Book #120 |
Book: Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology | Author: Cal Newport | |
| Source: Library loan Format: Audiobook |
Pages: 290 | Duration: 12/02/25 – 12/02/25 (1 day) | |
| Rating: ★★★★★ | Genres: nonfiction, self help, productivity, psychology, technology | ||
| 📕10-word summary: How to stop mindlessly sacrificing your time, productivity to clickbait. 🖌6-word review: Provides practical, albeit not easy, strategies. |
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| 💭An interesting quote: “Digital minimalism definitively does not reject the innovations of the internet age, but instead rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools.” | |||
| Description:* In this timely and enlightening book, Cal Newport introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives. Digital minimalists are all around us. They’re the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones. They can have fun with friends and family and eat out at restaurants without the obsessive urge to document the experience. Now, Newport gives us a name for this quiet movement and makes a case for its urgency in our tech-saturated world. Drawing on a diverse array of real-life examples, from Amish farmers to harried parents to Silicon Valley programmers, Newport identifies the common practices of digital minimalists and the ideas that underpin them.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||
| Thoughts: I found several nuggets in this book, a couple being: 1) the difference between conversations and connections, and 2) the concept of “high quality leisure.” I’ve already implemented one practical suggestion, which was to remove the Facebook app from my phone because it contains more of the “sticky” functionality, as well as provides location and activity data that the “attention economy” finds so valuable, which is to say is used to make money off us. It also confirmed my “intentional” use of Facebook, which I’ve been doing since the beginning of February 2025 — “using” Facebook instead of it using me. I do that by only going on it for 3 reasons: 1) as a very quick and efficient way to compress images to use in my writing, 2) to grab images I’ve posted there that I want to use in my writing, and 3) to check updates from groups I’m in that only use Facebook to communicate, all of which I can still do by logging in through the web interface. Not everything in the book resonated with me, but often that’s how self-help books are, and I’m happy to have been made to think deeply on this topic. | |||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.
