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of Snapchat—no one would begrudge you having fun with friends.

But Newport points out that we rarely take the time to find the best
way to get the value we’re looking for. Instead, we try a new tool, find
some value in it, and decide that’s a good reason to keep giving it our
attention.

Newport suggests another way of approaching the digital clutter in
our lives. Whether you use his subtractive or additive method from
the previous section, he recommends starting by thinking about your
values. What is it that’s important to you? What do you want to achieve
from how you spend your time?

When you know what your values are, Newport says, you can focus on
finding the best tools to help you live out those values.

For example, if you previously found scrolling through Twitter useful
because it helped you stay on top of news, and one of your values is to
be informed about local events, you could then evaluate whether Twitter
is the best tool for staying updated on what’s happening in your local
area. You might find that a local newspaper or the RSS feed of a local
news website is a better tool to help you live out this particular value.

Protect your time
One of the inevitable effects of digital clutter is that it makes us busy.
Filling our time with email, social networks, and mindless scrolling
through other people’s updates leaves us with little time to get real
work done. Our lives are taken over by busywork.

As writer and entrepreneur Scott H. Young points out, this is a problem
because we associate being busy with being productive, but they’re
not the same. When we spend all our time on busywork, therefore, we
entertain the idea that we’re being productive while all along we’re
neglecting our most important work.

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