For the second installment of our quarterly book club at H+D, we searched for a balm for the previous entry, “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” by Cory Doctorow. His 2025 bestseller offered a depressing deep dive into the almost inevitable decay of online platforms, driven primarily by corporate greed. To brighten up the discussion, we turned to “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in A Noisy World,” by Cal Newport.
While Newport’s book also covers the downsides of online platforms, he focuses primarily on how they negatively effect users and what those users can do to mitigate or even remove their resulting harm. Newport also highlights the rise of smartphones and the corresponding impact on the amount of time we all spend online.
Despite smartphones’ current status as do-everything devices, the design team for the first iPhone primarily focused on combining a phone with an iPod – with internet browsing and apps considered less important functions. Even competitors like the Blackberry concentrated on call quality and fast, reliable email access instead of internet browsing. However, smartphones now offer much wider functionality with calling as one of the least-used functions for many users, particularly younger ones. As a result, we increasingly reach for our smartphones as a source of entertainment or distraction not only in public but while at home as well.
According to Newport, the average user checks their smartphone 85 times a day and spends over two hours a day on social media. However, these statistics are from a book published in 2019 and likely represent an even earlier measurement period. The more recent statistics that we found paint an even more deary picture. Indeed, according to surveys by Reviews.org, in 2026 the average American respondent checked their phone 186 times a day (roughly every 5 mins while awake) with the total time spent on the phone at just over five hours a day (see chart).
Despite these worrying stats, many Americans do seem to understand the need to break, or at least moderate, their smartphone habit. The Reviews.org survey found that over 45% of members of all four generations (Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z) considered themselves addicted to their phone. A 2025 YouGov survey further found that 53% of U.S. adults wanted to reduce screen time, with the youngest cohort (ages 18-29) most interested at 69%. The question remains: how to do so and to what benefit?
Newport’s answer is to embrace digital minimalism, which he defines 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.”
Newport argues that the effectiveness of digital minimalism lies in three core principles: clutter is costly; optimization is important; and intentionality is satisfying. Embracing Newport’s version of digital minimalism requires accepting each of these principles, and he provides persuasive arguments for each.
Newport’s next step, a 30-day “digital declutter”, failed to connect with most of the H+D book club. Members felt committing to the time restrictions would be hard given how engrained the phone has become in both work and personal life. Additionally, some of the parents in the room felt like the decluttering timeline would work better with very young children or after the children left the nest. Unlike some other practices in the book, few of the H+D readers expect to attempt the 30-day process in the near term.
In contrast, Digital Minimalism’s focus on solitude and its benefits resonated heavily with many of us. Newport makes a compelling case for carving out time to spend alone with your thoughts, unencumbered by music, conversations, and especially digital distractions. Concentrating on your own thoughts and experiences, encourages “the insight and emotional balance that comes from unhurried self-reflection.” While solitude and self-reflection sometime invoke visions of hermitage, Newport points out that a daily walk or run in nature without your earbuds or phone also constitutes solitude. The book points out that historical giants like President Abraham Lincoln and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. found solitude in a small parlor or kitchen table at night, along with their thoughts and reflections.
Reclaiming leisure, according to the book, is another positive outcome from digital minimalism. The benefits of high-quality leisure such as gardening, woodworking or playing sports, not only include improved work-life balance but also increased work performance when the activities are energizing. While the H+D book club positively reacted to the emphasis on work-life balance, some felt Newport was overly focused on physical activities over mental activities, like gaming or reading. Another take away from the chapter on leisure was the need to practice leisure activities while still part of the work force. Many participants noted that more than a few people in both their personal and professional spheres struggled upon retirement since they didn’t develop leisure as a skill prior to leaving their job.
So how does one actually practice digital minimalism? While there is no “magic bullet” here, we each picked a few of Newport’s more practical strategies, including implementing notification management for texts, emails, and social media to reduce distractions. Using message responses and ‘Do Not Disturb’ modes for after-hours work emails and chats can also be effective. To help use technology more intentionally, consider removing apps like TikTok and YouTube from mobile devices and monitor screen time to encourage enrichment over passive distraction. Turn off the radio or podcast when driving or taking showers to create more moments of solitude. Finally, create weekly or seasonal plans to help ensure that high-quality leisure remains a priority.
While Digital Minimalism may not be a completely cheerful cleanser for Enshittification, the book does provide a more optimistic approach to embracing technology and offers many practical approaches to dealing with the digital deluge in our daily lives. Some of the book’s recommendations, like a 30-day digital declutter, may not be practical but there are a number of smaller changes that most readers can both implement and benefit from greatly.
