We got Digital Minimalism wrong
It's more than just monochrome apps. Three simple ways to embrace digital minimalism.
I first read Cal Newports "Digital Minimalism" shortly after it came out in 2019. It resonated a lot with me. At a time when I was very focused on my work as a software engineer, it helped me to understand that I was terminally online and the negative effects of being so. Digital Minimalism was a first realisation that what I was feeling and experiencing was a result of my bad digital habits.
The core concepts are rooted around becoming less reliant on technology to live our every day lives. We can't escape it in it's entirety, but being mindful about social media, conscious of screen time and having a simpler approach to using digital tools that so many of us rely on day to day.
It's grown in popularity, especially over the last few years and rightly so. We are becoming more attuned to the negative impact living on a screen brings - and we are questioning if there is a better way of doing things. People are intentionally cutting back on social media, finding simpler ways of building and creating - and I am all for it.
Yet somewhere along the way, digital minimalism has seemingly turned into an aesthetic. We have started focusing on the surface level - apps that look simple, or quitting a particular social media rather than making actual change.
Don't get me wrong. I love the look of minimalist interface, and it's something that I take great influence over in my own work, but there's a risk here. When we focus on the appearance of minimalism or the surface level, we miss the deeper work that Cal wrote about so well.
Deleting apps or simplifying a home screen is great - but only if it’s part of a larger process that affects your behaviour and how you are living your digital life. Without that foundation, aesthetic minimalism becomes little more than digital feng shui. Simple and clean interfaces are easy to fetishise as it gives us the feeling of clarity and being on top of everything without necessarily helping us achieve it. And in doing so, they can distract from the harder, deeper task of rethinking our relationship with technology.
Imagine it in terms of physical clutter. If you are tidying your house and you move every little bit of mess or rubbish into one room and then shut the door, the illusion is that you might be on top of everything, but the bad habits that got you into such a state in the first place still exist - they are just hiding behind the door. Nothing has been sorted, it's just been moved somewhere out of sight.
This is where most people get stuck in that they change the surface, but not the core. They use tools that look simplistic, but spend days building complex systems and workflows that bring very little benefit. They organise their apps nicely on the home screen, then spend hours mindlessly on them. They delete Tiktok, then binge YouTube. They announce their departure from Instagram and then doom scroll Substack. They spend hours making their Notion "aesthetic AF ✨", but then never actually use it for what they have designed it for.
I speak from experience by the way, I have fallen into every trap imaginable, believing that I was making positive change in my life but swapping one vice for another. I cringe when I think back to how overly complex I made things for myself in the guise of "minimalism". So much time wasted.
For me I was always chasing the one way of working that would help me solve all of my problems - but being true to myself, the only issue was I was avoiding doing the things that I was supposed to. I wasn’t getting shit done. All I was doing was plastering over my lack of agency with a facade of things that were making me feel “productive”. That is a bad place to be, readers.
Yet I have learned from my mistakes - and I want to help you embrace digital minimalism and digital clarity also.
Design your digital life around your values, from your goals. Start from the inside, then work outward. Most importantly, be an honest critic for yourself and hold yourself truly accountable for building healthier habits.
Here’s how I think about it:
1. Define your outcome.
What do you actually want from your digital life? More focus? Deeper work? Less comparison? Just to be behind a screen less? Clarity starts with direction.
For me it was about having less comparison, less busy work and more creativity. I let go of the places that made me feel like shit (looking at you, Instagram) and dived deeper into actions like writing in my physical journal, or capturing inspiration via Obsidian and MyMind.
These things are good for me, and again, digital minimalism is not about abstaining from all digital tools, that is not realistic, it is about being mindful and intentional.
2. Audit your tools.
Every app should earn its place. If it doesn’t help you create, connect, or grow - it’s probably noise. Delete the apps that are sitting on your phone unused. Get rid of the social media accounts where you don't actually post but just doom scroll.
This took me a lot of time to do, and was hard, but it is an important process. I said goodbye to social media accounts that had 10,000+ followers that had been the accumulation of years of work as your own mental health is always more valuable than social clout. I deleted all of the productivity apps from both my phone and laptop that I liked, but only used occasionally.
I speak to so many people who are constantly chasing the new tool to solve all of their problems... Pick tools for simplicity but also longevity. Systems take months to develop and grow. Constantly migrating is no good.
(I am going to be writing more about this particularly in future, if folks are interested.)
3. Add friction with intention.
Make distractions harder to access. Log out. Remove shortcuts. Put your phone in another room. Write more things by hand. Avoid needless automation.
One of the things I try and teach is friction is good. Whether its adding enough friction to break you out of the muscle memory habit of opening social media, or manually writing things down so your brain processes them more efficiently, it is helpful.
Adding the screen time widget to the phone home screen is another small hack that adds just enough friction. A pang of guilt when you open your phone and see the wasted time initially is scary, but effective in changing bad habits.
I hope this resonated with some of you. It's certainly been resonating with me more and more over the last year, where I have been working on myself more than I ever have done in the past.
To truly embrace and get the benefits of digital minimalism, look past the aesthetics. Look at the core. If your apps look minimalist, but your digital habits are a complete mess and you are not working/building with the clarity and purpose that you want - then it is never too late to make some impactful change.
Until the next time friends!