Perhaps predictably, many of the participants in my mass declutter experiment ended up abandoning the social media services that used to take up so much of their time.
It was also common, however, for participants to reintroduce social media in a limited manner to serve specific purposes. In these cases, they were often quite rigorous in taming the services with strict operating procedures. Marianna, for example, now restricts herself to checking her remaining social media services once a week, during the weekend.
Ramel and Tarald decided it was sufficient to take their remaining social media apps off of their phones. The extra difficulty involved in accessing these services through a web browser on their desktop computers seemed sufficient to concentrate their use to only the most important purposes.
An interesting experience shared by some participants was that they eagerly returned to their optional technologies only to learn they had lost their taste for them. Here, for example, is how Kate described this experience to me: The day the declutter was over, I raced back to Facebook, to my old blogs, to Discord, gleeful and ready to dive back in— and then, after about thirty minutes of aimless browsing, I kind of looked up and thought.
This is. Several participants discovered that eliminating the point-and-click relationship maintenance enabled by social media requires that you introduce alternative systems for connecting with your friends. A digital advertiser named Ilona, for example, set up a regular schedule for calling and texting her friends—which supported her most serious relationships at the cost of some of the more lightweight touches many have come to expect. Abby, a Londoner who works in the travel industry, removed the web browser from her phone—a nontrivial hack.
Rebecca transformed her daily experience by buying a watch. This might sound trivial to older readers, but to a nineteen-year-old like Rebecca, this was an intentional act. You can now rebuild it from scratch in a much more intentional and minimalist manner. This process will help you cultivate a digital life in which new technologies serve your deeply held values as opposed to subverting them without your permission.
It is in this careful reintroduction that you make the intentional decisions that will define you as a digital minimalist. After around two miles it shifts to the brick row houses and crowded restaurants of the close-in city neighborhoods: Shaw, then Columbia Heights, and then, finally, Petworth.
Today the city sprawls well beyond the property, but when you pull through its main gates, as I did on an unseasonably warm fall afternoon while researching this book, its ability to provide a sense of escape remained intact.
As I drove onto the grounds, the noise of the city diminished: there were green lawns, old trees, chirping birds, and the laughter of children from a nearby charter school playing on a playground.
This cottage is now a National Historic Site because it once played host to a famous visitor: during each summer and early fall of , , and , President Abraham Lincoln resided there, commuting back and forth to the White House on horseback. But this site is more than just a place where an important president stayed. A growing amount of research suggests that the time and space for quiet reflection the cottage enabled may have played a key role in helping Lincoln make sense of the traumas of the Civil War and tackle the hard decisions he faced.
Anderson saying that their provisions would be exhausted. The decision on whether to evacuate or defend Sumter was just the first of an avalanche of similar crises that Lincoln faced daily as the executive of a union sliding toward dissolution.
The gravity of these times was not enough to free Lincoln from other less weighty obligations that relentlessly claimed most of the remaining scraps of his schedule. It shows a crowd of two dozen top-hatted men milling right outside the doors to the room where Lincoln was meeting with his cabinet. They were there, the caption explains, to aggressively seek employment as soon as the president emerged. The cottage provided Lincoln something we now see would have been almost impossible to obtain in the White House: time and space to think.
We know that Lincoln took advantage of this quiet to think because many accounts of people coming to visit Lincoln at the cottage specifically mention that their arrival interrupted his solitude. A letter written by a Treasury employee named John French, for example, describes the following scene when he arrived unannounced with his friend Colonel Scott during the early darkness of a summer evening: The servant who answered the bell led the way into the little parlor, where, in the gloaming, entirely alone, sat Mr.
We know Lincoln valued this source of solitude, as he would occasionally sneak out to begin his ride back to the capital without the cavalry company assigned to protect him. This was not a decision made lightly, as the military had previously uncovered a Confederate plot to assassinate Lincoln on this route, and the president was shot at on at least one occasion during the ride. Folklore, for example, describes Lincoln scribbling the Gettysburg Address on the train ride to deliver his famed speech.
As Erin Carlson Mast, the executive director of the nonprofit that oversees the cottage, explained to me during my visit, during the weeks leading up to the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln.
The cottage also provided the setting where Lincoln wrestled with the Emancipation Proclamation. Both the necessity to free southern slaves and the form that this emancipation should take were complicated questions that vexed the Lincoln administration— especially at a time when they were terrified of losing the border slave states to the Confederacy.
Lincoln invited visitors like Senator Orville Browning to the cottage to discuss the relevant issues. The president would also famously record his ideas on scraps of paper that he would sometimes store in the lining of his top hat as he wandered the grounds. Lincoln eventually wrote the initial drafts of the proclamation at the cottage. When I toured the house, I saw the desk where Lincoln first penned those important words. It sits in his high-ceilinged bedroom, between two tall windows that overlook the back lawn.
This is ironic because almost certainly Lincoln would have struggled much more with this historical task if he had been forced to grapple with it amid the bustle and distraction of his official residence. We can therefore say, with only mild hyperbole, that in a certain sense, solitude helped save the nation. The goal of this chapter is to argue that the benefits Lincoln received from his time alone extend beyond historical figures or those similarly faced with major decisions.
Everyone benefits from regular doses of solitude, and, equally important, anyone who avoids this state for an extended period of time will, like Lincoln during his early months in the White House, suffer. To aid us in this effort, we can turn toward an unlikely pair of guides: Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin.
They first met in , when Erwin was stationed in Ann Arbor to study toward a graduate degree. It took them seven years, but their efforts culminated in the release of Lead Yourself First. Before outlining their case, however, the authors start with what is arguably one of their most valuable contributions, a precise definition of solitude.
Many people mistakenly associate this term with physical separation—requiring, perhaps, that you hike to a remote cabin miles from another human being. This flawed definition introduces a standard of isolation that can be impractical for most to satisfy on any sort of a regular basis. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.
You can enjoy solitude in a crowded coffee shop, on a subway car, or, as President Lincoln discovered at his cottage, while sharing your lawn with two companies of Union soldiers, so long as your mind is left to grapple only with its own thoughts. On the other hand, solitude can be banished in even the quietest setting if you allow input from other minds to intrude.
In addition to direct conversation with another person, these inputs can also take the form of reading a book, listening to a podcast, watching TV, or performing just about any activity that might draw your attention to a smartphone screen.
Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be. Why is solitude valuable? Kethledge and Erwin detail many benefits, most of which concern the insight and emotional balance that comes from unhurried self-reflection. These pressures were particularly intense given the unintentional manner in which King had become involved in the boycott.
These forces culminated on January 27, , the night after King was released from his first stint in jail, where he had been locked up as part of an organized campaign of police harassment. King returned home after his wife and young daughter had gone to sleep, and realized that the time had come for him to clarify what he was about. Sitting alone with his thoughts, holding a cup of coffee at his kitchen table, King prayed and reflected.
Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. Its benefits have been explored since at least the early years of the Enlightenment. I acknowledge solitude an agreeable refreshment to a busy mind.
In , the noted English psychiatrist Anthony Storr helped correct this omission with his seminal book, Solitude: A Return to the Self. As Storr noted, by the s, psychoanalysis had become obsessed with the importance of intimate personal relationships, identifying them as the most important source of human happiness.
Solitude can be just as important for both happiness and productivity. Woolf would agree with Storr that solitude is a prerequisite for original and creative thought, but she would then add that women had been systematically denied both the literal and figurative room of their own in which to cultivate this state.
To Woolf, in other words, solitude is not a pleasant diversion, but instead a form of liberation from the cognitive oppression that results in its absence. In our time, this oppression is increasingly self-inflicted by our preference for the distraction of the digital screen. This is the theme taken up by a Canadian social critic named Michael Harris in his book, also titled Solitude. Calmly experiencing separation, he argues, builds your appreciation for interpersonal connections when they do occur.
Harris is not the first to note this connection. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone. I argue that the answer is a definitive yes. To understand my concern, the right place to start is the iPod revolution that occurred in the first years of the twenty-first century.
If you stood on a busy city street corner in the early s, you would not see too many people sporting black foam Sony earphones on their way to work. By the early s, however, if you stood on that same street corner, white earbuds would be near ubiquitous.
The iPod succeeded not just by selling lots of units, but also by changing the culture surrounding portable music. The iPod was pushing us toward a newly alienated phase in our relationship with our own minds. Even though iPods became ubiquitous, there were still moments in which it was either too much trouble to slip in the earbuds think: waiting to be called into a meeting , or it might be socially awkward to do so think: sitting bored during a slow hymn at a church service.
The smartphone provided a new technique to banish these remaining slivers of solitude: the quick glance. At the slightest hint of boredom, you can now surreptitiously glance at any number of apps or mobile-adapted websites that have been optimized to provide you an immediate and satisfying dose of input from other minds. Thoreau and Storr worried about people enjoying less solitude.
We must now wonder if people might forget this state of being altogether. While researching his book, Alter decided to measure his own smartphone use. To do so, he downloaded an app called Moment, which tracks how often and how long you look at your screen each day. Before activating the app, Alter estimated that he probably checks his phone around ten times a day for a total of about an hour of screen time. A month later, Moment provided Alter the truth: on average, he was picking up his phone forty times per day and spending around a total of three hours looking at his screen.
Surprised, Alter contacted Kevin Holesh, the app developer behind Moment. As Holesh revealed, Alter is not an outlier. The average Moment user picks up their phone thirty-nine times a day. As Holesh reminds Alter, these numbers probably skew low, as the people who download an app like Moment are people who are already careful about their phone use. When you add in time spent listening to music, audiobooks, and podcasts—none of which are measured by the Moment app—it should become more clear how effective people have become in banishing moments of solitude from their daily experience.
As recently as the s, solitude deprivation was difficult to achieve. There were just too many situations in everyday life that forced you to be alone with your thoughts, whether you wanted to or not—waiting in line, crammed into a crowded subway car, walking down the street, working on your yard.
The key question, of course, is whether the spread of solitude deprivation should concern us. Tackled abstractly, the answer is not immediately obvious. If you suffer from chronic solitude deprivation, therefore, the quality of your life degrades. When it comes to constant connectivity, these extremes are readily apparent among young people born after — the first group to enter their preteen years with access to smartphones, tablets, and persistent internet connectivity.
As most parents or educators of this generation will attest, their device use is constant. The term constant is not hyperbole: a study by Common Sense Media found that teenagers were consuming media—including text messaging and social networks—nine hours per day on average. This group, therefore, can play the role of a cognitive canary in the coal mine. If persistent solitude deprivation causes problems, we should see them show up here first. And this is exactly what we find.
My first indication that this hyper-connected generation was suffering came a few years before I started writing this book. I was chatting with the head of mental health services at a well-known university where I had been invited to speak. This administrator told me that she had begun seeing major shifts in student mental health. Until recently, the mental health center on campus had seen the same mix of teenage issues that have been common for decades: homesickness, eating disorders, some depression, and the occasional case of OCD.
Then everything changed. Seemingly overnight the number of students seeking mental health counseling massively expanded, and the standard mix of teenage issues was dominated by something that used to be relatively rare: anxiety.
She told me that everyone seemed to suddenly be suffering from anxiety or anxiety-related disorders. When I asked her what she thought caused the change, she answered without hesitation that it probably had something to do with smartphones. The sudden rise in anxiety-related problems coincided with the first incoming classes of students that were raised on smartphones and social media.
She noticed that these new students were constantly and frantically processing and sending messages. As Twenge notes in a September article for the Atlantic, she has been studying these trends for over twenty-five years, and they almost always appear and grow gradually.
But starting around , she noticed a shift in measurements of teenager emotional states that was anything but gradual: The gentle slopes of the line graphs [charting how behavioral traits change with birth year] became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear.
In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the s—I had never seen anything like it. When journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis investigated this teen anxiety epidemic in the New York Times Magazine, he also discovered that the smartphone kept emerging as a persistent signal among the noise of plausible hypotheses. Lots of potential culprits, from stressful current events to increased academic pressure, existed before the spike in anxiety that begins around The only factor that dramatically increased right around the same time as teenage anxiety was the number of young people owning their own smartphones.
When an entire cohort unintentionally eliminated time alone with their thoughts from their lives, their mental health suffered dramatically. On reflection, this makes sense. These teenagers have lost the ability to process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power down their critical social circuits, which are not meant to be used constantly, and to redirect that energy to other important cognitive housekeeping tasks.
When looking for explanations, they might turn to the latest crisis—be it the recession of or the contentious election of —or chalk it up to a normal reaction to the stresses of adulthood.
Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired. Thoreau helped spread this conception. His book about the experience, Walden, is rich with long passages describing Thoreau alone and observing the slow rhythms of nature. Historian W. Barksdale Maynard, to cite one example among many, listed in a essay the many ways in which Thoreau was anything but isolated during his time at the pond. Friends and family, for their part, visited him constantly at his cabin, and Walden Pond, far from an untrammeled oasis, was then, as it remains today, a popular destination for tourists seeking a nice walk or swim.
But as Maynard explains, this complicated mixture of solitude and companionship is not a secret Thoreau was trying to hide. It was, in some sense, the whole point.
What Thoreau sought in his experiment at Walden was the ability to move back and forth between a state of solitude and a state of connection. He valued time alone with his thoughts—staring at ice—but he also valued companionship and intellectual stimulation.
He would have rejected a life of true hermit- style isolation with the same vigor with which he protested the thoughtless consumerism of the early industrial age. This cycle of solitude and connection is a solution that comes up often when studying people who successfully sidestep solitude deprivation; think, for example, of Lincoln spending his summer nights at his cottage before returning to the bustling White House in the morning, or of Raymond Kethledge taking a break from the busy courthouse to clarify his thoughts in a quiet barn.
These practices are not exhaustive nor are they obligatory. Think of them instead as a look at the varied ways that people have succeeded in creating their own metaphorical cabin by the pond in an increasingly noisy world. The glow of the screen distracts patrons from the cinematic experience, and the Alamo Drafthouse is the type of place where people respect cinematic experience. Most movie theaters, of course, politely ask moviegoers to put away their phones, but this particular venue takes this prohibition seriously.
The standard multiplex has implicitly given up on the idea that people can make it through a film without using their phone. Some are even considering formalizing this retreat.
This rise of cell phone as vital appendage is supported by many different explanations. Young people, for example, worry that even temporary disconnection might lead them to miss out on something better they could be doing. Travelers need directions and recommendations for places to eat.
Workers fear the idea of being both needed and unreachable. And everyone secretly fears being bored. People born before the mids have strong memories of life without cell phones. It's for those of you being pulled under the waves of icons that flood your desktop each time you open your computer.
I've written the checklist I wish was available when I started. Are you tired of spending far too many hours looking at your social media screen and putting off other, more meaningful, tasks in your life?
Maybe you have noticed recently that you are spending more and more time either scrolling through your phone, watching videos on your iPad, or vegging. If you want to know why you can't help but keep checking your phone and what harm it can cause your productivity and happiness, then keep reading Do you know how many times you check your phone per day? Have you recently checked your screen time?
A recent Deloitte survey. The key is using it to support your goals and values, rather than letting it use you. This book shows the way. Have you thought about why that is? Probably scrolling through your phone.
Sometimes with intention but sadly a lot of the time we are on our phones because we are bored or we are addicted and fear FOMO. I use tech each and every day so you may be asking why I think this book is so important and questioning why I agree there is a problem?
Well because I started to notice it in my own life and around me. He shows that digital minimalists rethink their relationship with technology, rediscover the beauty of the offline world, and reconnect with their inner selves through periods of solitude. With carefully adapted text, new illustrations and language learning exercises, the print edition also includes instructions to access supporting material online. Titles include popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction, introducing language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content.
Exercises at the back of each Reader help language learners to practise grammar, vocabulary, and key exam skills. Before, during and after-reading questions test readers' story comprehension and develop vocabulary. The longer text is made up of sentences with up to four clauses, introducing future perfect simple, mixed conditionals, past perfect continuous, mixed conditionals, more complex passive forms and modals for deduction in the past.
He has written a number of books on computers and technology. This book is useful for anyone who is worried about the amount of time they are spending online and shows them how to use less technology in their life.
Visit the Penguin Readers website Exclusively with the print edition, readers can unlock online resources including a digital book, audio edition, lesson plans and answer keys. Author Cal Newport argues that many users have become dependent on smartphones and the applications those phones can access to fill spare moments in their days Purchase this in-depth summary to learn more. It allows you to have the essential ideas of a big book in less than 30 minutes.
By reading this summary, you will discover how to use your digital cameras more efficiently to regain your autonomy. You will also discover : that digital tools deprive you of more and more moments of solitude, yet essential to better manage your thoughts; that the unrestricted use of new technologies has an impact on your psychological well-being; that the systematic optimization of your applications will allow you to regain control over your life; that your free time must allow you to have rich social interactions to be truly satisfying; that making better use of your devices means resisting companies that try to steal your time and attention.
Everyone believes in the power of the Internet and recognizes that it is a force that should improve everyone's life. However, many people feel that their current relationship with technology has become unmanageable.
Online tools tend to cultivate behavioral addictions. The irresistible urge to watch your Twitter feed or refresh your Reddit page has become a nervous tic that robs you of your free time. You need to stop passively allowing this clutter of tools, entertainment and distractions that the Internet brings you. The web must stop dictating how you spend your time or how you feel. Aren't you tired of being a slave to your devices? Do you feel like your digital technology use is becoming too habitual?
Don't worry. You're not alone. If you feel like your gadgets are stealing a lot of your time, focus, and energy, then this book, Digital Minimalism in Everyday Life, may have the solution for you. You can also put old and sell them in a bundle. Make sure that the exact parameters of your offer. Use social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook and send out information which includes links to your business to your target audience.
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