Injecting Intention into Technology Use with a Digital Ritual

Many people nowadays have heard of the idea of Minimalism. The core philosophy of Minimalism is that more possessions doesn’t mean greater happiness, and that a more fulfilling life can be gained from owning far fewer possessions, but ensuring that everything you do own adds real value to your life.

Fewer people, however, will be aware of its newer counterpart, Digital Minimalism.

A term coined by author and blogger Cal Newport in his book of the same name, Digital Minimalism ‘applies the belief that less can be more to our relationship with digital tools’. It calls into question the modern mindless scrolling through social media and asks if there is a better way to make technology work for us, and not the other way round. In Cal’s own words, it ‘provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.’

In his book, Cal calls the reader to undergo a ‘digital declutter’, stepping away from optional online activities for thirty days. They then rediscover the ‘analogue’ activities which act as a more valuable replacement for the digital ones which used to take their place, and reintroduce only the online activities which add the most value to their life. The aim is to become one hundred percent intentional about the way you use technology.

Whilst I haven’t undergone a full digital declutter in my own life, reading Digital Minimalism has led me to re-evaluate the role of technology in my life and make a few changes to become more intentional about the way I use it. Whilst Cal focuses heavily on social media as public enemy number one of the Digital Minimalist, due to its propensity for engineering addiction into its platforms, my personal struggle is much more with YouTube and video streaming services such as Netflix, and so my approach has been a little different.

The idea I want to share is what I call a digital ritual, inspired by this post in Cal’s blog archives.

The post shares the process a grad student developed to ‘quickly shift his brain into a state of concentration’ when writing his doctoral thesis, by using what Cal terms a ‘focus ritual’. The core idea is that before starting his focused task, he loads up a text document with a handful of questions about his work which help him achieve focus and produce better results.

The digital ritual is similar, except that rather than opening up a series of questions before focused work, it is a series of questions to answer whenever starting a new task on a computer. I use these questions to prevent mindless technology use and ensure that whatever activity I’m doing will add value to my life.

The idea is to define the activity I’m doing, why, and for how long, so that I do only what I intend to do and nothing more. I have the text file set to open automatically on startup, and then every time I’m about to start a new task I delete my previous answers and fill it out again. It takes less than a minute, but that small pause really helps me to stay intentional about the way I use technology.

The results have been noteworthy. I find that I spend a significantly smaller portion of my time binging YouTube videos that I’m not really interested in, and much more time on fulfilling activities that add genuine value to my life.