Cal Newport Habits: Digital Minimalism And How To Track Them

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World came out on 5 February 2019 from Portfolio, part of Penguin Random House. Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of Deep Work (2016) and Slow Productivity (2024). The publisher sums the book up in two sentences: "Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology."

When he announced the book, Newport described digital minimalism as a philosophy "in which you radically reduce the time you spend staring at screens, focusing on a small number of digital activities that strongly support things you deeply value, and then happily ignoring the rest." The book is not against technology. It is against drifting into apps one notification at a time, and it asks you to choose each tool on purpose.

Its centrepiece is a thirty-day "digital declutter", which Newport tried out before writing. In late 2017 he invited the readers of his mailing list to run it during January 2018. He expected 40 to 50 volunteers, and more than 1,600 people signed up. The rest of the book is about what to do with the time you get back: be alone with your thoughts, talk to people properly, and fill your evenings with something better than a feed.

Newport lives by a stricter version of his advice, and his blog describes how. He has written that he has never had a social media account of any kind, and has never missed one. He plans every minute of his working day in blocks of time ("I call this planning method time blocking") and checks those plans against weekly and quarterly planning notes. In a 2008 post he described keeping his work to fixed hours, "from 9 to 5 on weekdays", and making the work fit rather than the other way round. And he ends each workday with a set shutdown routine and a set phrase.

Two of those, time blocking and the shutdown ritual, come from his earlier book Deep Work rather than Digital Minimalism, but they solve the same problem from the work side. They are habits 5 and 6 below.

The declutter has three parts. First, take a 30-day break from optional technologies: the apps, sites and tools you could put down for a month without real harm to your job or family. Second, use that month to find activities you actually enjoy offline. Third, start again from a blank slate and bring back only what earns it. In Newport's description of the 2018 experiment, participants were to rebuild from a blank slate, "only allowing back in technologies for which they could provide a compelling motivation."

Two experiments point the same way, though neither tested Newport's exact process. Hunt Allcott and colleagues randomly assigned Facebook users to deactivate their accounts for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election, and compared them with users who kept going. Deactivating "reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends", increased subjective well-being and caused "a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use". Melissa Hunt and colleagues randomly assigned 143 University of Pennsylvania undergraduates either to limit Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to 10 minutes per platform per day for three weeks, or to use them as usual. In the authors' words: "The limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group."

In HabitKit: a quit habit (choose Quit A Habit under Habit type) called "Optional apps", with Yes / No tracking. A quit habit counts every day as clean on its own, so you only press when you slip. Thirty days of clean tiles is the declutter, done. Track a bad habit you want to quit explains how quit streaks count.

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Illustrative demo data. The home screen and the clean-days counter are diagrams, not app screens.

When the month ends, give each app you bring back a rule and track the rule if it matters to you. "News once a day" works as a quit habit with Count tracking and a Stay Below of 2, which keeps the day clean as long as you open it once or not at all.

The book warns about what Newport calls "solitude deprivation": going whole days without a single moment in which your mind is free of other people's input. He borrows his definition of solitude from Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin's Lead Yourself First, and on his blog he describes it as "a subjective state in which you're isolated from input from other minds". You can be alone in a quiet room and have none of it, if a podcast is playing. Among his suggestions are leaving the phone at home now and then, and going on long walks without one.

Research on both halves of that is encouraging but modest. Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz had people come up with creative ideas while walking or sitting. "Walking increased 81% of participants' creativity" on a task about alternative uses for everyday objects, though it helped only 23% of them on a task with a single right answer. Thuy-vy Nguyen, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci found in a series of experiments that solitude "could lead to relaxation and reduced stress when individuals actively chose to be alone". Neither study was about phones, so they support the walk and the quiet, not the phone in a drawer as such.

In HabitKit: a Yes / No habit called "Phone-free walk", ticked when you are back. Put the cue in the name if you can, "Walk after lunch" or "Evening walk, no phone", so the habit says when as well as what. How to choose a habit cue covers why the anchor matters.

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Illustrative demo data. The phone and the timer are a diagram; HabitKit records the tick, it does not time the walk.

Newport argues that likes, comments and quick reactions feel like staying in touch but deliver little of what a real conversation does. His suggestion is to stop treating them as connection: skip the quick reactions, and make room for calls and meetings instead, for example by keeping regular times when friends know they can reach you.

There is good evidence that the medium matters, and that people misjudge it. In a series of experiments by Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, "interactions including voice (phone, video chat, and voice chat) created stronger social bonds and no increase in awkwardness, compared with interactions including text". And on the long run of a life, a meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues pooled 148 studies with 308,849 participants and found "a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships". That second result is observational, so it shows how much relationships matter rather than proving what any single phone call does.

In HabitKit: a Yes / No habit called "Call or meet a friend" with a weekly goal:

1. Open the habit and tap Edit.
2. Under Repeat, tap the card to open Goal & Streak.
3. Choose Times a week. It starts at 3 / week; tap the minus button once for 2 / week.
4. Under Count my streak in, choose Weeks.
5. Go back to the edit screen and tap Save.

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Illustrative demo data. The days move around from week to week; the goal only asks for two.

The book's answer to empty scrolling is not willpower but better options. Newport recommends leisure that asks something of you: a craft, an instrument, making or fixing things with your hands, or activities that put you in a room with other people. He also suggests planning that time on purpose, so the evening is not decided by whatever app is open.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Judith LeFevre tracked 78 working adults through their days and asked how they felt at random moments. They were looking for flow, the state of being fully absorbed in a challenging task, and found that "the great majority of flow experiences are reported when working, not when in leisure". The study did not test hobbies, but it fits Newport's point: free time often goes to activities too easy to be absorbing, and a demanding hobby is a way to bring that absorption home.

In HabitKit: a Measure habit for the hobby itself, such as "Guitar" with minutes as the Unit and a Daily Goal of 20. Or, if the hobby is not daily, a Yes / No habit called "Made something" with Times a week at 3 / week. Set daily goals and track counts or measured amounts covers both.

Newport's Deep Work argues that the most valuable work needs long stretches of attention without interruptions. His own way of getting them is time blocking: the evening before, he spends a few minutes dividing the next day's working hours into blocks and giving every block a job. When the day changes, he redraws the rest of the plan rather than abandoning it.

Two findings explain why. Sophie Leroy showed that switching away from an unfinished task leaves "attention residue": "it is difficult for people to transition their attention away from an unfinished task and their subsequent task performance suffers." And Kostadin Kushlev and Elizabeth Dunn had 124 adults spend one week checking email only three times a day and another week checking as often as they liked. In the limited week they reported significantly lower daily stress, which is the case for giving messages their own blocks.

In HabitKit: a Measure habit called "Deep work" with hours as the Unit and a Daily Goal that fits your job, such as 3. Set On Tap to Enter total, and after each block enter the day's running total: 1.5 after the first, 3 after the second. Measure accepts decimals. Today's tile fills in shades as the hours add up and turns full when the goal is met. HabitKit records the amount you enter rather than timing the session.

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Illustrative demo data. The time-block plan on the left is a diagram, not an app screen.

Newport's shutdown ritual is a short, fixed routine at the end of every workday. He updates his task lists, looks over his calendar for the next two weeks and his plan for the week, and then ends with a set phrase. In his words from a 2009 post: "I close down my computer and say the magic phrase: 'schedule shutdown, complete.'" The phrase is a signal that work thoughts can wait until morning.

The research behind it is about unfinished goals. E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that goals left open keep intruding on people's thoughts and interfering with other tasks, and that making a plan was enough to switch that off: "Allowing participants to formulate specific plans for their unfulfilled goals eliminated the various activation and interference effects." The ritual is that plan, made once a day.

In HabitKit: a Yes / No habit called "Shutdown ritual" with a Reminder at the time you want to stop work. Set a reminder for a habit shows where reminders live. To keep the ritual's notes in the same place, press and hold the day in the habit's calendar to open the day editor and write the open items in its note. Log a completion and fix a past day shows where notes live.

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An illustrative note. Three lines are enough for the ritual.

It is a fair question to ask of any app in a guide about using fewer of them. The declutter's own screen answers it: bring a tool back only if you can give a compelling reason for it, and use it on your terms.

A habit tracker passes that test when it stays small. HabitKit has no feed, no followers and no likes, and needs no account. Ticking a habit takes a few seconds, and with Pro, home screen widgets let you tick one without opening the app at all. If even that feels like too much screen, a sheet of paper on the fridge does the same job: printable habit tracker ideas has free templates.

The book's own advice is to change your relationship with technology deliberately, and the same goes for these habits. The declutter alone is a big change. Start with it, or with the one habit that solves your biggest problem: the walk if you never get a quiet moment, time blocking if your workday dissolves into messages, the shutdown ritual if work follows you into the evening. Add the next one when the first runs without thinking.

HabitKit's free version tracks four active habits, which happens to be a sensible ceiling for a first round anyway. Habits take time to settle: in the best-known study the median was 66 days, with a very wide range. How long it really takes to form a habit covers what that number does and does not mean, and how to start a small habit you can repeat has more on choosing the first version.

Keeping a record helps. A meta-analysis of 138 studies by Benjamin Harkin and colleagues found that monitoring progress helped people reach their goals on average, and more so when the progress was physically recorded. That is a result about tracking in general, not about any particular app.

Stronger for the direction of the advice than for its details. The two social media experiments are randomised and the effects are real, but both are short and specific: four weeks off one platform, and three weeks of limits for students at one university. The Facebook break also had a cost: people who took it knew less about the news. The 30-day declutter itself has never been tested as a whole; Newport's 1,600 volunteers were a self-selected group reporting back, not a trial.

The walking, solitude, attention and planning findings come from laboratory studies with modest samples, and they support the mechanism rather than the exact routines. The link between relationships and survival is large and consistent, but observational.

One popular claim is weaker than it sounds. A 2017 study suggested that the mere presence of your own smartphone drains your attention, but a preregistered direct replication found that "the 'brain drain' effect did not replicate", and a 2024 meta-analysis found only limited support for it. The case for leaving the phone at home rests on what you do instead, not on the phone itself sapping your mind. The useful way to read Digital Minimalism is as a set of reasonable experiments: try one for a month, notice whether your days feel better, and keep what earns its place.

What Are Cal Newport's Habits?

From his books and blog: he has never used social media, he plans every working day in time blocks the evening before, he checks those plans against weekly and quarterly planning notes, he has described working fixed hours, and he ends each workday with a shutdown ritual. That makes his daily routine simple: a planned day of blocks, a fixed stop, and a ritual that closes the day. Digital Minimalism adds the habits it recommends to readers: a 30-day digital declutter, regular time alone without a phone, conversation in place of likes, and demanding leisure in place of scrolling.

What Is The 30-Day Digital Declutter?

It is the process at the centre of Digital Minimalism. You take a 30-day break from optional technologies, spend the month rediscovering activities you enjoy offline, and then bring back only the tools you have a compelling reason to use. A quit habit in a habit tracker is a simple way to count the 30 days.

Does Cal Newport Use Social Media?

No. He has written that he has never had a social media account of any kind and has never missed one. He publishes through his blog, his newsletter and his podcast instead.

What Is The Difference Between Digital Minimalism And Deep Work?

Deep Work (2016) is about work: how to protect long stretches of concentration, with time blocking and a shutdown ritual as two of its tools. Digital Minimalism (2019) is about personal technology: which apps and services deserve a place in your life, starting with a 30-day declutter. They share one idea, which is to decide on purpose where your attention goes.

Can I Track A Digital Declutter For Free?

Yes. HabitKit's free version tracks four active habits on iPhone and Android, with no account, which is enough for the declutter and two or three of the habits in this guide. The declutter works as a quit habit, the walk and the shutdown ritual as Yes / No habits, and deep work as a Measure habit in hours.

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