5 Technology Mistakes You're Making in 2025 (& What You Can Do)
by Parker · 57 things on NewTwos
- Tips and tricks from Cal Newport's book “Digital Minimalism.”
- Cal Newport refers to 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.
- Our world is becoming increasingly noisy and fixing these mistakes and habits can help you live a more focused, intentional, and satisfying life.
- These are 5 mistakes you should avoid to make better use of technology.
- You think social media and texts improve your relationships
- Replacing real world relationships with social media use is detrimental to your well-being.
- The socializing that counts is real conversation, and text is no longer a sufficient alternative.
- You joined Facebook to stay in touch with friends across the country, and then ended up unable to maintain an uninterrupted conversation with a friend sitting across the table.
- Practice: don't click "like" or leave comments, consolidate texting, always be on do not disturb mode, and hold conversation office hours.
- Strive for in-person or verbal communication rather than text based connection.
- You don't use technology to support your values
- Even when a new technology promises to support something the minimalist values, it must still pass a stricter test: Is this the best way to use technology to support this value? If the answer is no, the minimalist will set to work trying to optimize the tech, or search out a better option.
- The Amish do something that's both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.
- "Is this going to be helpful or is it going to be detrimental? Is it going to bolster our life together, as a community, or is it going to somehow tear it down?"
- The Amish prioritize the benefits generated by acting intentionally about technology over the benefits lost from the technologies they decide not to use.
- Be clear on your values and then work backwards to satisfy those values with technology when necessary.
- You don't prioritize solitude
- Solitude is about what's happening in your brain, not the environment around you. It's defined as a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds.
- You can enjoy solitude anywhere so long as your mind is left to grapple only with its own thoughts.
- Solitude can be banished in even the quietest setting if you allow input from other minds to intrude.
- “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal
- The smartphone provided a new technique to banish these remaining slivers of solitude: the quick glance. At the slightest hint of boredom, you can now surreptitiously glance at any number of apps or mobile-adapted websites that have been optimized to provide you an immediate and satisfying dose of input from other minds.
- People are now experiencing solitude deprivation: A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.
- When you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you: the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, and to strengthen relationships.
- Practices: leave your phone at home, take long walks
- You'd rather do nothing
- Embrace pursuits that provide you a source of inward joy.
- A life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity itself generates.
- The value you receive from a pursuit is often proportional to the energy invested.
- Prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption.
- Doing nothing is overrated.
- Describe specific goals you hope to accomplish, with accompanying strategies for how you will accomplish them.
- Investing energy into something hard but worthwhile almost always returns much richer rewards.
- "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." - Henry David Thoreau
- You don't protect your attention
- "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."
- Our attention is up against companies spending billions of dollars making us addicted to their technologies.
- The rapid switching between different applications tends to make the human's interaction with the computer less productive in terms of the quality and quantity of what is produced.
- Focus only on the highest-quality sources of news.
- Breaking news is almost always much lower quality than the reporting that's possible once an event has occurred and journalists have had time to process it.
- Practice: delete social media from your phone, embrace slow media, dumb down your smartphone
- How to improve your use of technology
- Here is a 30-day experiment to minimize the technology you use and live a more intentional life.
- Put aside a thirty-day period during which you will take a break from optional technologies in your life.
- Technologies include apps, websites, and related digital tools that are delivered through a computer screen or a mobile phone and are meant to either entertain, inform, or connect you.
- You should probably also include video games and streaming video in this category.
- Consider the technology optional unless its temporary removal would harm or significantly disrupt the daily operation of your professional or personal life.
- In some cases, you'll abstain from using the optional technology altogether, while in other cases you might specify a set of operating procedures that dictate exactly when and how you use the technology during the process.
- During this thirty-day break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors that you find satisfying and meaningful.
- At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies into your life, starting from a blank slate. For each technology you reintroduce, determine what value it serves in your life and how specifically you will use it so as to maximize this value.
- Don't think of this as a temporary detox. A temporary detox is a much weaker resolution than trying to permanently change your life, and therefore much easier for your mind to subvert when the going gets tough.
- Conclusion
- I hope these mistakes and practices will help you make intentional choices about how you use technology.
- I highly recommend reading “Digital Minimalism” and “Deep Work” by Cal Newport.
- If you'd like to read all of my notes on “Digital Minimalism”, you can do so here
- It's all about awareness, habits, and living the life you want on your terms.
- Thank you for reading.