How to cut back on your smartphone use
According to the author of "Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World."
Is your phone stressing you out? Join the club.
But also, it may be time to declutter your device, said Cal Newport, the author of the 2019 book “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.”
“Just like with a closet, you empty it out and you want to just put back the things that you really care about,” said Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
While working on his book, Newport asked folks on his email list to give up social media for 30 days and report back the results — 1,600 people answered the call.
“One of the things I learned is that a lot of people have been telling themselves the story of, ‘This is harmless and it’s something I just do to fill the idle moments,'” he said. “And what they end up discovering when they go through a process like this is that their use of this technology has long since expanded past the idle moments and has become an escape that keeps them away from the important things they know they should be doing in their lives.”
Newport offered the following five tips for embracing digital minimalism.
Step away from “optional personal technology” for 30 days
First off, according to Newport, is to “start from scratch and rebuild your digital life more intentionally.”
He considers the first step toward achieving digital minimalism to be departing from what he calls “optional personal technology” for 30 days. His definition of “optional personal technology” includes social media, online news, streaming video, and video games — anything used primarily for distraction and entertainment.
“Just take it off your phone,” Newport said. “You step away for 30 days to get back in touch with what really matters.”
Then ask yourself, ‘What do I really want to spend my time doing?’
You should fill the time you’ve gained with the activities that you determine matter to you, Newport said. Maybe it’s taking long walks along the Charles with your loved ones, planning more frequent dinners in the North End with friends, or taking a cooking class with a Boston chef.
Volunteers in Newport’s research wound up starting new hobbies, reading, writing poetry, learning how to dance, overhauling their diets, working toward becoming more physically fit, and joining church, community, and political groups. The people who actively pursued meaningful activities were the most successful in achieving digital minimalism, he said.
Rebuild your digital life from scratch
After 30 days without social media and other digital diversions, it’s time to get back at it — carefully. You do this by considering each app before reintroducing it into your life, Newport said.
“You’re working backwards from, ‘Here’s what I care about,’ and then trying to put technology to use on behalf of those things,” he said.
For example, if keeping in touch with family and friends is very important to you, think: Is Instagram the best way to do it? Perhaps FaceTiming them is the best way.
“If it doesn’t directly support one of the things you’ve identified that you really care about, you should probably ignore it,” Newport said. “Even if it does help one of the things you really care about, you should ask, ‘Yeah, but is it really the best way to do that?'”
Learn how to ‘put up fences’ around technology
Once you determine that an app helps you achieve what you care about, you need to decide how and when you are going to use it, Newport said. For example, you may decide Instagram is a must, but choose to use it only on your desktop and only on Sundays. This way, you’re still getting the value from it, but the footprint on your life is minor, Newport explained.
“Putting fences around how you use that important stuff is a big part of success in digital minimalism,” he said.
In Newport’s research, volunteers who decided they needed to keep Facebook for things such as keeping in touch with groups they joined minimized their use of it with tools such News Feed Eradicator for Facebook, a Chrome extension that replaces the Facebook newsfeed with inspirational quotes. Or they simply bookmarked their chosen Facebook group on their desktop browser and were then able to jump straight to that information and bypass their newsfeeds. The volunteers reported using Facebook significantly less after taking such steps, he said.
“For a lot of people, they were like, ‘Yeah, I look at [Facebook] maybe five minutes a week,” Newport said. “Before that, they were maybe looking at it for two hours a day.”
Understand that it’s an ongoing process
Once you rebuild your digital life, you’ll undoubtedly have to keep tweaking it.
“There’s no single, perfect technology configuration for you that you discover,” Newport said. “You really need to be flexible and make changes.”
If you feel like you’re using your phone more than you think is useful or to the detriment of things that are important to you, that’s when Newport said it’s time to reevaluate.
“That’s the feeling that should spark you,” he said, “the feeling of, ‘I’m starting to be used by these tools,’ rather than the other way around.”
