‘A practical game plan to reclaim our lives’ Cal Newport
DIGITAL EXHAUSTION PAUL LEONARDI
SIMPLE RULES FOR RECLAIMING
YOUR LIFE
DIGITAL EXHAUSTION
DIGITAL EXHAUSTION
SIMPLE RULES FOR RECLAIMING YOUR LIFE
PAUL LEONARDI
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For
Norah, who is almost never exhausting
CHAPTER4
CHAPTER5 ■ Put On Your Own Mask Before Helping Others: A Guide for Parents
In June 2000, I stepped off the escalator at the Montgomery Street BART station in San Francisco’s financial district for my first office job. Looking up at the skyscrapers lining Market Street and seeing the rush of people all around was exhilarating. That’s one of two memories I have of that day. The second memory is of my new boss’s face. His name was Brian. He beamed when he greeted me with a warm handshake and a hearty “Hello.” I don’t recall what we talked about— probably how to log in to my computer or where the coffee machine was— but I haven’t been able to forget the energy and enthusiasm he radiated as he told how much he loved his job and how great the company was.
I don’t think I would remember that image so well had it not contrasted so sharply with his disposition at the end of the day. When I walked into his office to say goodbye, I had to do a double take to make sure he was the same guy I’d met that morning. He was slumped in his chair, eyes glazed over, staring vacantly at his screen. He was scrolling, endlessly it seemed, through pages of text, and I can still hear the
sigh he made before he dropped his head. Then he noticed I was standing there. He tried to perk up and appear energetic, but it didn’t work. He was clearly exhausted. Just about every day played out the same: I met perky Brian in the morning and bid farewell at the end of the day to a defeated man.
A few weeks into the job, I got up the courage to ask him about his daily transformation. “Is it that obvious?” he asked, clearly a bit embarrassed. “I love my job, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “But all day long— the email, the calls, the system data, the reports— it just wears me out. I get to a point in the day where I’m just staring at the screen feeling like crap because I know in the morning I was super focused and productive, but by the end of the day I’m beat.” And then he said something that has been ringing in my ears for more than two decades: “It’s like I’m depleted. I’m not physically drained because I can go straight to playing basketball after work, no problem. And it’s not like I’m burned out of the job. But something about all the technology and all the inputs coming at me all day just makes me exhausted.”
I understood how he felt. Even though it was my first job, I felt it too. So many technologies to learn. So many streams of information. Eyes glazing over as you stare at the screen. The aimless scrolling. Knowing what task you should be doing but not being able to start it. The feeling that no matter how many messages you respond to, how many posts you read, or how much data you sort through, you can never keep up. And perhaps worst of all, that depressing realization that this morning you were more focused and energetic than you are now and that yesterday you seemed more on top of it than today.
Two years later, I was in graduate school. By that point I’d interviewed nearly one hundred people who worked in what we would typically call knowledge jobs across a range of industries, from banking to education to consulting to marketing. No matter who I talked to, these people’s stories about their work eventually started to sound like
Brian’s: They liked their jobs and they were excited about their work, but they ended their days feeling a sort of exhaustion that was hard to describe. The one common thread I could discern was that their description of exhaustion seemed most intense when they talked about the digital technologies they used at work and at home.
So at the start of 2002, I decided that in every study I did, I would ask a simple question: “How much do the digital technologies you use make you feel worn out?” Sometimes I would sneak this question in at the end of a survey, and other times I’d ask it casually in an interview. I always had people rank their response from 0 (not at all) to 6 (so worn out that I can’t even keep looking at the screen). I wanted to know who felt that their digital tools were exhausting them and understand why they felt that way. Over the years, no one has ever had a problem answering this question, and rarely has someone asked me what I mean or to define “worn out.” The question clearly resonated. Fast forward to COVID-19. At the height of the pandemic, when most countries had shut down and nearly all knowledge-intensive jobs had gone remote, the daily news began to explode with stories of people’s strained romance with their technologies. A study exploring “Zoom fatigue” got lots of press, The New York Times published a wellread article called “It’s Time for a Digital Detox (You Know You Need It!),” and the World Economic Forum titled one its reports “Are You Suffering from Digital Exhaustion?” All my friends and coworkers ratcheted up their complaints about the amount of time they spent on digital tools, and the people I interviewed and surveyed seemed to bring up the topic of how crappy their technologies made them feel before I could ask my usual question about it.
By this time, I had spent nearly twenty years learning about what caused digital exhaustion and how people effectively coped with it, but I had never tabulated the responses. It was time to look at the data. So I did.
Ratings of Digital Exhaustion from 2002 to 2022
This graph shows the average responses of 12,643 adults from twelve countries spanning the twenty-year period from 2002 to 2022. It includes people aged twenty- one to seventy-five who worked in more than fifteen different industries and in all types of roles. The years I collected data are displayed along the horizontal axis. The vertical axis presents the scores (from 0 to 6) that people chose to represent their level of digital exhaustion. In 2002, the average exhaustion score reported by 426 people was 2.6, just below the midline of feeling worn out by digital technologies. But by 2022, the average exhaustion score reported from 739 people was 5.5, indicating that respondents were feeling extremely worn out. When I first showed this figure to my family, I thought they might comment on how clear the trend in the data was or tell me they were impressed that I’d asked the same question of so many people for so long. Instead, my then-nine-yearold daughter said, “It looks like a snake about to strike.”
The data reveal a disturbing trend: People have been growing increasingly worn out by their use of digital technologies at work and at home. Importantly, this trend did not start with COVID-19, nor did it
end when lockdowns were rescinded and we began to circulate in the world again. Even in the early 2000s, before the advent of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, people were experiencing moderate levels of exhaustion from high digital tool use. Digital exhaustion has been with us for a long time. But you can see two important jumps in the graph.
The first jump occurs between 2010 and 2011. This was a period of major transformation in our digital landscape. Facebook and YouTube’s monthly active users (a key metric tracked for online subscription-based products) jumped to more than five hundred million, nearly double the number of users two years prior. During this time, smartphone users reached more than one hundred million in the US alone, giving a historically large number of people constant connectivity to online content and social networks. Our use of digital technologies to access data and connect with others had been growing for some time, but the twin forces of software companies making their money by selling our eyeballs to advertisers and device manufacturers getting into our pockets and purses created a leap in our feelings of exhaustion.
The second jump is, not surprisingly, timed with the spread of SARS- CoV-2 and the associated worldwide shift to remote work in 2020. Working from home; talking with our coworkers, friends, and family on Zoom, FaceTime, or Microsoft Teams; and the blurry boundary— if not the total destruction of the boundary— between work and home wore us out. What is more surprising than the increase, though, is that although the world reopened and there is a general societal awareness that the tools that keep our digital economy humming are depleting us, the last few data points show no drop in exhaustion levels. To the contrary, it seems like the snake of digital exhaustion isn’t waiting to strike. It has struck. And with a vengeance.
In today’s world, if we want to work an office job, be a good friend
or sibling, interact with most of our civic institutions, and maintain relationships with people near and far, we can’t escape digital technologies and the threat of exhaustion they bring. But we can learn to use them in healthier ways.
In an attempt to combat this problem, it’s become popular to talk about adopting a philosophy of “digital minimalism,” as author Cal Newport calls it. Much like what I’ve heard from so many digital technology users, Newport observes that “almost everyone” he spoke to in his research “felt as though their current relationship with technology was unsustainable— to the point that if something didn’t change soon, they’d break too. A common term I heard in these conversations about modern digital life was exhaustion .” I’m completely on board with the idea of digital minimalism. The more we can minimize our use of the technologies that create the conditions for our digital exhaustion— while still reaping their benefits— the better off we are likely to be. Some suggest that a good strategy is to embark on a “digital detox,” permanently eliminating— or if you can’t do that, taking an extended vacation away from— your digital devices. Although a hiatus in technology use has some benefits, neither I nor the vast majority of people I’ve interviewed and worked with over the last twenty years have found this to be a realistic long-term option.
Even if you could take time for a digital detox, the problem is that all vacations must come to an end. “Leaving Las Vegas for ten days if you’re a problem gambler is great,” says Alex Pang, who has written books on distraction and the importance of rest. “But if on day eleven you’re back at the slot machines, then it’s not so great.” The evidence shows that a vacation from your phone or your computer probably won’t solve much. In my own research, I’ve found that people who take a significant amount of time away from their digital technologies have a bumpy reentry once they decide to return to them. The world kept turning while they were gone and there is now too much to catch
up on. The strain of working extra hard to recoup lost time, coupled with the blissful memory of a vacation away from these devices, can lead to even more desperate feelings of exhaustion.
There have been many reports about our direct physiological responses to our digital devices that discuss how staring at screens can cause our eyes to fatigue or how the blue wavelengths emitted from them can wreak havoc on our circadian rhythms. These physical effects, though important, are not the subject of this book. Instead, my goal is to understand how the access to information, data, and people that our digital devices enable contributes to our digital exhaustion. Devices are not the problem; the way we use them and the social, organizational, and cultural expectations associated with our patterns of use are.
In today’s digitally connected world, our secret weapon is knowing how to develop a healthier relationship with our technology. We can’t stop using our devices, so we have to learn to use them in ways that don’t sap our energy and, importantly, in ways that give us new energy. By taking back control of our digital tools, we can use them for the very reasons we adopted them in the first place: to help us connect better with others and to be more creative, more efficient, better at our jobs, and happier people. Those are the promises of digital technologies. Reimagining our relationship with them so that they stop exhausting us is how we fulfill those promises.
Let’s begin by discussing what digital exhaustion is.
EXHAUSTION UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
The feeling of digital exhaustion is easy to recognize but much harder to define. Anna Schaffner, a professor at the University of Kent, sought-after exhaustion coach, and the author of the book Exhaustion: A History, reminds us that although Western societies have written
about the concept of exhaustion since at least 350 BCE, it has never been well defined. In surveying more than two millennia of writing on the topic, she concludes: “Exhaustion generally suggests the vampiric depletion or harmful consumption of a limited (and usually nonrenewable) resource, which leaves an originally well-functioning person, object, system, or terrain in a weakened or dysfunctional state.” I love the term “vampiric.” Even though exhaustion may be hard to define precisely, the image of an insidious beast that sucks the energy from its host seems on the mark.
There appears to be general agreement that the symptoms of exhaustion include weariness, disillusionment, apathy, hopelessness, restlessness, irritability, and a general lack of motivation. Exhaustion is simultaneously a mental and physical phenomenon. When we overtire the brain, our body attempts to reserve its energy to restore our cognition, and we feel physically drained. Exhaustion reduces our energy, our desire to act, and our ability to focus and concentrate. Mental exhaustion is a particularly acute problem because unlike our bodies, our brains rarely send clear signals that we are tired. It is not always easy to tell when we have hit our limit and need a break. If you’re doing something physical like moving boxes or swinging a hammer, your body will tell you when it is tired and needs rest. We are good at interpreting the signals of fatigue coming from our muscles, recognizing pain from our joints, and noticing that we are not hitting nails with the same force or accuracy that we were earlier in the day. But we have much greater difficulty recognizing our mental exhaustion. In the moment, we might be aware that we are making more mistakes than usual. But usually, it’s the physical symptoms like a stiff neck, a sore back, or dry eyes that tip us off to the fact that we are mentally exhausted. We often push our brains harder and longer than we can push our bodies, and, in a cruel paradox, the more we over-
work our brains and deprive them of rest, the less likely they will be able to rest when we want them to.
Now let’s add digital technologies into the mix. We live in an age of information abundance. No matter where we go or where we look, we are overwhelmed with data. At work, email, Excel, databases, text messages, Slack, Zoom, ChatGPT, and so many other digital technologies that permeate our everyday lives inundate us with information and data. A growing number of research studies on the effects of these so- called productivity tools show that our increasing use of them leads to exhaustion. Away from work (or maybe secretly at work!), the sites on which we do our shopping, like Amazon and Alibaba, music platforms like Spotify and Pandora, and video streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ provide us with endless opportunities to consume. The research shows that these sites exhaust us too because they provide so many options and so many reviews to wade through that choosing is overwhelming.
No type of technology in the digital environment has been so closely linked to exhaustion as social media. The messages. The photos. The videos. The memes. The likes. The recommendations. The news alerts. The windows into other people’s lives. The advertisements. Participating in social media is like drinking from a data fire hose. But it’s not just the quantity of data that exhausts us; it’s the fact that we can’t escape. What is clear by now is that social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and others are extremely addictive and designed to be so. That urge to return to our devices and be exposed to more and more data on more and more occasions is what can so easily lead us to exhaustion.
In our quest to define digital exhaustion, it’s useful to pause for a moment to situate exhaustion in relation to two other well-known concepts: stress and burnout.
Let’s start by drawing a distinction between stressors and stress. Stressors are external events or conditions that can trigger a stress response in our bodies. They are things that we typically perceive as a threat or challenge to our physical or emotional well- being. Some common examples of stressors include work-related pressure, financial difficulties, relationship problems, health issues, or major life changes such as a move, a new job, or the birth of a child. When you experience a stressor, your body undergoes a complex biological and physiological response known as a “stress response.” Prolonged exposure to stressors can lead your body into the exhaustion stage of stress response. In this stage, the body’s resources are depleted, and you experience fatigue and decreased ability to cope with stress. If we experience too much stress over too long a period, no matter whether it’s good or bad, our minds and bodies stop working at peak efficiency because we are worn down.
While stress can be a precursor to exhaustion, burnout is one of exhaustion’s most fiendish consequences. Burnout is normally defined as a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by prolonged or excessive stress. Most often, burnout is associated with our jobs and the stressors that kick off the stress- exhaustionburnout chain are thought to be found in the workplace. The most current research suggests that burnout is recognizable through three characteristics: exhaustion, cynicism (sometimes called “depersonalization”), and inefficacy. Although exhaustion is a key contributor to burnout, burnout is bigger and more complex than exhaustion. But that doesn’t mean exhaustion is unimportant. In fact, research by the psychologist Christina Maslach has shown that exhaustion is the key driver of burnout because it sets people on a trajectory to depersonalization and reduces feelings of self- efficacy. She and her colleagues write, “Exhaustion is not something that is simply experienced— rather, it prompts actions to distance oneself emotionally and cogni-
tively from one’s work, presumably as a way to cope with the work overload.”
Fixing exhaustion alone won’t fix burnout because people’s job assignments, their workload, and their relationships with their colleagues and boss, along with contextual factors like whether they work remotely or in the office, all contribute to their feelings of burnout. But it’s also true that to deal with burnout, we must get a handle on exhaustion.
Exhaustion can come from many places. It’s my aim to convince you that a significant portion of your exhaustion comes from the way you use your digital technologies and that you have to reduce the stressors that cause exhaustion before it becomes a contributing factor in your own burnout.
LEVELS OF DIGITAL EXHAUSTION
A few years ago, I started a consulting job with a major software development company that built digital collaboration tools for medium and large businesses. Throughout the project, I met on the first Tuesday of each month with a product manager named Andi. She was in her early thirties and full of energy and enthusiasm for the project. In the course of our conversations, I learned that she had recently joined the company after being recruited from a small start-up that had built a competitor product. Andi was the ideal product manager. She had great technical depth and understood how to move a project forward. In every meeting I saw her lead, she was attentive to her team members and worked hard to make their jobs interesting and fulfilling, while also staying on time and on budget.
But just over a year in, I’d seen a dramatic change in Andi’s disposition. She seemed to lack the excitement for the product that she once had. When I saw her interacting with her team, she seemed short on
patience and somewhat irritable. One morning I asked if she was doing OK. “Not really,” she responded. “I just can’t keep up with it all. I’ve never had this experience before. I get so exhausted from going from this task to that task, to this tool to that tool, to dealing with this data and that data. It’s too much. I find myself staring at my screen a lot, scrolling and clicking and generally unmotivated. I feel like my battery is worn out and no matter what I try, it can’t hold a charge anymore.” Not being one to miss an opportunity for data collection, I asked her, “So, on a scale of zero to six, how much do the digital technologies you use make you feel worn out?” She laughed for a second and then said, “Six, for sure. But why doesn’t the scale go higher?”
Over the years, a number of people have described their exhaustion to me using the language of a depleted battery in need of a recharge. It’s a metaphor that I too have come to find useful in talking about digital exhaustion— and in dealing with my own. We have lots of experience with batteries because they power the devices we depend on, like our phones, laptops, and, increasingly, our cars. A battery has only so much capacity. It can hold only so much energy, and the rate at which that energy is exhausted depends on the demands we make of the device it powers. If we use our phone a lot, or if we use many power-hungry applications on our phone simultaneously, we’ll drain the battery faster than if we use it more sparingly. When we start our day well rested and enthusiastic, we feel charged. But with each email we receive, each report we read, each friend’s picture we comment on, each choice we make about what playlist to select, we use up that valuable energy we have stored. The more we engage with the data, information, and people that our digital devices connect us to, the more we feel depleted. We know when we are exhausted because we recognize the signs we discussed earlier. Sometimes we can go weeks before we feel exhausted, sometimes it takes just a few hours. This normal process of going from full charge to energy depletion
is what I call “Level 1 exhaustion.” We expect our energy reserves to fall based on our activities, and we know we need to recharge to restore them. Our use of digital technologies is, of course, not the only thing demanding our energy. But as I will demonstrate in part I of this book, our use of them is becoming the central driver of exhaustion today because so much of our lives is mediated by our technologies, and our choices about how we use them have a direct impact on how much of our energy they demand. Choice is important. In each recharge cycle, we can choose how we expend our energy. Just like we can choose not to run our Wi- Fi and flashlight, listen to music, and scroll through Instagram at the same time, we can also choose to engage with our digital devices, and the content and people to which they connect us, in ways that demand less energy. We have a great deal of agency in choosing how long our energy will last before we need to recharge.
The reason these choices are so consequential is because the number of times we can expend energy and recharge is limited. The constant cycle of depletion and recharge that characterizes Level 1 exhaustion takes its toll. Over time, we notice that our energy doesn’t last as long as it used to and find ourselves more anxious, irritable, and demotivated. This chronic experience is what I call “Level 2 exhaustion.”
We see signs of Level 2 exhaustion all around us. A 2023 survey of 3,400 people across ten countries showed that 43 percent of all employees reported that they felt “often” or “always” exhausted, and 46 percent of middle managers— those in the workplace most affected by digital exhaustion— said they planned to quit their jobs within the next twelve months because of work-related stressors. Jivan, a technical sales manager I talked with, is a member of this group. He is in his late forties, recently changed jobs, and started working with a therapist to deal with his Level 2 exhaustion. He explained it to me like
this: “I got to a breaking point where I couldn’t even do simple tasks right. I was too worn out from being worn out all the time. Feeling exhausted by all the information and the contacts with people and the switching between this and that and then needing to find energy to do it all again was hard. But finding the energy to come back again and again got to be too much.”
A battery’s health is typically measured in terms of its cycle life, which refers to the number of times it can be charged and discharged (Level 1 exhaustion) before it starts to lose its performance (Level 2 exhaustion). Lithium-ion batteries (like those that power our phones and laptops) typically have a life of around three hundred to five hundred cycles before they start to degrade significantly and eventually die. The good news is that although the battery metaphor helps us to understand exhaustion, we are not consumer batteries. If we experience Level 2 exhaustion, we can bounce back. But the metaphor is still useful. Our job is to reduce the number of Level 1 exhaustion-recharge cycles. To do that, we have to learn how to conserve our energy and find new sources of energy so that we don’t get so depleted in the first place. To do these two things, we must reimagine our relationship with our devices.
SOME SIMPLE RULES
If there were one universal law about the use of digital technologies, it would be this: People settle into patterns of use quickly. Whether that fact delights or terrifies you, the evidence suggests that most people’s experimentation with new technologies is short-lived. After about twelve to sixteen weeks of testing the capabilities of new digital tools, most people will have settled into a routine with them, and the ongoing effects of their use will be fairly predictable. The duration of that
window of uncertainty (or opportunity) has been constant for the past thirty years. The arrival of social media and AI-based technologies using large language models (LLMs) has not only prevented the window from shutting when it should but has shattered the glass. Unlike virtually any other digital technology we’re accustomed to using, AI- enabled digital tools (and just about every digital tool being designed and sold today is embedded with AI capabilities) are designed to change by themselves— continuously. Each time you provide new data to an LLM to produce text or computer code for you, the technology learns and its capabilities grow. That means that you are never really using the same technology twice. The things it can do for you this week will change by next week. Thanks to the autonomous learning that characterizes even today’s most basic digital tools, you aren’t learning to use a new technology once— you’re learning to use a new technology nearly every time you engage with it. In short, we live in an increasingly fast-moving and unpredictable digital world.
Kathy Eisenhardt, a professor at Stanford’s School of Engineering, has spent nearly four decades studying how companies succeed in chaotic high-velocity markets and is widely regarded as the foremost authority on technology strategy. Her work shows that companies that do best in environments characterized by rapid technological change have one thing in common: They rely on a set of simple rules. When markets won’t stand still because technologies are constantly evolving, trying to develop a detailed strategy is futile— by the time you have your strategy ready, the market is no longer the same and all your hard work is for naught. But when companies develop, follow, and stick to a set of simple rules, they know what to do when change happens and they’re prepared to adapt.
This strategy is a useful guide for thinking about how to reimagine our relationship with digital tools. If the applications and devices
we use are changing rapidly and we don’t know what capabilities and liabilities they’ll present to us, we will be in the strongest position to avoid digital exhaustion if we have some simple rules to follow.
To determine what simple rules are likely to be most effective, we first need to get a handle on where our digital exhaustion comes from. In part I of this book, I discuss the roots of the problem, what I call the “exhaustion triad”: the three major forces that shape our digital exhaustion. These chapters examine the new energy sinks of our day, showing that the ways we pay attention, how we make inferences of ourselves and others, and the emotions we feel when we’re in front of our screens work interactively to sap our energy. This is an important place to begin because we can’t moderate our energy expenditure or find the right ways to recharge if we don’t understand what’s draining us. By the end of part I, you’ll see digital exhaustion in a much more nuanced way than simply as something that comes directly from our devices.
Part II presents eight simple rules for digital resilience you can follow to reshape your relationship with the ever- changing cadre of technologies you use at work and home. Just like the feature on your phone that limits apps from running in the background, changes in how you use your digital technologies can help prevent Level 1 exhaustion. The chapters in this section discuss how to make these changes and build routines around them that will help them last. Some of the rules presented in this section will help you to reclaim your energy and enthusiasm by being deliberate about your digital technology use. I’ll show examples of new uses for digital tools that will reenergize you, and I’ll walk through some of the latest research about how you can find consistent hits of non- digital dopamine that will encourage you to use your devices only for the things they’re best equipped to assist with.
In part III, we will explore how to leverage these rules in three
different contexts: at work, while parenting, and when interacting with AI. We’ll look at how we can create a healthy culture of technology use in our workplaces, and we’ll examine the causes, effects, and solutions to the problem of digital exhaustion that are increasingly common in hybrid and remote work arrangements. We will also examine how parents can use the rules from part II to reduce their own digital exhaustion as they attempt to navigate a world in which they are expected to do more and be more than ever, while also setting a good example for their children about how to use digital technologies in healthy ways. Finally, we’ll explore the emerging role of AI and what effects it’s likely to have— good and bad— on our exhaustion. The sudden introduction of AI into our lives will have major implications for our exhaustion not only because AI represents yet another set of digital tools with which we can interact but also because the way AI deals with data and presents it to us is unprecedented. We’ll also explore how AI can be used to minimize our digital exhaustion and how to make sure it doesn’t become yet another energy consumer.
It’s all too easy to vilify our digital tools and want to separate from them when we start to recognize they are major contributors to our overall exhaustion. But it’s important to remember that we started using these tools for a reason. In most cases, they allowed us to do something better or something new. That’s exactly what new technologies should do for us. And, of course, many of them do allow us to improve some aspect of our lives. But that constant access to information, to other people, and to the manifold distractions that devices bring exhausts us. Again, it’s not the technologies that are the problem, it’s how we use them. And to make things more difficult, we don’t always get to choose how we use them. Our bosses, our coworkers, our friends, our kids’ friends’ parents, and so many other people lure us into relationships with our digital tools that can wear us out.
The good news is that despite these constraints there is a simple
path to reducing our digital exhaustion. Of course, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. But by understanding why technology drains us, following the evidence-backed rules outlined in this book, and knowing how to apply them in different contexts, you can be well on your way to defeating digital exhaustion and leading an energized life. It’s time to reimagine our relationship with our devices.
DIGITAL EXHAUSTION
PART I
The Exhaustion Triad
Attention
Inference Emotion
You Really Do Pay with It
Maya is jolted awake at 5:50 a.m. by the buzzing in her right ear. The buzz and the light accompanying it emanate from her smartphone, which sits on her nightstand, inches from her resting head. She grabs her phone, turns off the alarm, and looks at the time. As on most mornings, she groans and flops the phone back down on her nightstand. But seconds later, even though she is still half asleep, she instinctively reaches for it, enters her passcode, and taps the icon for the Instagram app. She spends several minutes scrolling through pictures posted by her friends and family members— as well as strangers she’s never met— before a notification pops up alerting her that she’s received an email from The New York Times previewing the day’s top news stories. She clicks on the notification, which opens her email application. Before she can even look at the Times , she notices several emails that arrived from colleagues in Europe while she was sleeping. She clicks on the first one and begins to read it while her partner, who is lying on the other side of the bed, groans something she doesn’t hear. She’s about to ask him what he
said, when the “do not disturb” mode she set on her phone turns off and she sees she has three text messages and one WhatsApp message. She clicks on one of the texts, but before she reads it, she thinks perhaps the WhatsApp message might be more important, so she switches to that app. It turns out it’s just a group message from some friends overseas. So she switches back to her texts and reads one from a close friend asking her if she can believe the recent Supreme Court ruling. Her partner grumbles something again, and Maya still doesn’t hear what he wants because she’s too busy clicking on the New York Times app to see what news she can find about the Supreme Court. “Shit,” she says as she notices the time (Maya tells me she makes this exclamation just about every morning). She hops out of bed, turns on the shower, and just as she’s ready to step under the warm water she finally hears what her partner is asking on his third attempt to get her attention: “Hey, Maya, do you know where my phone is?”
Maya’s story could be my story, your story, or anyone’s, really. There’s hardly a moment in the day that’s free from some news source, application, or digital device trying to catch our attention. We live in an attention economy. Our attention is valuable because it’s a limited resource that companies can monetize. Maya knows that if she clicks on one of the ads for Skims exercise clothing that seem to have overtaken her Instagram feed, Kim Kardashian’s company will pay Instagram a small fee for the referral. But what she and most other people don’t fully appreciate is that there is an entire set of lucrative economic transactions that don’t depend on whether we click on an ad; the owners of the website or application are getting paid if they can provide proof that we simply saw the ad. This is what the world of digital marketing refers to as “impressions.” If Instagram or The New York Times or any other commercial website can show advertisers that people like you and me are likely to stay on their site for a long time, they can charge more for the ad placement because more time on the site means
a higher probability of the ad making an impression on you. From the moment you wake up, the attention merchants are angling for you.
But it’s not all about money. Those emails from work colleagues in Europe and the texts from friends are also vying for your attention. So is that voice coming from the other side of the bed. We receive and send so many texts and emails (and have to call from the other side of the bed multiple times) because we know that other people’s attention is limited and we are fighting to get a piece of it. And the data show that inundating people works. One of the first research studies I conducted was with project managers from six different companies. Project managers often have the unenviable task of trying to coordinate people and get them to do things without having direct reporting authority over them. That means they are in a constant battle to grab and hold people’s attention. We found that project managers who were the most successful in moving their projects forward on time and on budget were those who sent the same message to people on their team multiple times through different technologies. They would email, call, and walk by colleagues’ desks to tell them the same thing three times through three distinct media. And it worked. Project managers who engaged in this kind of redundant communication were able to cut through the various demands on others’ limited cognition and capture their attention more often than those who refrained from launching similar assaults on people’s attention. Unfortunately, the project managers in our study eventually realized what you and I have come to learn the hard way: Over time, all their extra communicating added to the amount of data that those they were trying to reach had to process, leading them to feel more distracted and making it even harder to capture their attention.
The predicament that most people find themselves in today is now well- documented. Our attention is fragmented. We lose focus and become easily distracted. We can’t get things done as quickly or
as easily as we should be able to, and often quality suffers. More insidiously, the multiple demands on our attention shape not only whether we can pay attention but also how we pay attention. As Nicholas Carr eloquently described in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains , one of the first books to document how the internet is changing patterns of attention: “Media aren’t just channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
Since Carr published his important book fifteen years ago, our attention has undoubtedly become more fragmented as more companies and more people try to find ways to capture it. Several important books have appeared in the last few years to help us figure out how to redirect our attention. Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism , exhorts us to dampen the assaults on our attention so we can do “deep work,” and Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus , urges us to find ways to reclaim our focus so we can “think deeply again.” In this chapter, I take a slightly different approach. Rather than tell you that you should pay better attention so that you are not so exhausted, I’m going to show you how paying attention is itself exhausting.
HOW WE PAY ATTENTION MATTERS
Maya’s preshower routine is familiar to most of us. According to a major national study conducted in 2010, 65 percent of American adults reported that they routinely slept with their smartphone on or right next to their beds. By 2023, researchers had stopped asking if