

His influence in writing the book came out of notes he received from readers of his earlier book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, about their struggles with focus: Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.Īnd Newport, a computer science professor, in Digital Minimalism, offers a blueprint for organizing our technology around what we most value, and minimizing the rest.
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In How to Do Nothing O’Dell, an artist and writer, questions our society’s definition of what counts as “productive”:Į inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Rather than achieving this through sheer self-control, he suggests “constructing an environment that does not tempt you all the time.” In Joy of Missing Out, Brinkmann, a philosopher, argues that the path to happiness is not in acquiring more but wanting less. A digital declutter is an audit of your entire digital life, followed by removing or reorganizing everything into a simpler, more secure, and more backed up system. This double-edged sword was brought home for me recently after reading three books, each about building one’s life around less: Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, Jenny O’Dell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, and Svend Brinkmann’s Joy of Missing Out: The Art of Self-Restraint in the Age of Excess. The flip side of all that digital abundance is that we often feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and burned out from it all. Our digital lives today are seemingly limitless worlds of people to follow, music to stream, articles to read, and so on.
