Principles of Digital Minimalism

The best way to fight the tyranny of the digital in your life is to embrace a philosophy of technology use based in your deeply held values. I then proposed digital minimalism as one such philosophy, and provided examples of it in action. Before I can ask you to experiment with digital minimalism in your own life, however, I must first provide you with a more thorough explanation for why it works. My argument for this philosophy’s effectiveness rests on the following three core principles:
 
Principle #1: Clutter is costly.

Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.
 
It’s easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we possess: the minutes of our life.
 
Principle #2: Optimization is important.

Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology.
 
Once you break free from this mind-set, however, and begin seeing new technologies simply as tools that you can deploy selectively, you’re able to fully embrace the second principle of minimalism and start furiously optimizing—enabling you to reap the advantages of vaulting up the return curve. Finding useful new technologies is just the first step to improving your life. The real benefits come once you start experimenting with how best to use them.
 
 
Principle #3: Intentionality is satisfying.

Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their general commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. This source of satisfaction is independent of the specific decisions they make and is one of the biggest reasons that minimalism tends to be immensely meaningful to its practitioners.
The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values. As Kraybill elaborates, they confront the following questions: “Is this going to be helpful or is it going to be detrimental? Is it going to bolster our life together, as a community, or is it going to somehow tear it down?”

- Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport