention resistance. It
emphasizes that the smartphone versions of these services are much more adept at
hijacking your attention than the versions accessed through a web browser on your laptop
or desktop computer. This difference is due in part to the ubiquitous nature of
smartphones. Because you always have the phone with you, every occasion becomes an
opportunity to check your feeds. Before the mobile revolution, services like Facebook could
only monetize your attention during periods when you happened to be sitting at your
computer.
There’s also, however, a more ominous feedback loop at play. As more people began to
access social media services on their smartphones, the attention engineers at these
companies invested more resources into making their mobile apps stickier. As discussed in
the first part of this book, some of these engineers’ most ingenious attention traps—
including the slot machine action of swiping down to refresh a feed, or alarm-red
notification badges—are mobile-only “innovations.”
Pulling together these pieces of evidence points to a clear conclusion: if you’re going to
use social media, stay far away from the mobile versions of these services, as these pose a
significantly bigger risk to your time and attention. This practice, in other words, suggests
that you remove all social media apps from your phone. You don’t have to quit these
services; you just have to quit accessing them on the go.
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This strategy is classic digital minimalism. By removing your ability to access social media
at any moment, you reduce its ability to become a crutch deployed to distract you from
bigger voids in your life. At the same time, you’re not necessarily abandoning these
services. By allowing yourself access (albeit less convenient) through a web browser, you
preserve your ability to use specific features that you identify as important to your life—but
on your own terms.

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I started informally offering this advice soon after my last book, Deep Work, was
released in early 2016. At the time, a lot of readers were nervous about my minimalist
suggestion to quit social media services that didn’t provide more benefits than harms.
Accordingly, I began to suggest that they take the apps off their phones as a first step. Two
things struck me about the feedback that began to trickle in. First, a nontrivial percentage
of people who deleted the apps discovered that they essentially stopped using social media
altogether. Even the small extra barrier of needing to log in to a computer was enough to
prevent them from making the effort—revealing, often to their admitted surprise, that
services they claimed were indispensable were in reality providing nothing more than
convenient hits of distraction.
The second thing I noticed was that for people who did continue to use social media on
their computers, their relationship to these services transformed. They began to sign in for
specific, high-value purposes, and only do so every once in a while. Facebook use, for
example, dropped down toward one or two checks a week for many of my readers who took
the app off of their phone. For them, social media became one tool among many they
sometimes use, and stopped acting as an omnipresent drain on their attention.
For these reasons, this advice likely frightens social media companies. They’re happy to
argue about the importance of their services or give examples of the good things they have
provided society. But the one thing they definitely don’t want you to notice is that the only
really good reason to be accessing these services on your phone is to ensure companies like
Facebook continue to enjoy steady quarterly growth.
PRACTICE: TURN YOUR DEVICES INTO SINGLE-PURPOSE
COMPUTERS
In 2008, Fred Stutzman was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina,
working on a doctoral dissertation about the role of new tools like social media to aid life
transitions, such as heading off to college. Perhaps ironically, given the topic of his
research, Stutzman struggled with this work because his internet-connected laptop offered
too many enticing distractions. His solution was to start writing at a nearby coffee shop.
This plan worked well until the building next to the coffee shop got Wi-Fi. Frustrated by his
inability to escape the attractions of the internet, Stutzman programmed his own tool to
block the network connections on his computer for set amounts of time. He called it,
appropriately enough, Freedom.
Stutzman posted the tool online, where it soon began to gather a cult following.
Realizing that he was onto something, he shelved his academic career to focus on the
software full time. In the years that followed, the tool became more sophisticated. Instead
of simply deactivating the internet, you can now use it to block custom lists of distracting
websites and applications, and set up regular schedules that activate this blocking
automatically. It also works across all of your devices, allowing a single click from your
Freedom dashboard to activate blocking across your computers, phones, and tablets.
The tool has since been adopted by over 500,000 users, including, notably, the novelist
Zadie Smith, who thanked Freedom by name in the acknowledgments of her critically
acclaimed 2012 bestseller, NW, crediting the software for “creating the time” needed for
her to finish the manuscript. Smith is not alone. Freedom’s internal research reveals that
its users gain, on average, 2.5 hours of productive time per day.
Despite the effectiveness of Freedom—and other similarly popular blocking tools such as
SelfControl—its role in human computer interaction is often misunderstood. Consider, for
example, the following quote from a profile of Stutzman that appeared in Science: “There’s
an even deeper irony, and also a retro element, in the idea of taking a powerful productivity
machine like a modern laptop computer and shutting down some of its core functions in
order to increase productivity.”

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This sentiment, that temporarily blocking features of a general-purpose computer
reduces its potential, is common for skeptics of tools like Freedom. It’s also flawed: it
represents a misunderstanding of computation and productivity that benefits the large
digital attention economy conglomerates much more than the individual users that they
exploit.
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To understand my above claim, some brief history is needed. Electromechanical machines
that performed useful tasks were around before electronic computers. Many people forget,
for example, that IBM was selling automatic tabulating machines to the US Census Bureau
as early as the 1890s. Part of what made computers so revolutionary was that they were