I tried digital minimalism for 3 weeks. Here’s what I learned
Trying Cal Newport’s digital minimalism practice for a few weeks was like putting on noise-canceling headphones.
While it significantly increased my peace of mind and lowered my time on digital devices, It wasn’t easy to sustain for long before I hit roadblocks that pulled me back in.
What is digital minimalism?
The crux of digital minimalism is to take a considered approach to using technology to achieve more productivity and peace of mind.
The idea comes from the practices of the Amish.
Cal explains that the culture of the Amish is to carefully consider whether technology is good, or bad for their values and community. If it is considered unhelpful, it is avoided, and vice versa.
To go through this process yourself, Cal suggests taking a break from digital technology and selectively reintroducing what adds value.
How the process works
Cal explains this in his book, outlining a two-phase process:
Take a cease-fire from nonessential app technology for 30 days, then reintroduce digital tech afterward.
Re-introducing digital tech afterward with purposeful consideration of what you need, and why.
This is how the process went for me.
Timeline Overview
Here’s a quick overview of how my journey went with the idea.
Week one, I read the book and started implementing the idea of the digital cease-fire. I moved all the temptation apps on my phone to a special folder, so I knew whether or not I was stepping over the line. I full on deleted some like Twitter. I started changing the way that I messaged people to emphasize coordination for real human contact over messaging.
Week two, By week two, I felt more at peace but also started getting really bored. Without the feeds of Instagram, and YouTube, to distract me, I ended up feasting on books. As much as I love reading, this can dry out really fast if you’re also avoiding blogs. I was probably doing it wrong, but I avoided digging into rabbit holes via YouTube for the time being too.
Week three, I started caving. Life dramas triggered me into finding easy distraction and comfort from the feeds. Back to YouTube and Instagram scrolling for a few evenings.
Week four, I’m starting reintegration early. Cal suggests doing 30 days first but I couldn’t last that long. The boredom was killing me and also, I felt frustrated not being able to use my typical digital means of digging into rabbit holes.
⏱️ Results
My mental health and relationships improved.
The pace of life slowed down. There were genuinely fewer distractions, and I was getting more peace of mind. And I would say my stress level went from 8 out of 10 to about 5.
My average screen time on the phone went from 5 hours per day to 2.7 hours.*
*This would have been lower still, but during the experiment I had a few bad days where I was only able to basically just zombie-out watching shorts or reels for awhile.
This wasn’t sustainable though, because I had to re-integrate technology. So the hours per day is back up to what it was before, but I would argue that it’s higher quality.
Key Benefits
There were some awesome benefits. Some of these you would expect, others, maybe not:
Less time wasted on social media. Cutting the social media root was great because, basically, all the platforms give me some form of agony.
Whether political or simply discussions designed to provoke a reaction, I found it interesting how each time I moved to a social media platform like Facebook, or Twitter, it was feeding me something that was trying to hook me in the very first post.
Less mindless watching. I’m a fan of business and marketing-related stuff on YouTube, and sometimes I fool myself into thinking I’m not wasting time because it is edutainment videos. But it was just passive learning. Now, I jump onto YouTube and research a specific topic that I want to learn about and stop once I feel I have satisfied with that vertical.
Fewer notifications. Because I changed my messaging style to wards coordinating better quality interaction, such as phone calls, the amount of light touch interaction needed was reduced significantly. People don’t need to ping you every day if they know you’re gonna call in a few days.
Better conversations. In his book, he emphasizes Human interaction with people rather than mere digital connection with people. This means conversations and video calls, not messages and likes. You really do feel more connected and heard, and likewise, your friends do too.
More focused study. By relying on books and purposeful inquiry, I studied more productively. I jumped onto YouTube only to learn something specific. I read a book on the topic instead of getting pulled in a thousand directions by Wikipedia or blog spirals.
Better routines. Knowing that I needed to control my digital habits meant that I built new routines around when I engage with people. I reintegrated messaging technology into my life during lunch breaks and dinners eaten alone, for example.
Challenges
As you can expect, not all rainbows, though. Here are some of the challenges.
Different perspectives on messages. Some people just love to ping back and forth. Particularly significant others. It can be hard to change to a higher-quality interaction focus without making people feel ignored or neglected.
Boredom. The author warns that you need to be prepared to replace new downtime with hobbies. But there’s only so much you can do if your hobbies are fairly intensive. There was a lot of time where I had no idea what to do and didn’t have enough energy for any seriously demanding hobbies. I mostly defaulted back to reading books.
Tips
If you’re interested in trying digital minimalism these tips might help you.
Prepare some time-sink hobbies. If you’re gonna have a lot of downtime, you really do need to prepare what you’re gonna fill the gap with. I suggest walking and reading.
Discuss with your significant/close contacts. This is a key area of support. It will also make your experience easier, since likely, they may be the most impacted.
Schedule messages. Both reading and replying. Scheduling emails to send at the end of the day prevents back-and-forth distractions and allows the recipient more time to respond thoughtfully.
Leverage media wishlists. You know on YouTube how you can save videos to watch later? To stop yourself from scrolling use the feature. You can also use Pocket to save blog articles to read later. This helps break the reflexive habit of endless scrolling.
Lean on content curators. I used Glasp to source of some of my read-later content rather than self-discovery. They saved me from getting stuck in the scroll.
So, has anybody else tried this?
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