Hi, you guys, I have been meaning to tell you about finishing Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism over spring break. I was expecting it to cover well-trodden ground: phones are bad for concentration, smartphones are unhelpful at least as often as they are helpful, your attention is a valuable resource. We know all this, right? (Maybe you all will disagree on assertion #2. I am not convinced that smartphones are a net gain for the world.) It turned out to be a book that was more thought-provoking than guilt-inducing, so maybe you will want to read it too.
He seems to have mellowed somewhat on social media since he published Deep Work. He recommends a 30-day digital detox, in which you avoid all the sites that steer you toward immoderation, but he isn't asking readers to live austere lives in sparely appointed houses with only tin-can-and-string phones connecting them to the outside world. He suggests that if you want to have Facebook or Twitter or Instagram in your life after your detox, you should eliminate use on mobile devices; the mobile versions of these tools are specifically designed to elicit more compulsive use. He says that you can probably get what you're looking for on Facebook (i.e., actual updates from the people you actually care about) in 20 or 30 minutes per week; he acknowledges that this will vary.
If you are an average social media user, eliminating it entirely for a month will free up a lot of hours in your day. Newport invites readers to be purposeful about what they're going to do with that time. Perhaps the single most memorable piece of the book is his recommendation to engage in active leisure. Some of what he means by active leisure is familiar -- walk outside, play board games if that's your thing. Here's the thing I'm still thinking about: he challenges readers to improve or repair something once a week as a leisure activity. Use YouTube judiciously, to learn how to tile your backsplash or replace your light fixture or fix that hole in the drywall. And then -- get in there with your own hands and make your environment a little more homey.
(My backsplash remains untiled. But I'm THINKING TILE THOUGHTS, friends.)
The other idea that made me say "...whoa, that's really smart" was his suggestion that do-not-disturb mode should be the default. It's not hard to configure a phone so that calls and/or texts from your loved ones can get through while everybody else waits for you to finish what you're doing. "Treat texts like email," he says, which I think is excellent advice. As I was reading the book I was imagining a table:
| Level | Required Response Time | Adverse Outcome If Disregarded |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | <1 minute | Harm to someone I love |
| 2 | <10 minutes | Irreparable property damage |
| 3 | <1 hour | Avoidable distress and worry |
| 4 | <4 hours | Annoyance |
| 5 | <12 hours | None |
Contemporary phone culture makes it easy to treat every buzz of the phone like it's a Level 1-1 emergency: if I don't check this immediately, harm might come to someone I love. In reality, most of my texts from non-family members -- and many of the texts from family members -- can wait with no ill effects. Most of my texts probably fall in 4-4 or 4-5 territory: it would be good to respond before I eat my next meal, but I certainly don't need to respond before I finish my next sentence. It's not like I'm a realtor, whose income depends on prompt responses to inquiries from strangers, or a physician on call.
I am curious about your reactions. Are you intrigued by the active leisure idea? It might just be a natural fit for me as a person who finds joy in creating to-do lists. I'm also curious about where other people's texts tend to fall on my made-up urgency scale.
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