122: Digital Minimalism with Cal Newport

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Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. Back by popular demand, one of the most listened to Pivot Podcast episodes of all time has been with the one and only Cal Newport. Cal is an associate professor of Computer science at Georgetown University and the author of six books including Deep Work and so Good They Can't Ignore youe. You will not find him on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, but you can often find him at home with his family in Washington, D.C. he has three beautiful boys or writing essays for his popular website calnewport.com Today we are talking about his new book, Digital Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Cal, welcome back to the show.

Hi Jenny, it's happy to be back.

You kicked off your book with one of the most powerful articles that I have read in the last year. It was Andrew Sullivan's quote, I used to be a human being and you say its subtitle was alarming quote, an endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you too. Tell me what jumped out to you about this article, because I remember reading it and having to pick my jaw up off the floor at the end as well.

Sullivan was putting his finger on a phenomenon that I think we're all noticing more and more, which is there's been this shift in maybe the last two years, maybe three years when it comes to people's digital lives. That is what they do with technology, especially in their personal life, where there's this shift where maybe three or four years ago people would joke, oh, I look at my phone too much. Oh, I'm addicted to it. Oh, I'm on Facebook too much. Until more recently, you hear more People like Sullivan saying this is becoming a problem. We're past the point where we're kind of making self deprecating jokes about how we use our phone too much or how we're on social media too much. And people are starting to get worried. They're starting to get worried about how much time they're looking at these screens and more importantly, what that's taking them away from. What is it that they're missing out on in their life, out in the real world when they're sitting there staring at these screens hour after hour, minute after minute, compulsively so. I think Sullivan was a little bit ahead of the game in putting finger on this phenomenon, that our engagement with technology is phase shifting and it's coming from something that maybe we use too much, but it's kind of cool towards something that is overwhelming and now starting to even degrade our sense of being a full human being.

It's so interesting, this language of being a full human being. And it parallels another really powerful quote that you cited from Bill maher in his May 12, 2017 episode, the segment at the End. And I want to read this out loud because it's very striking, he says 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. Because let's face it, checking your likes is the new smoking. Philip Morris just wanted your lungs. Marr concludes, the App Store wants your soul. What I find so powerful about this one too. First of all, both Sullivan and Maher are talking about your soul, your essence, our essence as human beings. And when you cite Bill Maher, what you're citing is this phenomenon that it's not just individuals who are lazy and increasingly addicted to their phones, that actually we are being programmed. And Marr very boldly says they're programming us and we're pushed into it. That you even quote app designers and people who work at tech companies in the book saying phones are the new slot machine.

Right. I mean.

This is partially what's interesting about this phenomenon is that you'll find people who are otherwise very self disciplined, very ambitious. Right? They work out, they are very organized in their work life, they're very good at setting goals and accomplishing goals. They're not at all lazy, and yet they're completely frustrated by how much they're using their phones and the negative impact of it. So what's going on here? And a big part of the answer is what Bill Maher was putting his finger on, which is for some of the things that are attracting us to our phone, in particular, social media apps and certain games are engineered to be addictive. And so that Bill Maher segment where.

He was giving that monologue, it was inspired by a clip he showed of a former Google engineer named Tristan Harris, who had essentially become a whistleblower in recent years to say, look, we're making these things in the slot machines, we are designing these apps and these devices to be as addictive as possible. Our business is extracting time and attention out of your head. And the more addictive and appealing we can make these phones, the more money we're going to make. And that's what we're putting our efforts into. And they've been really successful at that, especially in the last two or three years, which is exactly that period. Going back to what I was saying before, we've seen this phase shift in the last two or three years where they got really, really good at making their apps and services and sites as sticky as possible. This is exactly that same period where people shifted from oh, I use my phone too much to oh my God, I use my phone way too much. This isn't a coincidence. That's what these things are programmed to do.

Did you see the. Probably not, but did you see the south park episode about the Buddha box?

No, I didn't.

Okay. I don't know if anyone has told you about it, but it was so funny. The premise is that they basically say, do you need more quality one on one time with your phone? Do you get interrupted every time you're trying to use your phone? If so, you need a Buddha box that is just a cardboard box that goes over their head that allows them to be immersed in their phone without anybody interrupting them.

It's funny. Yeah.

Such a funny flip on. Because I think what you're describing, and I want to lay the groundwork for this conversation because I do think it's very important that we recognize what's happening at a high strategic level from apps and app developers and companies that are involved in this landscape, because again, it isn't just a lack of individual willpower. And I would even say now there are many people who probably don't even really know or think about that. They're addicted to their phone because it's so normal, it's so ubiquitous in society.

Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, it seems normal. The amount we look at our phones, it seems normal. And so in this book I talk about these digital minimalists who use much, much less technology, and they're much more intentional, and they're rarely looking at their phones except for very specific purposes. And we look at them and say, oh, aren't they weird that they're not pulling out their phone when waiting in line? Or that they're not having their tablet out while they're watching tv, or they don't have their phone on the table while they're at dinner. Isn't that weird? But the minimalists are looking around and they're saying, wait a second, we're not the weird ones. You know how strange this is to see people walking through the street looking at this glowing box? The fact that people spend four to five hours a day looking at their screens. The minimalists are saying, wait a second. I think we're kind of the normal ones here. It can't possibly be the case that this new behavior that's arosen so recently, where we're just constantly pressing and typing and swiping on these little boxes, it can't possibly be that that's the normal thing to do. So it's funny, we've acclimatized to this behavior that's really, really new, but once you step outside of it, it looks so strange, right?

And it also escalates. Like, the more everybody's on their phone, the more there seems to be some kind of expectation that, well, everyone else is on their phone or should be responsive. But going to come back to that, but first, I thought it would be helpful if somebody hasn't listened to our Pivot podcast interviews or they're not familiar with their work. I would love for you and I both to just give our own digital, sort of like blueprint. So maybe tell us just at a high level, your philosophy, how you navigate, you know, just like this kind of stuff, and maybe any challenges, like, what are your biggest challenges in this regard, and then I'll do the same.

Well, so in my own digital life, obviously I'm a subscriber to the digital minimalism philosophy. That's why I wrote about it. The basic idea is that you should be very intentional about what technology you use. In essence, you should start with your values, what's important to you, and then work backwards and say, for each of these, what's the best way, if any, to use technology to support this value? This is the way I think about technologies in my personal life. I put them to use sparingly and intentionally to support very specific things that I value. I don't buy this notion that if something has any benefit, that's enough reason to let it into your life. So because of that, I don't use a ton of personal technology. I don't have any social media accounts. I rarely web surf. I spend large portions of my day without my phone. When I do use technology, it's usually for very specific sort of transactional purposes to help something I really value. That being said, I still have my struggles. For example, anytime we're near a baseball trade deadline, I get a little preview of how addictive breaking online news must be for people who are looking at it all year round. I feel that pull. Wait, I got to check. What if a trade has happened? What if there's some breaking news? I have that pull to it. So there's these occasional exposures I have to the type of life that Andrew Sullivan talked about being fully immersed in. But for the most part, I'm a minimalist. What matters to me is the things that I value, the work I value, my family, my community. Some high quality leisure technology is best used in my life where it could give me a big win on one of those things. And otherwise I'm just not going to bother.

I just love how bold you've been about not setting up any social media accounts, despite probably your publisher every time you have a book coming. In fact, I'm curious with this one. Did they even ask you to have any of those accounts or did they just assume and know that it's of course off limits?

I think somewhere around deep work they stopped asking.

Finally got it.

Yeah, I believe for so good they can't ignore you. I went to meet with my publisher for the first time and they brought in the social media brand expert or something like that. She did not have a lot to do in that particular meeting though. I'll have to say for this new book, we're. We're buying some sarcastic social media ads, you know, that's going to show up on Facebook and like, are you really spending the best. Is really the best use of your time type thing. I think it's going to be fun.

I'll be so curious to hear how those go.

Yeah, we'll see. We'll probably get kicked off, but it sounds like it'll be fun though, right?

Right. It's a good experiment. I can't wait. Because I think one of the biggest questions people have around this is when they're a creator, when they're an artist, they have work that they want to promote or they want to build, quote, a platform. And that's it seems to be a real gray area for people. So actually, before I share my landscape and where I'm at with it, I would love to know what your challenges continue to be around all this and maybe mention that CBC interview that you did with the Canadian network on. Well, but what if artists need to use social media?

Yeah, that was interesting. So I wrote this op ed for the New York Times right around, I think it came out the week after the 2016 election. And the op ed basically said, social media is not nearly as important to your career as you think. Most people don't need to be on social media to help their career. In fact, if you took the time you were spending on social media and rededicated it to improving your skills, you would probably be better off in your career. And at the time, it generated a lot of negative pushback. What's interesting, though, is maybe about six months later, the whole tone had changed. Something changed in this country after the 2016 election, where suddenly people were much more willing to think about social media in a critical or skeptical light, which has been really interesting. But this was before that shift happened. So I had a call from the cbc, which is a radio network. It's kind of like the NPR in Canada, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, to come do one of their live. Yeah, we want to talk about your op ed. So I come on the air and they essentially ambushed me in the sense that they didn't tell me there would be other guests on the show, but they asked me a little bit about the op ed and said, okay. Now joining us is an artist who uses social media to promote his work and a social media brand expert who thinks that social media is the key to life. So they brought in all these people to sort of counter what I was saying. And the funny thing about the artist is maybe about 10 minutes into the interview, he sort of admitted, you know, I do use social media to help promote my artwork, but honestly, like, recently, I really had to take long breaks from it because I wasn't getting any artwork done. So even the person they had brought on to be the canonical case study of why you need social media to promote yourself ended up admitting, actually he had to leave it or take long breaks from it to actually get things done.

My basic argument about that, there's kind of two points. One is in most fields, there's robust channels and marketplaces for recognizing rewarding talent. Widespread social media use is maybe about 5 years old. I don't buy the premise that in most of these existing fields, they now have thrown out and ignore all of these old channels that have been around forever. And they primarily use social media as the main mechanism for identifying and rewarding talent. It's just not the case. Whether you're an artist or a writer or musician, there still exist many, many different ways to have talent be rewarded and recognized. We overemphasize the importance that you have a lot of Instagram followers or a big Twitter following. This is definitely something that's becoming more true in the publishing world. Publishers are realizing, oh, having these huge social media platforms maybe translates to x percent more pre order sales, but it's really not going to be the deciding factor between a book taking off or not. And so we're starting to wise up to it. And then my second point about this is I like the Internet and I like the social Internet and I like the idea that you can use the Internet to connect with people or express yourself or share ideas. My main skepticism is not about that. It's with these giant social media companies. I am really suspicious of this idea that you want to consolidate as much of the Internet as you can into the walled gardens of a small number of large companies. So I'm on the Internet a lot. Cal Newport. I've been writing on calnewport.com for well over a decade. I have a big email list and a lot of followers. I love it. It's how I explore ideas, it's how I meet interesting new people. But I'm doing it on my own terms, on my own site, and not through the auspices of one of these massive attention economy conglomerates. There's a couple different things going on here.

There's a few other things you mentioned too that are consistent with that one. You wrote a thoughtful article on a reputable New York Times platform and you do have an email newsletter. So I love that you just reinforced that. That it's not like you never sign on to the Internet and that you protest the Internet altogether, but when you use it, it's strategic. It's not consolidated on one or two conglomerate platforms. And you do reach out to your list like anybody who listens to and enjoys this conversation. It's not that they have no way to ever learn about your work ever again. They go sign up for your newsletter list and then you get to communicate with them directly. How do you find new people? You write meaningful, thoughtful, value added articles on the Internet and do podcasts like this when you feel like it, when it supports your work, not out of obligation or just reacting.

Yep, I think that's right. And no one else owns it. And I don't have to be worried about using a platform where they're trying to productize me, where they're trying to break down my time and my attention and my data and package it up and resell it, where their business model depends on getting me to use their service as much as possible. I mean, the whole thing is very Orwellian to me as an old school computer scientist nerd who had my own hand coded website in the early 90s that I used to FTP HTML files to the server. I look at this Facebook or Twitter and I was like, this isn't the Internet. Come on, what is this? I wrote an article recently that was like, Facebook is basically to this decade what AOL was to the 90s. It's like a convenient gentle on ramp to what's going on on the social Internet. It doesn't have to be there. You can very well use the Internet to connect with people and express yourself and find interesting ideas. Without Facebook, it's just a useful user interface, but it also has a lot of downsides to it. And I think it's going to go the way of aol, which is at some point people said, actually I'm just going to directly go into the World Wide Web. I don't need to click on the AOL worldwide web for dummy buttons. I think that's where we're going to go with the social Internet. People say, I don't know, there's going to be a lot more tools and more niche types, products and services and I don't need to be on a one and a half billion person platform like Facebook to take advantage of the Internet.

Yeah. I also feel like for each of these platforms there's a small contingent of either A very early users or B super users who can benefit professionally in a kind of winner take all fashion. So we're not saying, oh, none of this can help you be successful. But I think there's a probably an 8020 here. Like there's a 20% that's really thriving and it fits their strengths. And then there's an 80% who are almost like pulled into it mindlessly in a professional sense or you know, out of someone saying you should do this. There's a lot of shoulds for me around this and that's really. I was just mentioning. I'll share a little bit. You were so clear with your philosophy. I don't think mine's as clearly established, but it will be soon after reading your new book. But mine has Been to notice two things. Well, maybe a few. What my strengths are when it comes to reaching out to the world, what feels like a should. So ditching those, even if it doesn't seem logical according to what everyone else is doing, and then being really mindful of new innovations that make me feel reactive. So in terms of strengths, I love podcasting. Similar to you with I don't love writing articles, but I do love creating.

Interesting, unique content that's like a conversation. Like this would be my equivalent of doing an article. And then I do have an email list as well. That's it. I stopped tweeting for the most part. I stopped posting on Facebook because I realized that it just didn't fit my strengths and it put me in a very reactive mode. Responding to reactions and likes and comments. And email tends to give me anxiety. It's like a never ending. I'm just constantly behind. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. And then even text messaging. I was thankful that you addressed texting because texts stressed me out. Now I feel like in the beginning it was just a few people and now they're more ubiquitous and there should be like now a counter of how many times I've said ubiquitous. But I tend to batch text now, just as you suggest in your book, where I actually don't assume they deserve always an immediate response. Nothing to offend the person who sends it, but I can't stand constantly getting pinged. So I end up responding to texts like emails, maybe a week, two weeks later sometimes. And I think that's an outlier. But I just, I don't like the feeling that just because someone has pinged and sort of reached into my world, I drop everything to go address it. Because it can happen all day long.

Yeah, well, see, you might not realize it, but a lot of what you're doing is digital minimalism 101. I mean, think about what you're doing professionally. Like, the core of digital minimalism is saying, I don't care if something has some benefit. Everything has some benefit. I'm sure there were some benefits you got from tweeting. It wasn't just a complete waste of time. What you said is, in the beginning.

I made a lot of friends when it was new and we were early on the scene. I did make friends that way.

But what you did is you said, let me work backwards, 80, 20 style. What do I value most, let's say, in my professional life? And you realize, well, directly reaching, producing podcast content and having a way to directly reach an audience that really likes what you're doing. You say, okay, so what's the way to use technology to do this in the best way? And you're like, well, actually podcasting your blog, your email list. This is actually the highest leverage things I can do with technology. So you focus on the high leverage things. Because of that, you're getting a huge return on the time you spend on technology. That's digital minimalism. The opposite of this is the maximalist approach, which is if anyone at any point has ever given you any argument that something might be useful, you might as well throw it into your life. The problem is when you do that is that you're really not counting the hidden cost of all this clutter. If you take 20 different ways of engaging online and they each have a little bit of value they give you, it's easy for a lot of people just to say, well, great, that's more value. If I add another little thing, that's another little piece of value. So the total value I'm experiencing is going up. But you're not actually counting the cost of all that clutter. What's it doing to your time? What's it doing to your mood? What's it doing to your attention? What's it doing to your capability to enjoy life, to actually produce things at a high level? And this clutter has a lot of cost. Just like if you fill your house with clutter and you eventually become a hoarder, every little thing in your house, there's some value. That's why you have it there. But the overall effect of your house being full of junk is that you feel miserable. It's the same thing with your online life. If you fill your online life with all these little things that each has a little bit of value, a little something you get out of it. The clutter, the weight of all that clutter can end up making you really, really miserable. It's just people are not comfortable sometimes with this idea, turning down things that offer you some value and by doing so, ending up having more value in your life. It's for Americans in particular, it's a little bit paradoxical, but it's an idea that's ancient. These ideas of minimalism are ancient. And so it's no surprise that it works well for our digital lives as well.

Well, that also it reminds me of my relationship with Instagram, because for, I don't know, the first five years, I don't know how long it's been around now, is it 10 already? In any case, I just rejected it Wholesale, like, no, I'm not getting on another thing and I am not that visual a person. So I didn't even want to upload any of my photos. I don't like going out of the moment of my life to report back to vast networks of digital. It's just, it's not my thing. But in the beginning when I created an account, because of course, out of a feeling of should or what you're describing, kind of like in the maximalist mindset, well, I should have one and well, I will have a book coming out at some point point. Facebook automatically had Instagram Follow my 2000 Facebook friends. So for the first few years I would go onto Instagram and just dread it. I don't know why, it was just too many people, all kids, all families. That's fine. I love kids, mostly the people I know as children.

But it wasn't a good experience. It was a lot of social comparison because it was following a Bunch, you know, 2,000 people who are in my vast, far reaching networks. And what I started to do was vigorously unfollow to the point where today I follow, I call it soothing, not social Instagram. So I follow soothing accounts like New Yorker cartoons. There's an account called High Satisfaction. I literally follow handfuls of dogs, bunnies, piglets. These are my animal obsessions.

And I maybe post once every four to six months if I'm just not, because I should just so I find something worth sharing and I set a time limit. I go on and I say, okay, in 20 minutes. And I've noticed my experience with it really shifted where now if I go on, it's a pretty soothing experience because of how I curated it. But it's not social and nor do I need it to be. Although these platforms would kind of direct you that way.

Yeah, well, I mean, that's another example of Digital Minimalism 101, right? Like a core idea of this philosophy. It's not just what, it's also how and when. So when it comes to technology, you can't just make the binary decision, I use this or I don't use this. That's actually what the technology companies want you to think about things that way. Right? Like this is Facebook's. It used to be their big argument. They would say, Facebook is not useless. We can come up with something that you use Facebook for that's valuable. Therefore stop complaining about it and don't think at all about the fact that you're using it two hours a day or whatever. We've decided that it's not useless, which means you should just use it a lot. Get into our addictive web and we'll try to get you in there. And so that used to be their main argument is that it's only about is this completely useless or has some use. And if it has some use, that's the end of the conversation. But what digital minimalists say is, well, that's just the first step is, okay, this technology does something useful. For me, the second step is saying, how and when am I going to use it? It's this optimization that you get a lot of big wins in. I have a lot of stories like this in the book of people who for particular social media platforms, for example, there are specific things that they find valuable, but what they do is they really have a structure for how they use it. I check it twice a week. It's never on my phone, it's on my desktop at home. I just follow these accounts. I do it for this purp it for 20 minutes. And they're getting 99% of the value while avoiding 99% of the downsides. So this being very careful about how and when and not just what is crucial to digital minimalism. It's also something that the big tech companies hate. It's their worst fear. I mean, their whole business model is built on, we need you to use this a lot. And the problem is if most people are honest about most of the social media platforms they use, and I've done this exercise with a lot of people, and if they sit down and really list out what are the key things I do on here that are very valuable and that I would really miss if I wasn't on this platform. Typically, the things that the average person lists are things that could be satisfied in maybe about 20 minutes of use twice a week.

The social media companies don't want you thinking about this because if everyone used it twice a week on their desktop for 20 minutes, it could get most of the value. Their market valuation would fall by a factor of 10. I mean, Facebook would go from a $500 billion company to whatever $5 billion company, it would drastically reduce the amount of value they're able to produce for their shareholders. They hate that idea. They really want you to think about their services as just these general use technologies that you either use. And it's an experience. You just log on and just let them take you on a ride. But what you're talking about with Instagram, that's the minimalist approach and that's really the right way to Think about things. If you need a particular technology, don't just settle for the binary decision of yes or no. Say, okay, how am I going to use this? And when am I going to use this? And those two questions can give you massive amounts of mastery, again, over the digital aspects of your life.

And I'm also observing too to see is this working for me? Do I want to stay on here or not?

You've described something really important that I just want to highlight, which is this shift similar to the magazine industry where I forget his name, you quote him in the book. But a guy kind of realized, oh, it's not magazine readers that are the customer, it's actually advertisers. And therefore the more subscribers we can generate for magazines, the more money we can make through advertising. And those are the real customers that we need to make happy. So the same thing is happening now with our phones that you've said they become this never ending billboard, our phones. It's so true when you put it like that.

It just flashed. It just couldn't be clearer. Like we are walking around. Billboards are not just on the side of the freeway anymore or walking down the streets in New York. They are on our phone and they are all the time. We're seeing ads everywhere, interstitials, not just when you're reading articles, they're in every app there and we've become used to them. But it's like we don't have to succumb to that. We don't have to just let our phones be these walking billboards. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Well, I mean, that's exactly right. And I think we underestimate the degree to which this was a massive innovation in the attention economy. Right. This idea that until recently we figured we had pretty much saturated the attention economy. Possibilities for extracting attention. We had billboards, we had things on cars, we had tv, we had radio. There wasn't much places left for us to get people's attention. But then the smartphone came along. And that's what's fueling this massive multi trillion dollar sector of our economy, is they realized, like, wait a second, a smartphone can deliver advertisements everywhere else that we can't put advertisements. But the problem was how do we get someone to look at their smartphone in all the times when they weren't looking at other types of advertisements? And that's where the social media companies and the infotainment sites figured out. If we can make these sites, apps and services addictive.

Then we can essentially train people to always look at these mobile Billboards. Furthermore, if we can get people to essentially enter data about themselves while they're doing it, we can tailor ads. Now we have billboards that follow you everywhere, and you're voluntarily spending your time to type in lots and lots of information about yourself so the ads can be targeted. This is massively valuable. Massively. I mean, it has taken the size of the attention economy and has multiplied it by huge factors. I mean, this is serious, serious money. This is why Facebook was worth $500 billion. That's entirely off of this insight that we can turn phones into mobile billboards if we can just trick people into looking at them all the time. We see this behavior of always looking at our phones, like, yeah, we're just kind of high tech. And that's the world this day. And we're up and we're connected. And we tell these stories about how modern we are and how connected modern life is. The attention marketers look at it and say, look what we've done. We've tricked a billion people into looking at our billboards all day. I mean, that behavior was invented to create money for these companies. It's not high tech, it's not being with it. It's all these storylines they tell. They somehow tricked a billion and a half people to become compulsively checkers of their billboards, which is why a small number of these people are making a massive amount of money. I look around and see that. I don't say, hey, look at how high tech and modern we are. I look around and say, man, we've.

Really been duped.

I get so angry. The other day I was searching on Google. I tried to stay signed out of Google so that I have Google search because although it is convenient that it tracks your tabs across devices and remembers things, I find targeted ads and the tracking so frustrating that anything you click on, it's going to follow you around the Internet. But I was so angry the other day because I did a Google search. And on the bottom, I don't even think I'd completed my search yet. And it said, articles you might like on the Google homepage. That used to be this pristine, clean, simple page. And now there was this article suggestion. And first of all, ever since I was a kid, I stopped watching local news on TV because it gave me nightmares. It was terrifying. I was convinced I was going to get kidnapped at any second. But so now, for 15 years, I've subscribed to the New York Times on weekends only. So I only consume my news through the paper edition on Saturday and on Sunday. Yes. Sometimes I miss big things during the week, but for the most part, no. And then to see these article suggestions show up on my search. And of course it said, you know, do you want to opt out of article suggestions? Click here. Which I promptly did. But it's like they're gonna chase you down to every corner if you're not careful. And pretty soon you're clicking on stupid articles when you weren't even intending to go read an article at that moment.

Yeah, it is frustrating. It is Orwellian. And the bigger issue here, and it's kind of one of the main points of the book, is that the role a lot of these technologies have played is that they've allowed you to avoid actually doing the hard self reflection and making the hard decisions about what you really want to do with your life, what you really want to do with your time. Because you can paper over every minute of downtime with this sort of mild distraction and reactivity and outrage or whatever it is, right? You can distract yourself at every moment of downtime. And by doing that, you can get away from actually having to make the hard decisions of what do I actually want to do with my time?

What do I want to do with my life? What do I want to do with my leisure time? What type of person do I want to be? These are vital, important questions. Now, typically we were forced to confront these things because boredom is a big motivator. So if it was 100 years ago and you're sitting on the porch after a hard day of farming, you are going to be bored, right? And boredom is a big motivator. So you would actually do the hard work of whatever, reading a book or having a conversation with a neighbor or working on a project. And these were very fulfilling to us. But now we can satisfy that itch for boredom with all these really trivial things at a moment's notice. And therefore we lose the drive to actually do the higher quality activities that we need to thrive as a human being. So a big idea behind minimalism is you can't let the technology dictate what you do with your time, what your life is like, what you pay attention to, how you feel. That's not the right source of meaning and direction in your life. You need to put it aside, make some hard decisions about what do I really love, what's really important to me, build a life around those things, and then go back and use tech only when it helps it. Right? Once you know what you want to do, what's the right way to spend your time what makes you happy, what makes you meaningful, what makes you fulfilled. Once you figured that out, then you can go back and say, hey, is there some way that I can use tech to help me do this even better. That's why I have this big idea in the book. I ran 1600 people through this experiment last year where you should take 30 days. I call it the digital declutter. Take 30 days, get all the optional technology out of your leisure time. 30 days to get away from that and to get back in touch with what really matters to you. To get back in touch with the analog activities that give you real meaning of satisfaction. Then when the 30 days are over, make technology earn its way back into your life. Start with the blank slate. And then for Instagram, for example, to come back into your life, it has to earn its way back into your life. You have to say, you know what, there's something that's really important to me and Instagram is really going to help me do that. And if it doesn't pass that test, it doesn't come back in. This is what I've really been advocating. Wipe the slate clean with a 30 day digital declutter. And then make any of these technologies to come back into your life. Make them earn a way back into your life by having a really compelling reason for them to be there. If you do this, it really cleans up your digital life. Just like decluttering your house gives you that extra breathing room and that sense of intentionality. I don't mean to wander or babble about it, but I really want to emphasize that a lot of what I've been talking about and writing about recently, it's not just that, hey, here's what's bad about technology. It's about, here's the meaning and the value and the satisfaction you can build into your life if you're willing to push technology off to the side and use it as a tool, not the center of what you do with your time.

Absolutely. And I'm glad you brought that digital declutter up, because I was going to ask you about it next. And in fact, I got a question from Valerie in Momentum, who asked, how do we hold ourselves accountable? And I know that within the 1600 people who did your first digital declutter, you said not an insignificant number wrote back and said how hard it was that they had a hard time sticking with it for 30 days.

Yeah, people definitely found it was difficult. Because what it turns out, there's two things. One, there's the sort of addiction factor. So it's hard when you take these technologies out of your life. At first you feel an itch. I need to check something, I need to look at something. And that can be really difficult. The second thing that people discovered is that high quality leisure, like doing meaningful things with your time is hard work. And we've forgotten how hard it is because we don't do that anymore. We just look at our screens and it's easy and it's lightweight. And so people definitely reported that it was harder than they remembered. They get back into these more meaningful analog leisure activities. But they also reported that they forgotten how much they enjoyed it and how much it was worth doing. So yeah, this is not easy. Transitioning back to a more meaningful value centric life is not easy, but it's definitely worth it.

Definitely. There are so many good strategies that you share in the second half of the book. Become less available, batch and consolidate text messages, have your phone on vibrate or do not disturb by default. Which I do that a lot as well. One of the most controversial is you say, stop interacting with your friends through likes and comments on social media.

Yeah, that is probably one of the more controversial suggestions. But there's an important foundation to it. So the idea is if you look at the research on social media, you see there's this paradox which is the really well designed studies, the studies that are done by really good teams published in the really good journals are consistently starting to find the same result, which is the more people use social media, the more lonely they feel. This doesn't really make a lot of sense at first because social media is a tool used to connect to people. So why would that make you feel more lonely? And the conclusion that's starting to emerge from this data, at least a pretty plausible hypothesis, is that what's happening is when people use social media, they interact less with people in the real world because we have this fundamental drive to connect with people, to interact with people. It's central to our nature. And if we don't, we feel really unhappy when we connect with people online. So we click like we leave comments, we do whatever you do on social media or text, it tricks you into thinking, okay, I'm being social, I'm scratching that itch. But it turns out that our brain is evolved to expect a much richer type of interaction. Our brain needs analog feedback. It needs to hear someone voice, it needs to see facial expressions, it needs to look at body language. There's a much richer data stream our brain expects when it's thinking about social interaction. So what's happening is the more you use social media, the less you tend to do old fashioned real world interaction. And when you start reducing real world interaction, you get more lonely. The online interaction is a poor, poor substitute for actual analog real world interaction. And so if you do a lot of online interaction, you're almost certainly going to do less of the real world interaction. And the result is going to be you'll be less connected, you'll feel more lonely. And so my advice is change the way you think about social media or text message communications. In your mind, don't count any of that as actual socializing. If you were leaving comments on a friend's post on Facebook or something, don't think about that as I was talking to my friend today. Or if you send a text message to someone, don't think about that as like I've been interacting with that person. Only count actual real world interaction, be it in person or on the phone or on FaceTime, but something where you have an actual analog communication, a stream of these rich cues. And in this mindset you think about social media and text messaging as mainly being more logistical. It's what you use to help set up real world interaction. It's what you use to realize so and so just had a baby, so I should call them or so and so is in town, so I should try to set up a time to get together with them or to meet with them. But you change the way you think about it such that anything that's just digital really doesn't count as socializing. And so once you change that mindset and you downgrade digital interaction to be more sort of convenient and logistical, but not counting as satisfying that itch to connect, you're gonna end up being much less lonely and much happier.

Awesome. Thank you for breaking that down. We also had a question from Peggy about how to healthily do communications work and this I've heard a lot as well. So for people who it really is part of their job, one of your suggestions. So a couple around social media, in addition to what we just talked about deleting it from your phone. So if you're going to use it for work, do work, use social media like a pro. And slow social media. I would just love if you could describe those two things for the people who are not going to sign off altogether, where they do feel that it's vital to their work or reaching new audiences. How do you use it like a pro? And then what is slow social media?

Well, I certainly had a good Time spending time with what we can call social media professionals. So people, for example, who run the social media presence for a large company or something like this. And if you spend time with social media media professionals, what you'll notice is they don't use it at all. Like most casual consumer users. First of all, they're not using it on their phone. I mean, the only reason to interact with social media on your phone is if you own a lot of stock in that company and you want to make sure that they're getting enough of your user engagement minutes. The apps on the phone are designed exclusively to create addictive overuse, and there's no reason it has nothing to do with professional benefits. So professionals use social media on their desktop. They almost always have pretty complicated tools that they use along with it. So a lot of people have heard about TweetDeck, but I learned when I was talking to these pros that there's all these really complicated software tools that only large companies use that really helps them dive deep into social media feeds and see what's going on. And also, more importantly, they're very structured and planned about how they use social media. So if they're trying to extract information from it, they have very specific types of searches they do, and they do it on a fixed schedule to see what's going on. They often actually build out software to do these things for them. And if they're trying to communicate on behalf of their brand or something like this, they have a very carefully constructed editorial schedule where this information, when it's going to get published and how it's going to get published. A lot of this is automated, but you'll never see a social media professional just sitting there on their phone browsing or clicking or seeing what's going on. If you do need to use social media for work, don't let that be an excuse to just casually and idly use social media whenever you want. That's not the way professionals do it. They're much more structured about how they actually approach these tools. Much more structured, much more scheduled.

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. And does that relate to slow social media as well?

So by slow social media, I'm wondering, are you referring to the slow media?

Yeah. Oh, maybe it was slow media. Okay, I just added the social package.

Well, it could work for that. Yeah. I mean, the slow media movement comes out of Germany, but it's sort of like the slow food movement, but for information consumption. And the idea is the Internet's a great source of information. It's much easier to get information than it used to be when we didn't have the Internet. But if you're just jumping around from link to link and post to post and clickbait, it's like eating fast food. It's a really unsatisfying experience that leaves you less healthy than when you began. So the slow media movement is essentially saying, slow down, consume online information from really high quality sources and don't follow a bunch of links. Like a good example of someone engaged in the slow media movement might have two or three magazines they follow online, and maybe what they do is on Sunday morning they download the most interesting articles to a tablet and then bring that tablet to a coffee shop and they sit there for an hour and read it.

With a plugin that strips out all the ads or something like that. That slow media, it's like having a great meal. You focus on very high quality sources of information, you create a very rich consumption experience and you really control how you do that engagement in such a way that it's very meaningful and creates more benefit in your life than harm.

Okay, so short of a 30 day digital declutter as we wrap up, what is one piece of homework or one action that you could suggest to listeners if they want to start on this?

I mean, you've said so many already, including the slow media movement. That's a really helpful piece of advice.

Yeah, so if you want to dabble with minimalism without committing, which you do.

Say is not ideal anyway.

Yeah, but if you want to dabble before you commit to doing the full 30 day declutter, a couple quick things would be useful. One, break the idea that your phone always has to be with you. And just get used to spending more time in your day where your phone's just not nearby. I mean, that alone just kind of plugs you back into the rhythms of the world and your own thoughts and what's going on around you and breaks you free from this need to always be looking at a screen. And two, start reflecting again on what is really valuable to you. What activities do you like the best? What type of connection or interaction or activity has been a deep source of value. And start adding some of this back into your life. Start rediscovering the analog side of your life that you've probably lost more than you really realize because of the time you spend online. So even before you start cutting out digital things from your life, if you start building up the high quality analog, it's going to be much easier to make the transition to digital minimalism. If and when that time comes.

The other thing I'll add is that from the outside, one could look at both of us and say we're like two poles, opposing poles of a magnet. Like we'll never connect because how do you connect to digital minimalists? It's like impossible. But actually we connect like when you have a book coming out or we have some professional sync, we don't interact at all in between. But it has not harmed our professional relationship. I could say that I feel like over the years I never think less of you because I can't reach you. It just builds and builds over time when it's adding value and very relevant. And I can say that the fact that both of us aren't on social media hasn't affected that. And I think it's an interesting case study that you can still move relationships forward even in the absence of all those likes and comments.

I think it's absolutely true. I mean, this is my relationship with my friend circle.

I don't know what's going on in their life day to day because I'm not on social media. But when we connect, we really connect and we have multi hour long phone conversations or long walks or an afternoon meals. And so this is how I interact with my friends. It's less frequent but more deep when we do it. And it's a very fulfilling way to be connected with people in my experience. And I don't think I'm missing anything. In fact, I'm probably much better off than if instead I replace those occasional deep interactions with just lots of shallow things. I think the research is pretty clear. The lots of little shallow things is no replacement. So yeah, I agree, this is a good case study. You can be connected to someone, respect someone, know what's going on, feel like there's a relationship there without having to click a little button under a picture of what they had for breakfast that morning.

It just has not impaired our professional relationship in any way. We build outside of the conglomerates. So High five.

Kal. Thank you so much for everybody listening. If you enjoyed this interview and you want to dive more deeply into all these concepts, be sure to check out Digital Minimalism Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. And I'll link to all the articles and resources we mention in the show notes, including our two previous Pivot podcasts. Cal, huge. Thanks again. It's always such a joy to talk with you.

Well, thanks Ginny. I enjoyed it.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow.

Hasn't it always.