For example, tidying up your inbox, clearing out paperwork from the office, reading the newspaper for the fifth time.

Optional work: These are all tasks which fall outside the vital, as you do not accomplish much by doing them compared to your vital tasks. These uninviting tasks should not take more than 20 per cent of your time and effort, or else you run the risk of losing sight of your main purpose. There will always be a subset of vital work, which may be uninviting to do, such as attending budget meetings, doing mandatory If you can stay in this zone, you are providing value to the organisation and are being productive. If you are a sales person it will be to close deals, a financial advisor to manage the portfolio of your client, a consultant to advise your client. Vital work: This is what you are paid to do. Create two categories: vital work and optional work. Here is something you might want to apply in a work setting. And ironically, it’s the very thing we need to do, if we are going to escape the gravitational pull of frivolous distractions. It’s the very thing the social media companies and those whose business models are built on grabbing our attention through dopamine hits, don’t want us to do. Minimising, decluttering, stripping out distraction, allows us to have clear space for reflection. When we are more intentional about how we use technology, it leads to significant satisfaction about how we engage with technology. Principle 3: Intentionality is satisfying To unlock the benefit of a technology, think carefully about how to use it Littering our time and attention with too many devices, apps and services results in a negative cost that drowns the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation. Newport’s philosophy’s rests on the following three principles: Likewise, if you are a musician, use technology to make you a better artist. If you are a gardener, use carefully selected technology to become a better gardener. Technology should be there to support the thing you value, it’s not the source of value by itself, unless you happen to be a technology geek, then fine, go do your thing. In others words, ask the question: what do I really value and then determine how technology can supplement this value. Newport forcefully makes the case that we should spend our online time on a few carefully chosen activities, which support the things we value, and gladly miss out on all others. Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism (2019), argues that what we need is a “full-fledged philosophy of technology use, rooted in your deep values, that 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”.

Digital minimalism