Firefox Reader View, Stylus, and umatrix are useful.
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I’m reading the book and can recommend it. “Digital Minimalism” isn’t anti-technology – it appears to be more of a counter argument to techno-maximalism. It offers a plan on how to break the cycle (“digital declutter”).
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Yeah, I read the book the day it came out.
Really good stuff.
The most interesting idea for me was the “solitude” idea. I spend almost 95% of my waking hours listening to something.
The other things I want to implement is writing letters to myself, and taking long walks.
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What do you use Stylus for?
I surf with all CSS and JS off by default. (I can turn it on for specific sites where needed.) Stylus lets me apply additional CSS in some cases.
This. I found my podcast addiction was actually reducing my attention span quite a bit. My setup at work is to have about 30 tabs of YouTube open. All videos on my computer will only play at 3.1x speed. So I have a ridiculous ADD inflow of very fast talking heads yapping at me constantly while I consume massive amounts of caffeine and barely focus on my work.
The memory palace hobby has helped a lot. Gives the mind something to work on in silence. Also tricks me into meditating more (which was my goal).
The book mentioned by ankiandroid, The Shallows, is profoundly interesting and useful.
I try to define everyday a “black area”, this is, a time without internet. Sometimes 2 or 3 hours. Occasionally an entire day. Sometimes I take decisions such as: “I will not visit this website for X number of days” (usually Facebook or some news websites).
I am not always able to fulfill the plan, but it works.
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For instance I am now in this forum because I decided that instead of going to other websites I would come here.
I found that visiting often website with polemical content (news) make me a bit more aggressive, angry and impatient. This is one of the reasons I decided not to spend so much time there. I “forgot” the passwords of some sites, so as not to contribute with comments, and avoid spending time there.
So, being in this forum is also a kind of self imposed therapy, to avoid reading useless things.
Also I began to read audiobooks, mainly from librivox.org.
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I just saw that Scientific American has a new ebook, Your Brain in the Smartphone Age. The introduction is titled “TV, Smartphones and the Risk of Brain Rot”. I don’t think I’m going to spend $6 on it at the moment, but if anyone reads it, let us know how it is. 
+1 for audiobooks. I listen to them in the car instead of the radio now.
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Great find Josh! I will add it to the list.
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This is interesting:
I offered [my students] extra credit if they would give me their phones for nine days and write about living without them. Twelve students—about a third of the class—took me up on the offer. What they wrote was remarkable, and remarkably consistent.
Several students went further and claimed that communication with others was in fact easier and more efficient without their phones.
Full article:
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I don’t know many people who agree with digital minimalism, so I’m glad that you guys are on board on the distraction adiction problem.
I read this post some time ago, it’s worth reading:
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I have been almost a week without facebook, videos, any news (paper or digital) or blogs, from time to time I do this.
For me the problem is not digital vs non digital, the problems is distracted work vs deep work,
and not consuming random information like junk food. News and blogs affect my capacity of attention, my mood and my sleep.
So thanks God I had a very good week, in which I managed to finish some difficult tasks and two small projects in my job.
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I am moving slowly towards audio books. Among other reasons, because during work hours I spend a lot of time in front of a screen, and I want to give my eyes a rest.
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I read this book. It does wonders.
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I ditched my smartphone a couple of years ago. Stupid Galaxy 8 was made of glass!! I replaced it with a simple flip phone that manages a contact list and voice mail, is shock proof, waterproof and cost a fraction of the Galaxy’s price and is compact. Life improved markedly.
I get that that a smart phone can take over your life. That didn’t happen in my case but I see it all around me. I visit people and they have their faces in the phone all the time. Any attempt at conversation is clearly a grudging distraction from the phone. It’s creepy to be in a houseful of people who are “elsewhere”.
My main frustration is with the design philosophy that packs too many functions into a tight space. A phone is a critical function. It is an emergency lifeline. Too often I have seen urgent phone calls frustrated by popups, by unexpected security barriers (Apple), by an autonomous decision to upgrade the software, by low battery brought on by some app in the background or simply by fumbling the tiny screen with cold fingers while standing on the side of the road.
A critical function needs to be protected. It should not be cluttered with toys and amenities that can confuse it’s operation. How about a combo hair dryer/ heat gun/ .45 pistol.? Imagine how useful and convenient it would be to have all that functionality in a compact package. That is until you find yourself suddenly attacked and blow dry the assailant’s hair - or are rushing to do your hair in front of the mirror and blow your brains out.
IMO this is driven by marketing. The more geegaws you can hang on a product, the better the ads look. Software suffers from this disease. Packages like MS Word present an array of features that look like the the cockpit of an airliner. Just trying to do something simple like writing a letter or starting a sentence with a lower case letter can involve half an hour with the documentation.
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Related:
At every stage in the trip, he had broken his promise. When the plane first touched down in New Orleans two weeks before, he took out his phone while we were still in our seats. “You promised not to use it,” I said. He replied: “I meant I wouldn’t make phone calls. I can’t not use Snapchat and texting, obviously.” He said this with baffled honesty, as though I had asked him to hold his breath for 10 days. In the jungle room, I suddenly snapped and tried to wrestle his phone from his grasp, and he stomped away. That night I found him in the Heartbreak Hotel, sitting next to a swimming pool (shaped like a giant guitar), looking sad. I realised as I sat with him that, as with so much anger, my rage towards him was really anger towards myself. His inability to focus was something I felt happening to me too. I was losing my ability to be present, and I hated it. “I know something’s wrong,” Adam said, holding his phone tightly in his hand. “But I have no idea how to fix it.” Then he went back to texting.
A small study of college students found they now only focus on any one task for 65 seconds. A different study of office workers found they only focus on average for three minutes. This isn’t happening because we all individually became weak-willed. Your focus didn’t collapse. It was stolen.
After getting away from distractions:
I later interviewed Prof Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Claremont, California, who was the first scientist to study flow states and researched them for more than 40 years. From his research, I learned there are three key factors which you need to get into flow. First you need to choose one goal. Flow takes all your mental energy, deployed deliberately in one direction. Second, that goal needs to be meaningful to you – you can’t flow into a goal that you don’t care about. Third, it helps if what you are doing is at the edge of your abilities – if, say, the rock you are climbing is slightly higher and harder than the last rock you climbed. So every morning, I started to write – a different kind of writing from my earlier work, one that stretched me. Within a few days, I started to flow, and hours of focus would pass without it feeling like a challenge. I felt I was focusing in the way I had when I was a teenager, in long effortless stretches. I had feared my brain was breaking. I cried with relief when I realised that in the right circumstances, its full power could come back.
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I’ve been experimenting with digital minimalism myself, which is why I’m now only on this forum on Saturdays. The rule I set up for myself in 2022 is that I only go on forums and social media on Saturdays, and the rest of the week, the only readable matter I consume is books and a couple of newspapers. It’s definitely been helpful in getting me to read more books and to focus better.
I’m not sure about the whole anti-smartphone thing, though. I only read e-books these days, and I kinda don’t see why that’s so much more horrible than reading the same book on paper. Especially in a pandemic, when it’s hard to get to a bookstore, I’d much rather just download my books.
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A post was split to a new topic: How to Focus Like It’s 1990
Here are a couple of related articles:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/opinion/teen-luddite-smartphones.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/style/teens-social-media.html