9 Ways to Practice Digital Minimalism (and Reclaim Your Freedom)

In the fall of 2018, I decided to pursue minimalism. I spent the next 9 months steadily letting go of 75% of our possessions.

I felt the benefits of decluttering our home immediately. Each box of unwanted or unused items that I jettisoned ushered in a profound feeling of freedom. Untethered from my excess possessions, I had more time to focus on what and who mattered. 

But as I removed our possessions, a new type of “clutter” crept into my life. 

I had started a blog to document our family’s journey into minimalism—I couldn’t believe how life-giving this lifestyle change had been, and I had felt called to share it.

As my online presence grew, I noticed my relationship with my phone was shifting. If my phone was in eyesight, I now felt tempted to check Instagram or blog hits. 

The freedom minimalism had promised dissipated with each enticing iPhone notification. With every compulsive scroll, my time and attention were yet again being pulled away from what mattered. If a device dictated my behavior, it didn’t matter how uncluttered my home was. I still wasn’t truly free. 

Truth is, we are a society attached to our devices.

Consider these recent statistics from ConsumerAffairs:

• Americans look at their phones 144 times a day.
• Americans spend an average of 4 hours and 30 minutes a day on their phone (over 2 of those hours are spent on social media).
• Nearly 57 percent of Americans consider themselves “mobile phone addicts.”
• Three in four Americans admit to feeling uncomfortable without their phones.

The first step to taking back our time, freedom, and attention from our devices is awareness. The second is practicing digital minimalism.

Cal Newport defines digital minimalism as “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.”

In my experience, practicing minimalism with your physical possessions isn’t enough. To truly focus on what matters, minimalist principles also need to apply to your digital world.

Here are 10 Ways to Practice Digital Minimalism (and Reclaim your Freedom):

1. Keep Mornings Quiet

When you look at your phone first thing in the morning, you focus on what your phone says is most urgent, not what matters most to you. Try starting the day with quiet and stillness instead of screen time. Put your phone in airplane mode before you go to bed and keep it that way until you’re ready to interact with it the next day.

2. Make Yourself Less Available

Let go of the idea that you have to be available to everyone all the time. You have no obligation to be constantly “on call.” When responding immediately to dings becomes habitual, broken attention becomes your norm.

Plus, if your phone frequently takes priority over the person you’re with, they may start questioning their importance to you.

3. Consolidate Texting

Instead of responding to text messages as they’re received, consolidate your texting. First, keep your phone in Do Not Disturb mode by default (you can adjust the settings so calls from a selected list, like your Favorites, still come through). Texts will be seen only by opening up the app, making them like emails.

Next, schedule specific times for texting—consolidated sessions where you review and respond to previously received texts. You may choose to text back and forth for a few minutes, but then turn the phone back to Do Not Disturb mode and continue with your day. Despite making you less available, consolidated texting can strengthen your relationships, as your messages become more deliberate.

4. Rethink Email

Remove email notifications from your phone. Maybe even remove your email app entirely. The time it takes to download the app again will give you time to ask yourself questions. Do you really need to check your email again, or are you checking it out of habit? Behavior change requires putting space between a stimulus and a response. Remove what triggers you to refresh your email feed and you’ll do it much less often.

Set specific times to check email, and then limit all email correspondence to those times. Maybe this means checking email at noon and again in the evening. Or maybe you dedicate a block of time several days a week to complete all email-­related work. If you’re not ready to remove the email app from your phone, then consider adjusting your settings so that your email app only refreshes every hour.

5. Raise Your Awareness

Behind social media apps are highly intelligent designers working to get you to spend as much time on their platforms as possible. Any app with a “like” button capitalizes on the fact that our brains release far more dopamine when our reward is unexpected than when it is predictable. (Psychology calls this “variable reinforcement.”) These apps are like slot machines that leave us constantly wondering, “What will I get next?” Keep this in mind before you log on. Don’t fall into their time-­sucking traps.

6. Change How You Use Social Media

Reduce the temptation to mindlessly scroll by removing all social media apps from your phone. Begin using social media only on your laptop, and schedule a set amount of time for social media use. Maybe you check it for thirty minutes in the evening three times a week, or ten minutes a day after lunch. Prepare yourself to be amazed at how much more free time you have.

(Remember, the average American spends over two hours a day on social media.) If you’re not ready to remove social media apps, at least remove all notifications from these apps. You can also set time limits on your social media usage in your phone’s Settings or use apps like AppBlock or FocusMe to lock yourself out of social media apps for set periods of time.

7. Engage in High-Quality Leisure

Use this extra time to engage in high-­quality leisure activities. Learn a new skill (ukulele, knitting, a second language). Go on more walks. Join a cause you feel passionate about. High-­quality leisure is essential to increased focus. Novelty enhances mood and motivation, while rest and play refuel our creativity and capacity to work.

8. Spend Time in Silence

Compulsive smartphone use is driven by an imbalance of two pathways in the brain: the “liking” system and the “wanting” system. When the “wanting” system is in overdrive, we make choices that we don’t rationally like. This is the case in chemical addictions and behavioral addictions alike. Silence helps rebalance these two brain pathways, resulting in less compulsive phone use.

9. Intentionally Spend Time Alone

Before cell phones, our days were full of moments ripe for solitude and self-­reflection: waiting in line, walking down the street, cleaning the house, doing yard work, or taking the subway. Today, these are all opportunities to plug in. Challenge yourself not to use your phone during these natural breaks and instead spend time with your thoughts.

In Conclusion

Newport said, “Humans are not wired to be constantly wired.”

If you’re as exhausted by your compulsive smartphone engagement as I was, I encourage you to embrace digital minimalism by trying a couple of the ideas above. 

Practicing digital minimalism allows our smartphones to work to our advantage, supporting our best life instead of distracting us from it. 

Even when your physical spaces are uncluttered, if your digital practices still have the upper hand, your life will feel anything but connected, meaningful, and free.

***

Julia Ubbenga is a freelance journalist. Her online projects on minimalism, simplicity, and intentional living have reached over 50 million people worldwide. Julia also practices what she preaches in her Kansas City home where she lives with her husband and their five children. You can also find her on Instagram and Facebook.

P.S. You can now find my new book Declutter Your Heart and Your Home: How a Minimalist Life Yields Maximum Joy on Amazon!