The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life. (Location 273)
Tags: twitter
Note: .twitter social media breaks up time periods into intervals so short you cant focus
they joined Facebook to stay in touch with friends across the country, and then ended up unable to maintain an uninterrupted conversation with the friend sitting across the table. (Location 280)
I’ve become convinced that what you need instead is a full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else. (Location 311)
Tags: principles
Note: .principles you need clear principle and rules as to why you use tech
Marcus Aurelius asked: “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?” (Location 319)
Tags: minimalism
Note: .minimalism we dont need much in life
When the iPhone first shipped in 2007, there was no App Store, no social media notifications, no quick snapping of photos to Instagram, no reason to surreptitiously glance down a dozen times during a dinner—and this was absolutely fine with Steve Jobs, and the millions who bought their first smartphone during this period. (Location 401)
Tags: iphone
Note: .iphone the iphone was designed to be n ipod which made calls, not features the bells nd whistles it has today
The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children. (Location 444)
Tags: socialmedia
Note: .socialmedia
how tech companies encourage behavioral addiction: intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval. Our brains are highly susceptible to these forces. (Location 537)
Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else. (Location 655)
Note: Happy miss out on those things which are not your priority
minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good. (Location 671)
Tags: focus
Note: .focus dont worrt about missing out on small things. Keep focus on the proven successful things
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. (Location 737)
Tags: declutter
Note: .declutter
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” (Location 787)
Tags: cost
Note: .cost
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. (Location 933)
Tags: amish, principles
Note: .principles start with what you value most and work backward
For many people, their compulsive phone use papers over a void created by a lack of a well-developed leisure life. Reducing the easy distraction without also filling the void can make life unpleasantly stale—an outcome likely to undermine any transition to minimalism. (Location 1151)
Tags: social media, phones, favorite
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. It seemed clear that the persistent communication was somehow messing with the students’ brain chemistry. (Location 1513)
Tags: parenting
Note: .parenting
FI stands for financial independence, which refers to the pecuniary state in which your assets produce enough income to cover your living expenses. (Location 2292)
Tags: fi
Note: .fi your assets produce enough to cover your expenses
when individuals in the FI community are provided large amounts of leisure time, they often voluntarily fill these hours with strenuous activity. This bias toward action over more traditional ideas of relaxation might strike some as needlessly exhausting, (Location 2334)
Tags: fi
Note: .fi fill your day with strenous activity
we can call the Bennett Principle, provides a plausible foundation for the active leisure lives we’ve encountered so far in this section. Pete Adeney, Liz Thames, and Theodore Roosevelt all provide specific arguments for their embrace of strenuous leisure, but these arguments all build on the same general principle that the value you receive from a pursuit is often proportional to the energy invested. (Location 2373)
Tags: pleasure
Note: .pleasure the value and enjoyment derived from an activity is often related to the energy invested
Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption. (Location 2382)
Tags: hobbies
Note: .hobbies
“Many people experience the world largely through a screen now,” Rogowski writes.20 “We live in a world that is working to eliminate touch as one of our senses, to minimize the use of our hands to do things except poke at a screen.” (Location 2402)
Note: We view the world through screens. Our only toch is to poke a screen
Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world. (Location 2441)
Tags: produce
Note: .produce create things for the physical world
The most successful social leisure activities share two traits. First, they require you to spend time with other people in person. As emphasized, there’s a sensory and social richness to real-world encounters that’s largely lost in virtual connections, so spending time with your World of Warcraft clan doesn’t qualify. The second trait is that the activity provides some sort of structure for the social interaction, including rules you have to follow, insider terminology or rituals, and often a shared goal. As argued, these constraints paradoxically enable more freedom of expression. Your CrossFit buddies will holler and whoop, and give you emphatic high fives and sweaty hugs with a joyous enthusiasm that would seem insane in most other contexts. (Location 2532)
Tags: socialing
Note: .socialing meet in person and has structure. Eg. Rules,common lingo
Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions. (Location 2540)
to escape the drain of low-value digital habits, it’s important to first put in place high-quality leisure activities. These quality activities fill the void your screens were previously tasked to help you ignore. (Location 2571)
Tags: leisure
Note: .leisure have high quality leisure time to replace tech usage
[The executive was] just raving about these people spending twelve hours a day on Facebook … so I asked a question to the guy who was raving: “The guy who’s spending twelve hours a day on Facebook, do you think he’ll be able to do what you’ve done?” (Location 2646)
Tags: success
Note: .success
no matter what immediate benefits these services might provide the users, the net impact on their productivity and life satisfaction must be profoundly negative if all these users do is engage the service. You can’t, in other words, build a billion-dollar empire like Facebook if you’re wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook. (Location 2655)
Tags: success
Note: .success you dont become successful.by wasting time on social media
In 1727, Franklin created a social club called the Junto, which he describes as follows in his autobiography: I had form’d most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the Junto; we met on Friday evenings.41 The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss’d by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased. (Location 2698)
Tags: franklin, junto
It’s important to know that the “attention economy” describes the business sector that makes money gathering consumers’ attention and then repackaging and selling it to advertisers. (Location 2826)
Tags: advertising, attention
Note: .attention .advertising
publishers considered their readers to be their customers, and saw their goal as providing a product good enough to convince people to pay to read it. Day’s innovation was to realize that his readers could become his product and the advertisers his customers. His goal became to sell as many minutes of his readers’ attention as possible to the advertisers. To do so, he lowered the price of the Sun to a penny and pushed more mass interest stories. “He was the first person to really appreciate the idea—you gather a crowd, and you’re not interested in that crowd for its money,” Wu explained in a speech, “but because you can resell them to someone else who wants their attention.” (Location 2831)
Tags: attention, advertising, news
Note: .news .advertising .attention newspapers view their advertisers as their customer, to whom they sell their readers attention
Figuring out how to turn smartphones into ubiquitous billboards was not simple. (Location 2855)
Tags: smartphones
Note: .smartphones smartphones are now billboards
- By October, 14 percent of the company’s ad revenue came from mobile ads.
- By the spring of 2014, Facebook reported that 62 percent of its revenue came from mobile,
- The Verge declared: “Facebook is a mobile company now.
This statement has continued to prove accurate: by 2017, mobile ad revenue rose to 88 percent of their earnings, and is still climbing. (Location 2911)
Tags: facebook
Note: .facebook 88% of revenue comes from mobile
Breaking news, for example, is almost always much lower quality than the reporting that’s possible once an event has occurred and journalists have had time to process it. A well-known journalist recently told me that following a breaking story on Twitter gives him the sense that he’s receiving lots of information, but that in his experience, waiting until the next morning to read the article about the story in the Washington Post almost always leaves him more informed. Unless you’re a breaking news reporter, it’s usually counterproductive to expose yourself to the fire hose of incomplete, redundant, and often contradictory information that spews through the internet in response to noteworthy events. Vetted reporting appearing in established newspapers and online magazines tends to provide more quality than social media chatter and breaking-news sites. (Location 3111)
Tags: news
Note: .news breaking news is of lower quality than news received after the event
reject the mind-set that says you must always have your smartphone with you. The hope was to create more occasions for solitude—which we as humans need to thrive. (Location 3192)
Tags: solitude
Note: .solitude humans need solitude to thrive
“Your Time = Their Money.” You should feel empowered to instead invest this value in things that matter more to you. (Location 3215)
Tags: time
Note: .time
We eagerly signed up for what Silicon Valley was selling, but soon realized that in doing so we were accidently degrading our humanity. (Location 3252)
Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves. (Location 3258)
Note: Technology should support your values
digital minimalism is much more than a set of rules, it’s about cultivating a life worth living in our current age of alluring devices. (Location 3266)