Last week I finished reading Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism, and it made me think about my own relationship with technology.
The title of this issue “A Digital Minimalist Software Engineer”, sounds like an oxymoron. How can someone who works on creating new technology every day be a digital minimalist?
I have loved technology since I was a kid, whether it was taking things apart or drooling over the latest tech in the Argos 1 catalogue. When you are busy being dazzled by the shiny technology with the flashy lights it can be difficult to remember that the purpose of technology is to make our lives easier and give us some time back.
I while ago I wrote “Will technology ever make our lives easier?” about how despite all the technological innovations of the last 100 years, we are still working 40-hour weeks as they did in the 1700s. Technology allows us to get more done in this time, but it hasn't given us more time.
To make matters worse we spend the little time we do have to ourselves staring into our phones instead of spending it with our loved ones. Our phones have become an ever present distraction, and we are addicted to it.
A large part of this is down to social media. In the book, Cal describes how most corporate social media platforms are designed to be addictive. They use psychological traits to keep us spending the largest amount of time possible on their platforms. The more time that they can steal from us the more money they make.
Like a slot machine, social media uses unpredictable rewards to get you addicted. How many likes will your post get? Will this one go viral and make me famous? Just one more reel, maybe the next one will be especially funny or useful. It is the unpredictability of what you will get that makes the thing so addictive.
Social media isn't all bad, but you do need to be honest with yourself whether you are using it as a tool or whether it is the other way around.
Digital Minimalism comes with 3 key principles:
- Clutter is costly — as with multitasking, having your attention split in too many directions can have a negative impact.
- Optimization is important — if you are going to use a technology then it is important that you optimize how you use it so you can gain the most benefits and avoid the negatives.
- Intentionality is satisfying — rather than flocking to the next shiny object thing hard about how this technology is going to benefit your life.
If you feel like technology might be using you rather than the other way around I encourage you to give Digital Minimalism a read.
Digital minimalism for me is about cutting out the noise from my life and spending more quality time with my family. I didn't need to replace my iPhone with a “dumb phone” to do this but instead made a few optimizations.
- Deleted social media from my phone — I had a social media cull last year, but I still kept apps for Mastodon, Reddit, and YouTube on my phone. In times of boredom I would often reach for one of these apps and start mindlessly scrolling. I still find myself reaching for my phone, but it doesn't last long when there is nothing to look at.
- Deleted unnecessary apps — I didn't do an exact count, but I had a lot of apps on my phone. A lot of them were to allow me to do things I should probably be doing on a computer anyway. I delete all the apps I don't absolutely need, each giving me one less thing to be distracted by.
- Turned off notifications — that little red notification badge is another one of those psychological tricks. If I don't need to respond to a notification then I have turned them off. Too many apps use notifications now for advertising (yes I am looking at you Uber and EasyJet). I still have Discord on my phone as I get notifications about course sales, but I have turned off the red badge and muted all the other channels I am part of. I also have an Apple Watch, but I have turned off all notifications apart from payments.
- Unsubscribed from emails — I have been good at ignoring my phone when I am bored, but it is hard to ignore if it keeps pinging at me. I used to get around 25 emails a day, mostly within a 12-hour window. That is twice an hour on average that my phone would ping and prompt me to look at it. I have unsubscribed from all marketing emails and newsletters and now things are much quieter. Most newsletters have an RSS feed (including this one!) and for those that don't I am using kill-the-newsletter. Having these in an RSS reader means I don't miss out on anything, but I can be intentional about when I consume information.
As software developers we are often expected to keep up to date with technology, but doing so can distract us from spending time with our family or doing something more fulfilling.
❤️ Picks of the Week #
📝 Article — Do Quests, Not Goals — I like the idea of this. It really boils down to enjoying the process not the outcome. I will have to keep this in mind when I do my goal setting next.
📝 Article — The Hidden Message You’re Communicating — We are spending more time now communicating through text than ever and as a result we can forget about our body language when we do see people. If you are managing people it is incredibly important that you are aware of your body language.
📝 Article — The Dying Web — I think people forget that apart from Firefox and Safari nearly all other browsers are based on Chrome. Giving Google that much control isn't a good thing. I am quite happy with Firefox and use it on all my devices. I use Multi-Account Containers every day to switch between my work and personal accounts.
📝 Article — Using Firefox remote debugging feature — Need another reason to use Firefox? It turns out you can access the developer tools of tabs open on another Firefox instance remotely.
📝 Article — Tracking supermarket prices with playwright — Web scraping gets a bad reputation especially if it is done badly, as it can cause unnecessary strain on someone's website. Yet people forget that search engines do this all the time. Web scraping for financial gain is obviously bad but for small personal projects I don't have a problem with it. I wish everything had an API or an RSS feed, but sadly it doesn't, and therefore we have to resort to scraping.
📝 Article — How East Germany invented ‘unbreakable’ drinking glasses — I can see how making glasses that don't break isn't very profitable, but it is good for sustainability. I actually don't break that many glasses but if you are particularly clumsy I can see these being useful. I hope they make a comeback.
📝 Article — 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey — It is that time a year again. There are always some interesting insights in the developer surveys. Apparently Erlang is the highest paying programming language and 63.2% of professional developers use AI in the development process.
📝 Article — CSS One-Liners to Improve (Almost) Every Project — This is a great list definitely one to bookmark and keep coming back to.
💬 Quote of the Week #
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone” — Blaise Pascal
Footnotes:
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Argos is a bit like Walmart, except you have to look through a catalogue, right down the number for what you want, pay for it and then wait for your number to be called while they retrieve your item from the warehouse out back. ↩
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