What is Digital Minimalism? As I’ve been trying to bring more focus on Digital Minimalism into my life over the last year, this is a question that has come up a lot.
It’s not an easy answer either because Digital Minimalism much like a the ‘Minimalist Mindset’ varies depending on who you talk to. In this article I’ve boiled it down to the bare bones of what it is so that you can use it as a framework to adopt the Digital Minimalism lifestyle that works best for you.
Before we get into what Digital Minimalism actually is, lets address the elephant in the room. Why are you even here in the first place? The chances are that you realized that you spend way too much time attached to your phone, your tablet, your computer and you realized that it’s not healthy.
That’s how I started down this path in the first place and I think you’ll find that it’s how most people who are involved in the digital minimalist space got involved. Most of what I’ve written is with that theme in mind. With the ultimate goal being to take back the time from the screens and refocus on things that are more important to you in your life.
Let’s Define Digital Minimalism
Let’s start with the official definition of Digital Minimalism, it’s important to know the roots of where this movement started so that you can understand how it has evolved. Digital Minimalism was coined by Cal Newport back in 2016. He defined it as:
“A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”
Cal wrote a book called Digital Minimalism, it’s a fascinating read. I highly recommend checking it out. You can also check out Cal’s Blog. With the official definition out of the way, we can start to focus on what that actually means to us.
Digital Minimalism And Technology
Now when most people hear the term Digital Minimalism, they think that it means that Digital Minimalists are against technology. When in fact, there is nothing further from the truth.
I absolutely love technology. I work in IT and techie gadgets and home automation are some of the coolest things in the world to me. If you look at our house, you definitely would not think that Digital Minimalism is even in our vocabulary.
Digital Minimalism isn’t about ripping out the technology from your life, it’s about making the technology in your life work for you. A good way to look at it is that each application and technology that you use in your life has a value.
Whether that is a positive value or a negative value is what needs to be determined. For the most part, I’m not here to tell you what types of technology are positive or negative values in your life. Your situation is different from mine and what is valuable to me might be completely useless to you.
Once you know the value of a technology in your life, you can make the determination of whether it’s worth it to keep that technology in your life. I’ll go more in depth on this in another article.
At a high level the determination you make will be based on whether or not the technology is providing the positive value its supposed to or if the cons of using it outweigh the positives.
Once you’ve determined what technologies are worth keeping in your life and which ones aren’t, you can focus on optimizing those technologies that provide the most value to get more of your time back in your life.
This is easy in theory but harder in actual practice. To achieve Digital Minimalism is more than just removing apps from your phone and stopping using certain technologies. It’s about changing the way that you interact with technology.
This article is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Digital Minimalism. If you’re interested in learning more about Digital Minimalism, please check out my other articles on the topic.