Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism is a good place to start. Think of it as a mindset, not a to do list.

https://www.calnewport.com/books/digital-minimalism/

Do you mean Digital Minimalism? Cal Newport is the author of both Deep Work and Digital Minimalism but the latter book is the one that deals with the topic of the article.

Reading a fantastic book called Digital Minimalism on this very subject.

Back when I used social media I noticed I'd be very angry arguing with people I didn't even know. Never meet anyone with a job. Deleted all that crap, moved , and had an amazing partner( she had a JOB) within a month.

Life is right here, if your at a coffee shop and you notice someone reading a book that seems interesting ask about it. Works out much more often than chatting with bots. Even when snapchatting with a "real" person, the "typing" notification felt like a raw anxiety machine. Now I only meet people in real life, text her once if she'd like to get dinner at 8 or so and then move on with my life.

Feels really good to hop off the social media hamsterwheel. Me a few years ago:

Gotta get more followers to get more likes to get more followers to get more likes to get more followers. Then maybe my matches will see how cool and popular I am. It's very much pointless. You'll never be popular enough. Without question I've removed the vast majority of stress from my life by ditching social media. Frankly my life is amazing. But if I'm staring at what other people have all day I'll never recognize it. Everyone will post 'just engaged' photos , no one is posting 'our marriage has been really rough, but I don't want to move back in with my parents'.

To add to the parent comment, make a list of people you'd like to stay connected with and add an event to your calendar a few times a week (I do two). Those events are to reach out to one of those people on the list and catch up with them. You can't follow a thousand people like you can one Facebook, but the conversations will be richer and 1000 close connections with distant people probably doesn't provide deep connections anyway. This has been good for me.

Another one I heard in Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport is to hold "office hours" in which you're available for conversation with anyone. What's nice about these is that you can schedule them during downtime like a commute or a regular walk, so you're not losing any extra time.

Might come off as robotic, but scheduling regular conversations with those who are closest to you is really nice and makes sure you're always in communication.

No. My phone is really useful.

Why do you want to quit in the first place? Are you finding it difficult to quit because it's inconvenient or because of some behavioral pattern that you want to eliminate? If it's the former, I wouldn't bother with it - you're just making your life harder for no benefit.

In general I think that the benefits of quitting stuff (social media, entertainment, devices etc) are really exaggerated in some circles. Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism was very popular, there was also the whole concept about dopamine fasting and similar ideas - I really think that we have very little evidence to back those claims and it's become a kind of broscience in which people are sharing what works personally for them as fact, or misattributing effects and relationships and are very susceptible to confirmation bias.

Starting off with new collaboration tooling integration is pretty on target for 2021!

Getting a big vibe of yesterday's "Slack Destroying American Companies"[1]. I didn't actually click through & read, which would have lead me to finding out it's Matt Taibbi having a discussion with Antonio Garcia-Martinez (who personally I am not interested in hearing from). But the title reminded me of a part of Ezra Klein interviewing Cal Newport about his new book, "A World Without Email"[2]. In the interview they spend quite a while discussing how it seems like the whole world is presently stuck with Slack, how there's so little visible mainstream competition. Cal has been engaged with this question of workflow & tech & collaboration for a number years, often from a somewhat anti- standpoint, with books such as "Deep Work" and "Digital Minimalism". Hearing two sharp minds talking about collaboration was incredibly enriching to me.

Notably, the collaboration tools shown at the beginning of IO are for explicit collaboration times. They're not marketed as always on communication devices, not a replacement for slack. But they both are about modern tech-enabled collaboration, which is an interesting topic, and one that seems like we're only just starting to really dive into. Long long long after Engelbart's Mother of All Demos (52.4 years after).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27191181

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/podcasts/ezra-klein-podca...

By now the concept of competing for attention, for the limited 3-4 hours of free time you have a day is well known. To maximize engagement and clicks you just have to appeal to the shittiest parts of human nature - anger, fear, low attention spans. A few people figured out how to make the equivalent of cocaine (e.g outrage porn news, gamified social media) and now there is no going back - you compete with cocaine whether you like it or not. The more technical phrasing is that "intermittent variable rewards" are highly addictive - and this basically explains the entire design of social media or the shitty mobile games you see now.

You can read statements/watch videos by Chamath Palihapitiya or Sean Parker admitting to this being an explicit strategy at Facebook. "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport is also a nice book that covers some of the same ground.

If you ask me, our current way of managing society is a failure. You have large, well-coordinated organizations basically selling cocaine (fast food, youtube, social media, cigarettes) on end, but the other end (consumers) are necessarily less coordinated and informed because they don't operate within an organizational hierarchy with centralized decision making, shared knowledge and people dedicating 8 hours a day to maintaining those systems. Theoretically, companies live and die by how much value they create for their their customers. Practically, many companies resemble organized militia waging asymmetric warfare on unorganized masses in an increasingly zero-sum world.

I think we need to focus a lot on organizing as people outside of the structure of a for-profit corporation. Theoretically the government plays this role but it's not enough.

(inb4 omg you hate capitalism stupid commie)