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Great article! I listened to it twice using my Instapaper app (Pocket has a similar feature as well). Here's a quick summary (in the voice of Mark Manson) for people who don't have the time to read it:

Introduction

• In what should have been 20 minutes of work, I compulsively interrupted myself at least nine times.
  
• These distractions aren’t just unproductive, they’re anti-productive. They create more work than they replace
  
• I felt that I had to pay attention to my attention, that I had to focus on my focus. It was new. It wasn’t something I’d had to think about since I was a kid.
  
  How We Became Mentally Lazy and Weak
  
  
• Back in the 1950s and 60s, the world changed. Modern economies moved people out of factories and fields and into office buildings. Whereas you used to have to stand on your feet all day and carry heavy shit around to make a buck, now, the best-paying jobs simply asked that you sit at a desk for as long as possible without ever getting up.
  
• To counteract this sedentary lifestyle, we all came together and developed a fitness culture to counteract the health crisis.
  
• The same way the consumer economy of the 20th century called upon us to invent the nutritional diet, I believe that the attention economy of the 21st century calls upon us to invent an attention diet.
  
  Goals of the Attention Diet
  
  
• The name of the game is quality over quantity. Because in a world with infinite information and opportunity, you don’t grow by knowing or doing more, you grow by the ability to correctly focus on less.
  
• Step 1: Correctly identify nutritious information and relationships.
  
• Step 2: Cut out the junk information and relationships.
  
• Step 3: Cultivate habits of deeper focus and a longer attention span.
  
• Our goal is to make our hobbies work for us rather than against us.
  
  Another Note Before We Begin 
  
  
• The Attention Diet should be emotionally difficult to implement. Ultimately, junk information hooks us because it is pleasing and easy. We develop low-level addictions to it and end up using it to numb a lot of our day-to-day stresses and insecurities.
  
  Step 1: The Social Media Cleanse
  
  
• Apply the Law of “Fuck Yes” or No to your social media connections
  
• Unfollow ALL news and media outlets (including sports and entertainment)
  
• Uninstall any apps that feel pointless after doing the above
  
  Step 2: Choose Good Sources of Information and Connection
  
  
• Try this: only get your news from the current events page of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is curated to remove bias, political leanings, and false statements. That is no longer 100% true of almost any news source these days.
  
• Long form content should be your bread and butter for news content and the majority of your entertainment content. Long-form content means any medium—Books, Podcasts, long-form articles, documentaries—the key is that shit takes a long time.
  
  Step 3: Schedule Your Diversions
  
  
• The same way you plan a “cheat day” or make an agreement with yourself that you’ll only have X number of desserts or Y number of drinks each week, the same goes with your attention. Email should be a consciously-chosen activity done at a specific time to maximize its purpose. It’s not something you compulsively refresh every 30 seconds. Same goes for social media. Same goes for entertainment.
  
  Step 4: Implementation
  
  
• In Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope, I redefine freedom as self-limitation. Freedom in the 21st century isn’t about having more, it’s about choosing your commitments to less. 
  
• To help us limit ourselves, we need to set boundaries around ourselves.
  
• I’ll talk about three types of tools in this section: website blockers, app blockers (listed in the FAQ), and power outlet timers.
  
  Common Objections to the Attention Diet
  
  
• Objection 1: “But Mark! I’ll be soooo boooreeed” Boredom is good. It means you’re challenging yourself. It’s like bicep curls for your mind. Embrace the boredom. Bathe in the boredom.
  
• Objection 2: What if I’m missing out! You are always missing out. You always were and always will be. The question is: what is it that you are choosing to miss out on? Ninety percent of the most important experiences in life are right in front of you. And instead of distracting yourself from them, as you have been, the Attention Diet will finally free you to face them.
  
• Objection 3: I should be able to discipline myself to stop using these things I’m surprised at how many people say this. It’s a noble intention but unfortunately, completely misguided. The dirty little secret of changing your habits is that your environment has far more of an effect than your willpower does.
  
  Accountability Buddies
  
  
• Find a friend to do it with you. It’ll make it easier, more fun, and more interesting. When one of you is craving a YouTube binge, you can agree to meet up for coffee instead.
  
• After adhering to the diet for a month, let me know your results. If enough people see significant results, I will compile a post based on what everyone has learned and post it on the site later in the year.
  
• Shameless plug: r/HabitBuddy is another subreddit I created to help people find accountability partners! So far I've used it to successfully stay accountable for meditating, studying, and programming!
  
  -----------------------------------------------------
  
  P.S. This summary isn't as detailed as the original so I highly recommend going back into whatever sections sounds the most relevant to you and reading it in full!

Choose 1 IDE for coding. Personally I use VSCode.

I even use it for note taking since it can predict whatever it is I type frequently.

Thunderbird to handle all my email accounts. School and personal.

Firefox Quantum and Chromium for browsers, I find I often benefit from both environments for web dev.

I host my own cloud service off a raspberry pi 3, using Nextcloud + DietPi. If it's too much for you to handle right now (I promise it won't be by the time you graduate) just choose any of the ones offered to college students with bonus amounts of storage. Backing up your stuff is a must.

Get a GitHub account, learn how to use it ASAP. You can get a student account for 10 free private repositories here. Back up your CODE! If you mess up badly during a project, you can revert to previous versions so long as you understand how git works. Just watch tutorials off youtube, preferably from Indians. This has saved me HUGE in school.

This is all I've used in my 3 years of community college comp. programming classes. Personally I stick to open source software as best I can. Once you get a grasp of coding, start contributing to open source projects on GitHub and pad your resume with them.

I also use a kobo for reading materials. Download everything I could possibly need on it.


It's not digital minimalism, but... Get a QUALITY laptop bag that will last you throughout your entire time. I recommend Timbuk2. Currently on sale for an unbeatable price. I paid over $100 for mine.

I bought this case in July of last year and I absolutely love it. I think the iPhone 7 has more colors available than the Plus, but it's been outstanding for me and is very sleek.

The tiny Moleskine notebooks Fit

I use:

Moleskine Cahier Soft Cover Journal, Set of 3, Plain, Pocket Size (3.5" x 5.5") Coffee Brown - for Use as Journal, Sketchbook, Composition Notebook

u/ThatsJustUn-American suggested,

Moleskine Volant Notebook (Set of 2), Extra Small, Ruled, Black, Soft Cover (2.5 x 4)

but I personally find those too small, and I prefer plain to ruled. I also prefer brown to black: brown feels more earthy, classic, and leathery. But they're cheap as hell, so buy both and try them out. A lot of digital minimalism, being so novel, is trial and error to find out what you like.