Quotes About Technology

To succeed with digital minimalism, you have to confront this rebalancing between conversation & connection in a way that makes sense to you.

Our sociality is simply far too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages & emojis. Any digital minimalist must confront this reality & manage his or her relationship with these tools accordingly. [...] The key is the intention behind what you decide, not necessarily its details.

we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we're now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist. Bad

My author website doesn't provide a personal e-mail address, and I didn't own my first smartphone until 2012 (when my pregnant wife gave me an ultimatum—"you have to have a phone that works before our son is born").

What's making us uncomfortable...is this feeling of losing control - a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child's bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience.

The use of network tools can be harmful. If you don't attempt to weigh pros against cons, but instead use any glimpse of some potential benefit as justification for unrestrained use of a tool, then you're unwittingly crippling your ability to succeed in the world of knowledge work. This

Deep work is so important that we might consider it, to use the phrasing of business writer Eric Barker, "the superpower of the 21st century.

this irresistible attraction to screens is leading people to feel as though they're ceding more and more of their autonomy when it comes to deciding how they direct their attention. No one, of course, signed up for this loss of control. They downloaded the apps and set up accounts for good reasons, only to discover, with grim irony, that these services were beginning to undermine the very values that made them appealing in the first place:

Acuity, ScheduleOnce, Calendly, and, of course, x.ai (to name a few examples among many)

In such a culture, we should not be surprised that deep work struggles to compete against the shiny thrum of tweets, likes, tagged photos, walls, posts, and all the other behaviors that we're now taught are necessary for no other reason than that they exist.

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.

Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough). Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it's not, replace it with something better). Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.

for the first time in human history solitude is starting to fade away altogether.

While email use certainly saves people time and effort in communicating," the authors of the 2016 study conclude, "it also comes at a cost." Their recommendation? "[We] suggest that organizations make a concerted effort to cut down on email traffic.

constantly sending and receiving e-mail messages like human network routers, with frequent breaks for quick hits of distraction.

While the ability to rapidly communicate using digital messages is useful, the frequent disruptions created by this behavior also make it hard to focus, which has a bigger impact on our ability to produce valuable output than we may have realized.

The respected New Yorker staff writer George Packer captured this fear well in an essay about why he does not tweet: "Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I'm morally superior to it, but because I don't think I could handle it. I'm afraid I'd end up letting my son go hungry.

As email spread through the professional world in the 1980s and 1990s it introduced something novel: low-friction communication at scale. With this new tool, the cost in terms of time and social capital to communicate with anyone related to your job plummeted from significant to almost nothing. As the writer Chris Anderson notes in his 2009 book, Free, the dynamics of reducing a cost to zero can be "deeply mysterious,

One study estimates that by 2019 the average worker was sending and receiving 126 business emails per day, which works out to about one message every four minutes.2 A software company called RescueTime recently measured this behavior directly using time-tracking software and calculated that its users were checking email or instant messenger tools like Slack once every six minutes on average.3 A

Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business

As Harris argues, these companies didn't invest the massive resources necessary to perfect this auto-tagging feature because it was somehow crucial to their social network's usefulness. They instead made this investment so they could significantly increase the amount of addictive nuggets of social approval that their apps could deliver to their users.

By working backward from their deep values to their technology choices, digital minimalists transform these innovations from a source of distraction into tools to support a life well lived. By doing so, they break the spell that has made so many people feel like they're losing control to their screens.

For many, the core question of "is this the best way to use technology to support this value?" leads them to carefully optimize services that most people fiddle with mindlessly.

Compulsive use, in this context, is not the result of a character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable business plan.