Nowadays, our daily activities are inseparable from our computers and smartphones. It's important for us to take breaks from social media and online work because studies show that spending too much time in front of a screen can increase feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression.

The answer can be by minimizing our digital presence to reduce these concerns. Digital minimalism is the phrase that Cal Newport uses in his latest book, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. 

What’s the idea behind this?

Digital Minimalism is a philosophy of technology in which you focus your online time on a few carefully selected activities that support the things you value. Newport is convinced that checking “likes” is the new smoking. It's a kind of addiction in which a person engages in the use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences.

Newport wrote that 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. Digital minimalists recognize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.

How to digitally declutter?

Break the bonds

Take a 30-day break from selected online activities. Decluttering is easier said than done; there’s no one formula that works for everyone. We all have different lifestyles and priorities. To get started, Newport suggests a 30-day fast. During this time, you can rediscover valuable analog activities, such as taking walks, creating handicrafts, or bonding with family.

Gain clarity regarding your priorities

Keep or kick. At the end of the 30 days, choose what activities to resume and what to do away with completely.

A toolbox of practices

Create better habits. After your 30-day fast, you have a clearer picture of what you do and don’t need in your life. It’s time to create habits that will cultivate and maintain your new life of digital minimalism.

Taking a thirty-day break from any of these technologies that you deem ‘optional’ means that you can step away from them without creating harm or major problems in either 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. In the end, you’re left with a list of banned technologies along with relevant operating procedures.