What
It’s a concept that I learned when reading a book called Digital Minimalism
by professor Cal Newport
who famously wrote lots of great articles and books about topics like productivity and curating a deep life.
A philosophy of tech 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
Digital minimalism, according to Cal’s definition, is a typical working backwards example that modern technology like internet and smartphone should be adapted to reflect things we value deeply rather than serving as a constant source of distractions.
Hence, digital declutter is a “radical” process proposed by Cal to redefine how we interact with those digital products and embrace a digital minimalism lifestyle at heart.
Why
Generally, under today’s attention economy, our attention and mind are constantly being “hijacked” by flooding news and social medias designed for business merits while ignoring human brain’s processing limit. As a result of information overload, mental issues like stress, anxiety and fear of missing out etc are becoming increasingly popular among the younger generations. Companies come up with different techniques like Personalization, Recommendations algorithms in response to the problem, only leading to new issues like information cocoon or filtering.
Aside from it, not until recent years did I start to realize how much of my own time is “killed” by mindless activities like surfing the internet, watching news and seeking social proofs on social medias. Those gradually formed digital habits are so hard to recognize as we’re surrounded by people sharing the similar habits, e.g. sitting on a subway starring at the phone with short videos tailored to our specific interests playing for hours. Fortunately, books like Hooked
and https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224 became the wake-up call for me. As an engineer, I understand that to be able to solve meaningful problems, the ability to work deeply is crucial and deep work requires cultivating long attention spans. As James Clear the author of
points out, one way to break a bad habit is to replace it with
