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Marcus Aurelius asked: “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?”

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.

checking your “likes” is the new smoking.

from his well-worn path through the world of tech to become

Michael Zeiler’s famous pecking pigeon experiments from the 1970s that rewards delivered unpredictably are far more enticing than those delivered with a known pattern.

a new technology offers little more than a minor diversion or trivial convenience, the minimalist will ignore it.

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.

“less than once a week.”

he settled on posting one picture every week of whatever personal art project he happens to be working on. “It’s a great way for me to have a visual archive of my projects,” he explained.

Principle #1: Clutter is costly.

In the book Walden, he wrote about this experience, famously describing his motivation as follows: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Thoreau’s “new economics,” a theory that builds on the following axiom, which Thoreau establishes early in Walden: “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.”

“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.”

Maintaining an active presence on Twitter, for example, might occasionally open up an interesting new connection or expose you to an idea you hadn’t heard before. Standard economic thinking says that such profits are good, and the more you receive the better.

more often than not, the cumulative cost of the noncrucial things we clutter our lives with can far outweigh the small benefits each individual piece of clutter promises.

optimizing how we use technology is just as important as how we choose what technologies to use in the first place.

They want you, therefore, to think of their offerings as a sort of fun ecosystem where you mess around and interesting things happen. This mind-set of general use makes it easier for them to exploit your psychological vulnerabilities.

the goal was to simply take a break from their digital life before returning to business as usual, also struggled.

checking her remaining social media services once a week, during the weekend.

embrace pursuits that provide you a “source of inward joy.”

In recent years, as the boundary between work and life blends, jobs become more demanding, and community traditions degrade, more and more people are failing to cultivate the high-quality leisure lives that Aristotle identifies as crucial for human happiness.

digital minimalists, therefore, tend to start their conversion by renovating what they do with their free time—cultivating high-quality leisure before culling the worst of their digital habits.

Mr. Money Mustache.

and relax. A decade later, Arnold Bennett took up the cause of active leisure in his short but influential self-help guide, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.

and relax. A decade later, Arnold Bennett took up the cause of active leisure in his short but influential self-help guide, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.

Arnold Bennett took up the cause of active leisure in his short but influential self-help guide, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.

How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.

Expending more energy in your leisure, Bennett tells us, can end up energizing you more.

Leisure Lesson #1: Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.

deep activity like writing a piece of computer code that solves a problem (a high-skill effort) yields more meaning than a shallow activity like answering emails (a low-skill effort).

“Leave good evidence of yourself. Do good work.” This then provides our second lesson about cultivating a high-quality leisure life.

Leisure Lesson #2: Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world.

Leisure Lesson #3: Seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.

There’s a thrill to fixing something that’s broken, but if you’re constantly fixing things, it can get old.

learning and applying new skills is an important source of high-quality leisure.

The simplest way to become more handy is to learn a new skill, apply it to repair, learn, or build something, and then repeat. Start

The simplest way to become more handy is to learn a new skill, apply it to repair, learn, or build something, and then repeat.

try to learn and apply one new skill every week, over a period of six weeks.

You can’t, in other words, build a billion-dollar empire like Facebook if you’re wasting hours every day using a service like Facebook.

by cultivating a high-quality leisure life first, it will become easier to minimize low-quality digital diversions later.

schedule in advance the time you spend on low-quality leisure.

If you want to binge-watch Netflix while live-streaming yourself browsing Twitter: go for it. But outside these periods, stay offline.

You’re not quitting anything or losing access to any information, you’re simply being more mindful of when you engage with this part of your leisure life.

social media users can receive the vast majority of the value these services provide their life in as little as twenty to forty minutes of use per week.

Once you start constraining your low-quality distractions (with no feeling of lost value), and filling the newly freed time with high-quality alternatives (which generate significantly higher levels of satisfaction), you’ll soon begin to wonder how you ever tolerated spending so many of your leisure hours staring passively at glowing screens.

Habit: During the week, restrict low-quality leisure to only sixty minutes a night. Habit: Read something in bed every night. Habit: Attend one cultural event per week.

The more you see these leisure plans as just part of your normal scheduling—and not some separate and potentially optional endeavor—the more likely you are to succeed in following them.

take time to review and remind yourself of the habits included in your seasonal plan. These reminders will prevent you from forgetting these commitments in the week ahead.

By removing your ability to access social media at any moment, you reduce its ability to become a crutch deployed to distract you from bigger voids in your life.

approach social media as if you’re the director of emerging media for your own life.

the idea of endlessly surfing your feed in search of entertainment is a trap (these platforms have been designed to take more and more of your attention)—an act of being used by these services instead of using them to your own advantage.

Good They Can’t Ignore You. You

So Good They Can’t Ignore You.