Digital Minimalism

Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

E-book, 317 pages

Published Feb. 4, 2019 by Portfolio.

ISBN:
978-0-525-53654-3
Copied ISBN!

View on OpenLibrary

3 stars (4 reviews)

The key to living well in a high tech world is to spend much less time using technology.

In recent years, our culture's relationship with personal technology has transformed from something exciting into something darker. Innovations like smartphones and social media are useful, but many of us are increasingly troubled by how much control these tools seem to exert over our daily experiences – including how we spend our free time and how we feel about ourselves.

In Digital Minimalism, Newport proposes a bold solution: a minimalist approach to technology use in which you radically reduce the time you spend online, focusing on a small set of carefully-selected activities while happily ignoring the rest.

2 editions

Review of 'Digital Minimalism' on 'Goodreads'

1 star

tl;dr drop social media. Own your time and be jealous of it. Do things that are productive in your free time. Don’t be afraid of boredom as it often is a catalyst of creativity or insights.

The writing of this book is so full of white male privilege quoting and praising historical privileged white men that I was tempted to start a fucking revolution.

This is not even a mediocre self help book. It’s a pretentiously bad self help book trying to surf the fashion wave of minimalism.

Common Sense and Anecdotes

3 stars

If I had finished this back when I started (2019) I would have lived it. Now, in 2021, a lot of what Newport talks about seems like common sense. Beyond the advice, the anecdotes of the digital minimalists that he encountered while preparing this book are à propos and well-chosen to highlight the underlying call to action: quit faffing around on your phone, stop with the constant Facebooking, put your phone down and do something else that keeps your hands busy or puts you in a social situation.

avatar for navarre

rated it

5 stars
avatar for Stitch@bookwyrm.social

rated it

4 stars