Top Highlights

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Principle #2: Optimization is important. Digital minimalists believe that deciding a particular technology supports something they value is only the first step. To truly extract its full potential benefit, it’s necessary to think carefully about how they’ll use the technology.
• “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.”6,7