On Digital Minimalism
On how I discovered Digital Minimalism, and how everything in my life non-magically improved.
This Was My Normal
Four months ago, my brain was a lot messier.
My day would start with scrolling Twitter, Reddit, various news outlets, and, of course, Stripe notifications. That is a whole lot of dopamine within the first 10 minutes of waking up.
The rest of the day didn’t look any calmer: emails, Discord chats, more endless scrolling, more outrage at current political events, and a YouTube video or a Podcast playing in background at all times. These would follow me around in my iPhone, at home on my MacBook. Fully synchronized and always present.
This sounds familiar, I suspect. After all, it does look like it’s what everyone else is also doing. It’s what feels normal, today. Yet, just six years ago, things felt… calmer.
Things changed when I stumbled upon Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism (ironically, through my podcast’s obsessive consumption) and picked it up skeptically.
I’d already deleted Facebook and Instagram years earlier, and I’d muted most notifications on my smartphone. Surely it had nothing to teach me, right? Fortunately, I was wrong.
The Addictions I Didn’t See
As a small company founder, I normally juggle between quite a few things: customer support, marketing, business development, and generally just making sure everything is solid. It is not unheard of that company founders are especially busy, especially when they’re the entire manpower of the company.
While this is all true, what I later realized is that I used this excuse to feed some behaviors that, in hindsight, were terrible for my mental health.
The worst part of this started during the COVID19 pandemic - I was fairly disciplined prior to this. This was not only due to the terrible social isolation it caused (I spent about 4 months alone in my London apartment) but also because it coincided with me transitioning from being a full-time employee, to a scrappy Indie Founder hungry for autonomy and success.
Let’s start from my largest addiction: X/Twitter.
It’s probably hard to see at first, but social media like Twitter create a pretty ugly loop. Reading and scrolling make you mildly upset, then you keep scrolling to feed your brain better information, and it ends up doing the opposite.
After scrolling Twitter for more than 10 minutes, I was visibly more angry, anxious and pessimistic. Reddit worked very similarly, so I won’t repeat it; it’s just a lot of the same.
Stripe notifications
This was more subtle and it took me a bit longer to realize. Stripe Notifications can quickly become a drug you have a growing business: the dopamine of emails when a customer buys your product are really hard to describe. It just feels that good. Little did I know, it became a very real addiction.
When you develop an addiction to receiving good news at random times of the day, it’s like a slot machine. The issue with businesses is that sometimes they go well, and others they do not.
When they go well, your phone keeps notifying you that your bank account just got higher while you’re sipping coffee on the sofa; when the phone is silent, however, it’s when things start to look bleak. You keep checking; sometimes every hour, sometimes every 15 minutes. In the morning, the first thing I’d do is to check for Stripe notifications. No notifications? Uhm, so weird. Let me check in the app, maybe something went wrong.
Do you see where this is going? My mood was now entirely dictated by whether I’d receive or not a Stripe notification.
Online News
I used to be pretty obsessed about being constantly informed about current events. Opening The Guardian’s website was one of my default actions as soon I woke up; at my worst, I used to play Sky New’s Live of the UK Parliament. Oh yes, that’s embarrassing.
Now, there is value in being informed - but Online News can easily be as addicting as social media, especially those who use their new live format.
I used to smugly look down on people that weren’t as informed as me. What, how can you not know of this awful law they’re discussing in parliament right now?. Yeah, not proud of that.
Day-to-day, consuming news endlessly greatly contributed to my anxiety. It doesn’t help that I live in a country that can be potentially at war at any time, and that the media talks about it on a weekly basis. It also doesn’t help that the world, in the past 3-4 years, has been a really shitty place overall.
But Online News learned from the best: social media companies. The “Live” and “Breaking News” are a constant stream of anxiety-inducing information landing on your screen real-time. The pulsing red dots that give you the feeling of receiving information as it happens. The notifications counter even made it to the Browser’s tab bar, so it can catch your attention when you’re not looking. It’s a lot, and I was deep into it, far too much actually.
Work
I was addicted to work. I still am in many ways, but I am more aware of it, which allows me to manage it better.
The addiction manifests through excessive, obsessive need to check my emails and the Discord server through which I manage my customers’ communication and support.
I’d check these while at lunch, dinner, out with friends, late at night before falling asleep, and the first thing I’d check while still in bed.
Sometimes it’s a customer expressing gratitude, other times is a disappointed or disgruntled one; some times, instead, it’s reports of complex or embarrassing issues in my products.
This won’t come as a surprise, but this need to be in constant control of every situation has been severely affecting my mental health in the past 5 years. The Always On state prevented me from relaxing and turning my mind to anything that wasn’t work related. Work followed me everywhere and anytime - together with both the good and the bad emotions that came with it.
I have the feeling that many fellow founders will find the same behavior rather familiar.
Reading Digital Minimalism made me realize a lot of these behaviors that, on the surface, do look pretty ordinary. As I came to realize, this is a much different lifestyle I have been living in the past 6-7 years, and not at all a healthy one.
What I Actually Changed
Leave the phone at home
This sounds crazy and scary - but yes, consider leaving your damn phone at home.
I absolutely understand that this is not feasible for a lot of you; perhaps you are driving in a city you don’t know, or have children that need to contact you.
I am not in the same situation, so it’s presumptuous of me to think anybody can apply such a drastic change in their lifestyles. Like Cal Newport mentions, you don’t need to be so strict: first, you can disable notifications (except those critical, such as your family’s); secondly, place your phone stashed away in your backpack so you can’t reach for it every time you’re bored.
These two tiny adjustments will over time reduce your inclination to reach for quick dopamine hits in your idle time; perhaps you’re walking home from work, waiting for your coffee to be ready, eating dinner at home, and so on. These are all situations where I’d normally picked up my phone for a quick dose of Twitter doom-scrolling.
Scheduling and Intentional consumption
I keep a log of most of my day in Apple Notes, including scheduling downtime where I am allowed to consume time on social media I find useful.
Whenever I mindlessly navigate to Twitter, Reddit or other websites not related to work, I add them to my log. Ideally it’s not a behavior I should engage in in the first place, however if it happens I just accept it and make a note of it. This helps me build awareness.
I didn’t fully shut down these services from my life: instead, I focus on using them more intentionally. In my daily logs, I make space for time dedicated to media consumption. For example, after work, I might schedule 30 minutes browsing Reddit, Twitter, Linkedin - or listening to a Podcast.
While I am not religious about this, it’s certainly one of the best strategies I have found to find the time to keep an online presence without falling into doom-scrolling rabbit holes that go on for hours and hours.
In general, I try to do this after my work log is completed; I need to earn the leisure time.
Replacing activities I carried out on my iPhone
While I’d drastically reduced phone usage (from about 6-8 hours to 1-2 hours a day) there was still room for improvement. In particular, I love reading ebooks before bed on my iPhone; this is not great for sleep, nor is it great for avoiding the urge of Googling things while reading. I replaced my phone’s bedtime role with a Kobo Clara.
This not only helped with reading e-books; any articles I want to read — including my now-reduced news diet — get saved to Instapaper from my laptop and synced to the device. I plan on reading general news exclusively on weekends, but I haven’t yet found an automation to prevent me from navigating to the website itself. That’s a work in progress.
The Apple Watch was a surprise. I didn’t expect it to help, but it effectively replaced my iPhone in most situations where I’d previously used it as a crutch — the gym especially. Dedicated fitness apps meant I had no reason to bring my phone. And for genuine emergencies, public WiFi is enough.
Between the two, I removed my phone from the two moments it had the most power over me: the hour before sleep, and the hour at the gym.
Disabling Notifications
Of course - I can’t and don’t want to fully stop using my iPhone. That doesn’t mean I should allow it to intrude into my daily life as freely as I used to do.
That means disabling most notifications - including group chats on Whatsapp, Discord, Stripe, email newsletters, and so on. I kept the ones that ping me to meditate and learn Chinese, two very productive activities.
Waking up being unable to know whether I made sales or not without actually logging into Stripe, has been incredibly helpful to reduce my addiction. I now log in weekly; if there is a downtrend, then I step in to analyze a possible cause.
What’s Different Now
Focusing on a single task
The ability to focus on a task was definitely one of the hardest problems I used to have. Whether it was work, watching a Netflix TV show, or reading a book chapter, it was normal to distract myself by peeking at my iPhone notifications, a quick Twitter scroll, or a YouTube short in the background.
These quick dopamine shots had completely broken my ability to focus on a single task at any given time; including those that are not supposed to be boring.
Besides scheduling and logging, I found the Pomodoro Technique very useful to keep myself focused on the current task, at least for work tasks. I have used this strategy for over 15 years now, but never consistently enough.
As expected, I can now watch an entire movie without checking my phone once, nor do I have an urge to check my Twitter like counts while at the cinema; I can’t remember the last time I was able to do this.
Doing Hard Things
My ability to start doing hard things is dramatically higher than before. Not the ability to carry them out, but the focus and initiative in getting them done. Procrastination is way lower, and I’m generally happier with delayed gratification.
This has been rather striking in a variety of situations:
- Debugging complex customers issues
- Heavy lifting at the gym; focusing on lifting without phone has been eye-opening
- Doing taxes and accounting on a weekly-basis - something I’d always defer to the last week or so, compounding my anxiety
All these situations which I regard as hard, either because they’re boring or tiring, somehow feel less heavy.
Less Anxious and irritable
Anxiety and irritability are issues I had been struggling with for a while.
Anxiety, in particular, caused a bout of insomnia that lasted for the vast majority of 2025 - and that I was only able to address by spending quality time in Italy during summer, when both work and the digital life are less appealing than the physical world.
As I came to find out, not one but many consequences arising from my digital world addictions were terrible triggers for my anxiety, some of which I described above; for the sake of transparency, I think that daily online news and Stripe notifications (or lack thereof) were two primary causes.
I cannot overstate how much anxiety has affected my life since the pandemic - but for the first time I feel like in the right direction.
More Present and aware
I am a more present husband and friend. My wife has been making similar adjustments and I do think that the quality of our time together has improved a lot.
When we go for lunch outside, as we usually do while in Taipei, we can catch up on our work, make plans, think about problems together, and the future direction of our business.
You know how many people these days can’t quite listen anymore? Or think about what they will say next while the other person is speaking? I find myself doing that a lot less these days. I can listen for longer without disengaging my brain so easily. I don’t think this is a fully solved issue - so perhaps I have room for improvement in other areas of my life.
Conclusion
These days, my morning’s first hour is spent drinking coffee and reading a good book, not obsessing whether I made any sale. I don’t try to solve support questions from my bed (which usually meant snarky/incomplete/plain wrong replies) but I wait until I am at my desk, with more clarity. I plan the full day and try to achieve it. When I am done, I call it a day - instead of compulsively checking my emails at midnight.
The honest truth is that some things are always hard; the urge of checking Twitter/Reddit, or knowing more about what’s going on in the world (as I am writing this, the Iran war is getting worse by the hour), or getting a quick dopamine hit by knowing how many sales I made today. These don’t go away easily, and it’s pretty damn hard without solid discipline, better habits, and the time required for your brain to adjust.