October 22, 2025 • 25 mins
Professor Paul Leonardi share how to turn down the digital noise
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Good morning, This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's episode is going to be a longer one part
of the series where I interview fascinating people about how
they take their days from great to awesome and any
advice they have for the rest of us. So today
I am delighted to welcome Paul Leonardi to Before Breakfast.
(00:30):
Paul is a professor at You See Santa Barbara and
the author of the brand new book Digital Exhaustion, Simple
Tools for Reclaiming Your Life.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
So, Paul, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Good morning Laura, nice to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Yeah, so, why didn't you tell our listeners a little
bit about yourself.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah, So, as you mentioned, I'm a professor at you
See Santa Barbara. I've been a professor for about twenty years,
and during that time I've really spent my effort and
energy trying to understand how people and people who are
working in companies can use digital tools effectively to increase productivity, efficiency,
(01:05):
well being, etc. And there's a dark side. As we
both know that all of these tools do great things
for us, they also wear us out, and so a
big chunk of what I've been focusing on for the
last few years is trying to understand how do we
make sure that we're taking advantage of all the great
things these tools do for us at work and in
our personal lives and not get so worn out by them. All.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Right, Well, that leads us to the title of your book,
digital exhaustion. I'm sure you have been asked this a
million times, but what exactly is digital exhaustion?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Great question. I like to define it more by feeling
rather than just a definition. So play along with me here.
If you don't mind, have you felt as you sat
in front of your screen that the screen's kind of
like a tractor beam. It sucks you in that you're
scrolling and you're clicking, You're kind of feeling lack of energy.
(01:57):
You maybe look at your watch and you're like, what
have I been doing for the last ten minutes? You
know you need to send an email, you know you
should be replying to somebody on Instagram, but you kind
of don't want to, but you can't quite leave and
get up. If you've had those sorts of feelings before,
that's digital exhaustion in a nutshell, right, It's this kind
of pervasive feeling that I should be doing more, but
(02:17):
I can't quite pull away. But I'm not being productive
and it's kind of getting overwhelming.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
All right, Well, that's an interesting way to look at it.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
You know, I'm trying to figure out what exactly is
leading to this, because obviously some tools are incredibly helpful
for our life. I'm hoping that the squadcast where we're
recording is not glitchy. But there's no way we'd be
doing this you in California and me and Philadelphia and like,
you know, be able to see each other. I mean,
there's a lot of tools. Sure, digital tools are incredibly amazing. Yeah,
but is it just the sheer volume of them that's
(02:46):
that's the problem. Is it the time we're spending on them?
What is leading to the problem.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Yeah, there's a combination of factors that I really outline
in the book, And the myth that I wanted to
spell right off the top is that that we're just
using tools too much. I don't think that's really the problem.
We have to use them to get by in today's world, right,
whether that's at home, whether it's at work, at parenting
with our families, The key is how do we use
(03:12):
them in ways that don't lead to those feelings of
exhaustion that we just describe. So there are three key
drivers to digital exhaustion. The first is attention. We hear
a lot today about how we need to focus, we
need to do deep work. All that's great, I totally agree,
but I think those conversations miss a slightly different point,
which is that the way we pay attention exhausts us.
(03:33):
So for most of us, we're constantly switching across different devices.
We're at home and we're thinking about work. We're doing
one project, but we're also switching to do things on
another project simultaneously. And each of those switches and how
we pay attention and where we pay attention is really exhausting.
We switch tools roughly twelve hundred times a day. Think
(03:54):
about that, like, how many of those switches happen, and
even if you're doing something is seemingly banal, as switching
between let's say Microsoft Teams and Zoom that are both
video conferencing platforms, think about, Okay, I've got to figure
out where the record button is or how I get
my mic on on this new application, and all of
(04:15):
those micro decisions are just cognitively exhausting. They wear us out.
So how we focus our attention is one. The second
is about inference. So we are exposed to so many
data points all day long, and sometimes those are data
points in a seal spreadsheet. Sometimes they're images that we
see on Instagram or a video on TikTok, and it's
(04:37):
easy to think that, well, we just are seeing the
total here, we're seeing the world. We're seeing all of
the bits and pieces of information, but we're not. We're
always making inferences about, well, what do these data actually mean?
Or why did that person post that? Or I wrote
this thing in this email, what does that person think
about what I just wrote? And so we're constantly making
(04:58):
all these inferences about data and information sources, and there's
just great research that shows that when you make those inferences,
we get emotionally exhausted, We get mentally exhausted, and we're
just doing that constantly. And then the final piece is
just really around emotions. You know, I don't think we
typically think of technology and emotion in the same sentence,
but the way we use our tools and how we
(05:20):
get involved in you know, sort of the flow of
our work or you know, interactions that we have, maybe
on text message with our family and friends, they lead
to a whole range of emotions, some of them really great.
We're excited, we're you know, we're feeling really happy. Others
were feeling kind of depressed, or we're having anxiety, or
maybe we're mad. And emotions are one of the biggest
(05:43):
sources of our exhaustion, whether they're positive or negative. Emotions
wear us out. And everything we do with technology today
piques our emotions in all kinds of ways. So if
you think about attention, inference, and emotion, those are the
things that are wearing us out. It's not our tools,
but it's how our tools create these different orientations to
those three drivers.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Well, and one of the things you suggest in the
book is doing a bit of an audit on all
the tools you are touching in the course of the day.
What we're switching between twelve hundred times. I'm curious what
are the sort of numbers people are posting when they
do an audit. What kind of numbers are is that
list going to be so our readers, our listeners don't
feel bad.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
When they do this.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Yeah, so I've done this with a like probably at
sixty seventy people at this point, and on average, I
would say people report using between thirty five and forty
different applications today. That's up from about a decade ago
when I started doing this, and people were reporting somewhere
between ten and fifteen applications. So that number has just
(06:46):
dramatically increased in a few years. Another interesting fact about
that difference between then and now is when I used
to ask people, okay, well, tell me about the digital
tools they're using, they would say, well, I use my laptop,
and I use my phone, and i use my computer,
so they are all devices. And today almost nobody mentions devices,
but they say I'm on this app and that app
(07:08):
and this app across all of these different devices. So
it's not just that we're switching and paying attention and
using so many different tools, but we're using them across
different devices, and so they all have different interfaces and
different ways of interacting with them. And thirty five to
forty that seems like a lot. But if you just
start to think about, okay, well, I use Safari on
(07:29):
my phone, and then I go on LinkedIn, and then
I'm using Microsoft Word, and then I look at Gmail
and then they all add up real quick, real quick.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Well, but one of the things you then say with
that is, I mean, the truth sets us free when
we know what all these are. One of the upsides
of doing this is you can see how many are
just for personal use, which I think gives people more
of a sense of agency over it. Like I can't
suddenly decide to stop using Zoom if that's how I
communicate with my boss and I'm working remotely, right, we
(08:00):
can't just write that off. But nobody's requiring you to
be on Instagram, for instance, most of the time.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
Yeah, that's true. So my recommendation when you're doing what
I call a tool audit is to say, first, just
list out all of the different technologies that you use,
and I think you'll be surprised often how many duplicating
tools we have. You know that maybe you're kind of
just for fun, you're talking to your family on FaceTime,
but you're also talking to your family on Zoom, and
(08:26):
you're like, well, those are sort of giving me the
exact same functionality. Maybe I don't need to be using
both of these. So just listing as powerful as you mentioned,
but then dividing between what do we use in our
personal lives and what do we use at work helps
us to recognize, just as you point out that we
can do a lot in our personal lives to reduce
the number of tools that we use. Sometimes it's harder
(08:47):
at work, although lots of great examples of people who
found that they're using a bunch of different technologies at
work and nobody really knows why, you know. So I
talked to one woman who was saying, well, we we
have Dropbox, and we have g Drive, and we have SharePoint,
and we seem to save our files on my team
and all of those and so I went and asked,
why are we using all three of these? And nobody knew.
(09:10):
So I just said to the team, the team was
about eight people, what if we just picked Google Drive?
And everyone's like, oh, yeah, that's fine, we'll just move
everything over to Google Drive. So often we're just stuck
in this tool creep right where we have more and
more devices and applications and we don't know why. And
so it's easier to take care of the ones at home,
slightly harder in the workplace. But I think both are doable.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Absolutely Well, We're going to take a quick ad break
and then we'll be back with more about digital exhaustion. Well,
I am back talking with Paul Leonardi, who's the author
of the brand new book Digital Exhaustion. We've been talking
about doing a tool audit of every tool you touch
(09:50):
on the course of the day and seeing which ones
maybe duplicates, which ones are solely for personal use in
er within your control, whether you think they add to
your life or not. But even if we are going
to use a tool, there are ways within the use
of the tool to sort of tone down its exhaustion
factor for us. I mean, one of the things you
mentioned is simply delaying responses and how does that work
(10:12):
to tone down the exhaustion.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
Sure, So this is I think a powerful rule that
I talk about in the book. It's rule number four,
and it's maybe the most controversial of the rules in
the book. You know, we're soingrained in quick response times
in at least the western industrialized world. You know, somebody
sends us a message, a text, an email, what's that message?
(10:35):
And we feel like, well, we just have to respond
right away. So there's a very strong cultural pressure towards
that response. What's interesting, though, is there's been a lot
of research about people and response times, and what the
research shows is, first, people overestimate how urgent they think
(10:55):
someone else's requests are, so we often think that we
have to respond away because this person needs this thing
right now. And if you go and survey the people
that sent the request, they often say, well, I didn't
really need this as quickly as they thought that I did,
so thinking about this email urgency bias, I think is
an important thing to remember. Second, the data also show
(11:17):
that people in train to our response patterns. So if
I'm someone who responds really quickly, then you're going to
respond quickly because I responded quickly, and if I respond
more slowly, you tend to respond more slowly because I
responded more slowly. So we get into this choreograph dance
pretty easily with the people that were exchanging messages to
(11:39):
So if you want to slow down the rate at
which you have to receive messages and respond to them,
like just don't send messages quite so quickly, or respond
to people's messages a little more slowly. I'm not suggesting
that we shirk our responsibility if there's a really important
and urgent thing, but many of the things that people
ask us aren't super and many of the things people
(12:02):
ask us resolve themselves if we don't respond right away.
I mean that you can probably think of many times
in your life where someone's asked you for some help
or asked you for this piece of information and you
don't respond for whatever reason, and then they email you
back or text you and say, actually, I don't need
that anymore. I moved on or I figured it out.
So delaying strategically sometimes can help us to reduce response time.
(12:24):
And the very last thing I'll say about this, because
I know we should move on, but is that a
lot of research shows that if we send longer messages
that are more thoughtful, people respond to them less frequently.
And that's important because what it means is that if
I just take a little more time crafting something that's
(12:46):
more thorough, then people will store that in their inbox,
they'll reflect on it. It'll help to answer their questions
maybe that they don't have right now, but they'll realize
that they have in five hours or in a week.
And that means that they're not constantly sending me these
small follow ups that get me out of the rhythm
of my work and really tax my attention for having
(13:07):
to respond when I'm trying to do something else. So
I think delayed response, slowing down a little bit is
a huge tool that we can have in order to
reduce our exhaustion.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Well, yeah, and you say you train people in what
you're like if I know that the emails I get
from Paul are thoughtful and explain everything, and you know
I'm not going to have a million follow up questions,
and I start to, Oh, the emails from Paul are
actually serious, I should.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Start paying attention to them and reflecting.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Upon them as they do what I think the things
I found sort of darkly humorous tell you like many
of us wind up using apps and group texts and
such in our personal lives, sometimes in the hope of
saving time, right, like the idea of Okay, I'm gonna
carpool with three other families to soccer, and because of that,
(13:54):
I am only going to have to go to soccer
twenty five percent of the time because we're all taking
each other's kids. And yet the mental management of that,
the mental load that winds up coming out of managing
the carpool group chat can sometimes be as much as
the time that you would have spent driving those children
to soccer.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Yeah, darkly humorous is probably a good way to describe it.
You know, this particular chapter in the book that's sort
of about parenting in the digital age is really poignant
for me personally because I've got three, well two teenage
daughters and one almost teenage, and I'm just like a
chauffeur service, right, I'm just driving them around constantly, and
(14:36):
so it was really sort of horrifying but also gratifying
to talk to so many parents to hear about what
are your struggles and what are the ways that you
deal with them. And the concept that I would urge
us to think about is what I call shadow hours.
So we think about a typical task like driving someone
(14:57):
or carpooling, like how much time does that take? And
the mental calculation that most of us make is, Okay,
well how much time is this going to save me?
But what we don't think of are those shadow hours,
or the amount of time that happens in coordination to
make that carpool happen. And it's funny. So just I'm
just going to pull out my texts here while we're talking,
because just last night, my wife's friend sent her a
(15:21):
text and I'm going to see if I can read
it here, and it says, got eighty three texts today
about the carpool situation. I'm over it with a big
face with crime. Now, think about that all the time
that you're trying to spend to coordinate because someone you know, okay,
well my other kids siys, so I can't do the
(15:41):
carpool today, or it turns out, you know, this person
has to go here rather than there. We're spending so
much time trying to do these coordination activities that really
take our time, attention, and peque our emotions that in
many cases, if we step back a bit, we might think,
maybe I just drive the person instead, maybe just drive
my kid and I don't have to do all this
coordination and spend all these shadow hours. And the other
(16:05):
thing that I find talking to a lot of parents
is they say, these are really crappy connections with people,
you know, like, I'm not actually building relationships by saying Okay,
I'll pick up, no you pick up, No, I'll be there, No,
you be there. What people say that they do that
really helps is that they'll say, well, rather than let's
try to coordinate this on text when we both go
(16:27):
and we're here at this event, let's talk about it.
And then you actually see somebody, you laugh a little
bit with them, you joke about the ridiculous situation that
we're in driving our kids to and fro, and you
feel like you're actually making a connection with someone and
you're able to resolve a lot of those ambiguities that
would have taken thirty texts in fifteen seconds worth of talking.
(16:48):
So I think that the watchword here is think about
your shadow hours and think about how you can connect
so much that you actually lose real connection with people.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Absolutely, we're going to take one more quick ad break
and then we will be back with more on digital exhaustion.
So I am back talking with Paul Leonardi, who's the
author of the brand new book Digital Exhaustion, Simple Tools
for Reclaiming Your Life. So, I mean that's not to.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Say we should never try to carpool or to you know,
outsource anything. I mean I'm reminded of the fact that
like managing in general, like when you manage, when you outsource,
you're still a resource.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Problem.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Is we have to, you know, try to minimize how
many shadow hours we are devoting to different things, but I'm.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Curious about your scandle. Here, let's talk about your scandule.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Okay, do you have any routines, particularly around how you
deal with digital stuff or inputs that you feel make
you more productive.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Yeah. So I've developed a number of different tricks over
the years, mostly inspired by doing the research for this book.
So one of the biggest ones is about my pattern
of response to incoming queer and that for me often
happens on email, but it also happens on LinkedIn, it
happens on text message, it happens through some group chat
(18:09):
devices that we use in my work and in my consulting.
And I used to be what I call a very
hardcore batcher, meaning that I would pick certain times a
day and I would say, Okay, this is my response period.
I'm going to give you a window right an hour
in the morning, and I'm going to give an hour
at lunch and an hour in the afternoon, and I'm
(18:29):
going to respond only during those times. In fact, when
I was really at my peak of doing this, I
think I really did it like once a day, and
I was really efficient with all the rest of my
work because I wasn't getting interrupted constantly by incoming messages
that took my head out of the space that I
was in and put in somewhere else, and my exhaustion
(18:52):
felt relatively low. However, what I noticed over time, and
after interviewing a lot of people who do batching versus
what I can streaming, which is kind of just taking
things as they come in and then responding to them
right away, is that I was actually letting a lot
of people down. You know, that I wasn't careful about
(19:15):
triaging my messages right and triaging the things that I
needed to accomplish, and so I put everything into the bucket.
I'll respond to this at the end of the day
when some things actually needed much more quick responses, and
so I was making it difficult for other people to
complete their work or to do the things they needed
to do. So over time, I've moved toward having a
(19:35):
system where I do dedicate chunks of time morning, right
before lunch and then about an hour before it in
my day to real in depth responses. But I'm also
just looking throughout the day to make sure that things
aren't coming in that will require a really quick response
that doesn't take a lot of my headspace so it's
a combination of figuring out about that batching and streaming
(19:57):
and what the ideal balance is on those two activities
for you that I think are really.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Important well, because it really is a balance, right, I
mean there are because there are people who are streaming
all day and I can tell you having studied their schedules,
they get nothing done. I mean, you know, everyone's excited
that you hear back from John immediately, but if John
has never gotten around to finishing his part of the
project of initially, it gets a little tedious set you
know that he was responsive but not effective.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
So I mean, I guess maybe people just need to.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Try different things and see, like where you get the
balance of people being unhappy with you versus where you
get the balance of being unhappy with yourself because you're
not getting stuffed.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
I guess I don't know.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
I would say that most of the inbound things that
we get right this is after talking to twelve thousand
people over the twenty years of studying this. Most of
the inbound things that we get are not urgent, you know,
and most of them require some amount of thought from us,
other than the ones that we quickly delete. Right, So,
like hat your inbox, you can probably quickly delete, but
(20:58):
things require some focus. So I do think it's worth
figuring out how do I dedicate times in the day
where I can really just focus on dealing with these
issues and not in a time when I'm trying to
write this report or put together this presentation or debrief
with this client. But we also have to recognize that
there are going to be the periodic things that come
(21:20):
in that require quick response, and usually the responses that
we need are not pulling us mentally out of a
space to get us to be able to respond, and
so we can deal with those quickly without really breaking
our concentration. So my recommendation is that you think about, Okay,
how do I batch most of these things into different
(21:40):
times of the day, but just make sure that I'm
only responding to those things that are really urgent that
I need to as they come in. And finding that
balance for you is going to be slightly different.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
For everybody, absolutely so, Paul, one of the questions I
always ask everybody on this show is what is something
you have done recently to take a day from great
tip to awesome?
Speaker 3 (22:00):
That question, and for me, it actually relates to one
of the concepts in the book, which when I talk
about flow, and you're probably familiar with that concept most
of your listeners are. You know, where you're really engrossed
in an activity and you're just there because the more
you're there, the less you want to be elsewhere. And
there's all kinds of positive energy that comes from being
(22:22):
in a state of flow in a fun activity and
a work activity doesn't really matter. But one of the
things that I tried to do recently was just to
really be where I am. And I know that sounds
kind of funny, but you know the other day, I
was driving my daughter somewhere and I was thinking, so
I started the drive, thinking, oh, like, I have the
(22:42):
driver here right But then when I thought about this
rule number eight in the book, I was thinking, Okay,
what if I'm just really here right now, drive because
I've made this choice, so I just will be right
in the car with my daughter. And that really changed
my day dramatically because I really listened to her talk
(23:03):
about her day and we were driving along and she
pointed out this beautiful bird that was flying along and
I was like, oh my gosh, that is a really
beautiful bird. And the drive went by like that, right,
and like three felt like three seconds because I was
in the drive. I wasn't thinking about what email is
going to respond to in my head or think about
the numbers I needed to crunch in my Excel spreadsheet later,
(23:26):
and that took my data great in a way that
almost nothing else has in a while.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Would that all our driving children around could be that amazing?
Speaker 3 (23:35):
No kidding.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
There was no traffic and there was the birds were.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Singing, birds were singing, and the clouds parted. It was amazing.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
It was amazing. My teenager wasn't mad at me. It
was great. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Paul, What are
you looking forward to right now?
Speaker 3 (23:50):
Let's see. I this sound a little geeky, but I'm
really looking forward to AI. Like there's so much talk
about it that kind of is exhausting, you know. But
I've been doing work with a lot of different companies
that are building AI tools and starting to implement them,
and I really am excited about the possibility of how
(24:10):
these different technologies are going to really change the way
we work and the way that we enjoy our leisure time.
There are certainly some things to be scared about, but
I'm actually quite optimistic that if we make some smart choices,
we're gonna, I think, have a better world. And maybe
that sounds a little pollyannish, but I don't know. I'm
kind of excited about it.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Yeah, I mean technology can be great.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
You know, cares are amazing that we get to use them,
even if they are occasionally exhausting.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
So, Paul, where can people find you?
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Yeah? So you can find me at LinkedIn. That's a
great place to interact. I'm on x p Leonardi one
is to handle there, and then my website, Paul Leonardi
dot com is a great place to get updated on
some latest writings and places like Wall Street Journal, Harvard
Business Review, and other books I've written. But check out
Digital Exhaustion.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Please please do book well. Paul, thank you so much
for joining us. Thank you to everyone for listening. If
you have feedback about this or any other episode, you
can always reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and
here's to making the most.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If
you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts
from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Good morning, This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's episode is going to be a longer one part
of the series where I interview fascinating people about how
they take their days from great to awesome and any
advice they have for the rest of us. So today
I am delighted to welcome Paul Leonardi to Before Breakfast.
(00:30):
Paul is a professor at You See Santa Barbara and
the author of the brand new book Digital Exhaustion, Simple
Tools for Reclaiming Your Life.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
So, Paul, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Good morning Laura, nice to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Yeah, so, why didn't you tell our listeners a little
bit about yourself.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
Yeah, So, as you mentioned, I'm a professor at you
See Santa Barbara. I've been a professor for about twenty years,
and during that time I've really spent my effort and
energy trying to understand how people and people who are
working in companies can use digital tools effectively to increase productivity, efficiency,
(01:05):
well being, etc. And there's a dark side. As we
both know that all of these tools do great things
for us, they also wear us out, and so a
big chunk of what I've been focusing on for the
last few years is trying to understand how do we
make sure that we're taking advantage of all the great
things these tools do for us at work and in
our personal lives and not get so worn out by them. All.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Right, Well, that leads us to the title of your book,
digital exhaustion. I'm sure you have been asked this a
million times, but what exactly is digital exhaustion?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Great question. I like to define it more by feeling
rather than just a definition. So play along with me here.
If you don't mind, have you felt as you sat
in front of your screen that the screen's kind of
like a tractor beam. It sucks you in that you're
scrolling and you're clicking, You're kind of feeling lack of energy.
(01:57):
You maybe look at your watch and you're like, what
have I been doing for the last ten minutes? You
know you need to send an email, you know you
should be replying to somebody on Instagram, but you kind
of don't want to, but you can't quite leave and
get up. If you've had those sorts of feelings before,
that's digital exhaustion in a nutshell, right, It's this kind
of pervasive feeling that I should be doing more, but
(02:17):
I can't quite pull away. But I'm not being productive
and it's kind of getting overwhelming.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
All right, Well, that's an interesting way to look at it.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
You know, I'm trying to figure out what exactly is
leading to this, because obviously some tools are incredibly helpful
for our life. I'm hoping that the squadcast where we're
recording is not glitchy. But there's no way we'd be
doing this you in California and me and Philadelphia and like,
you know, be able to see each other. I mean,
there's a lot of tools. Sure, digital tools are incredibly amazing. Yeah,
but is it just the sheer volume of them that's
(02:46):
that's the problem. Is it the time we're spending on them?
What is leading to the problem.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Yeah, there's a combination of factors that I really outline
in the book, And the myth that I wanted to
spell right off the top is that that we're just
using tools too much. I don't think that's really the problem.
We have to use them to get by in today's world, right,
whether that's at home, whether it's at work, at parenting
with our families, The key is how do we use
(03:12):
them in ways that don't lead to those feelings of
exhaustion that we just describe. So there are three key
drivers to digital exhaustion. The first is attention. We hear
a lot today about how we need to focus, we
need to do deep work. All that's great, I totally agree,
but I think those conversations miss a slightly different point,
which is that the way we pay attention exhausts us.
(03:33):
So for most of us, we're constantly switching across different devices.
We're at home and we're thinking about work. We're doing
one project, but we're also switching to do things on
another project simultaneously. And each of those switches and how
we pay attention and where we pay attention is really exhausting.
We switch tools roughly twelve hundred times a day. Think
(03:54):
about that, like, how many of those switches happen, and
even if you're doing something is seemingly banal, as switching
between let's say Microsoft Teams and Zoom that are both
video conferencing platforms, think about, Okay, I've got to figure
out where the record button is or how I get
my mic on on this new application, and all of
(04:15):
those micro decisions are just cognitively exhausting. They wear us out.
So how we focus our attention is one. The second
is about inference. So we are exposed to so many
data points all day long, and sometimes those are data
points in a seal spreadsheet. Sometimes they're images that we
see on Instagram or a video on TikTok, and it's
(04:37):
easy to think that, well, we just are seeing the
total here, we're seeing the world. We're seeing all of
the bits and pieces of information, but we're not. We're
always making inferences about, well, what do these data actually mean?
Or why did that person post that? Or I wrote
this thing in this email, what does that person think
about what I just wrote? And so we're constantly making
(04:58):
all these inferences about data and information sources, and there's
just great research that shows that when you make those inferences,
we get emotionally exhausted, We get mentally exhausted, and we're
just doing that constantly. And then the final piece is
just really around emotions. You know, I don't think we
typically think of technology and emotion in the same sentence,
but the way we use our tools and how we
(05:20):
get involved in you know, sort of the flow of
our work or you know, interactions that we have, maybe
on text message with our family and friends, they lead
to a whole range of emotions, some of them really great.
We're excited, we're you know, we're feeling really happy. Others
were feeling kind of depressed, or we're having anxiety, or
maybe we're mad. And emotions are one of the biggest
(05:43):
sources of our exhaustion, whether they're positive or negative. Emotions
wear us out. And everything we do with technology today
piques our emotions in all kinds of ways. So if
you think about attention, inference, and emotion, those are the
things that are wearing us out. It's not our tools,
but it's how our tools create these different orientations to
those three drivers.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Well, and one of the things you suggest in the
book is doing a bit of an audit on all
the tools you are touching in the course of the day.
What we're switching between twelve hundred times. I'm curious what
are the sort of numbers people are posting when they
do an audit. What kind of numbers are is that
list going to be so our readers, our listeners don't
feel bad.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
When they do this.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Yeah, so I've done this with a like probably at
sixty seventy people at this point, and on average, I
would say people report using between thirty five and forty
different applications today. That's up from about a decade ago
when I started doing this, and people were reporting somewhere
between ten and fifteen applications. So that number has just
(06:46):
dramatically increased in a few years. Another interesting fact about
that difference between then and now is when I used
to ask people, okay, well, tell me about the digital
tools they're using, they would say, well, I use my laptop,
and I use my phone, and i use my computer,
so they are all devices. And today almost nobody mentions devices,
but they say I'm on this app and that app
(07:08):
and this app across all of these different devices. So
it's not just that we're switching and paying attention and
using so many different tools, but we're using them across
different devices, and so they all have different interfaces and
different ways of interacting with them. And thirty five to
forty that seems like a lot. But if you just
start to think about, okay, well, I use Safari on
(07:29):
my phone, and then I go on LinkedIn, and then
I'm using Microsoft Word, and then I look at Gmail
and then they all add up real quick, real quick.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Well, but one of the things you then say with
that is, I mean, the truth sets us free when
we know what all these are. One of the upsides
of doing this is you can see how many are
just for personal use, which I think gives people more
of a sense of agency over it. Like I can't
suddenly decide to stop using Zoom if that's how I
communicate with my boss and I'm working remotely, right, we
(08:00):
can't just write that off. But nobody's requiring you to
be on Instagram, for instance, most of the time.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
Yeah, that's true. So my recommendation when you're doing what
I call a tool audit is to say, first, just
list out all of the different technologies that you use,
and I think you'll be surprised often how many duplicating
tools we have. You know that maybe you're kind of
just for fun, you're talking to your family on FaceTime,
but you're also talking to your family on Zoom, and
(08:26):
you're like, well, those are sort of giving me the
exact same functionality. Maybe I don't need to be using
both of these. So just listing as powerful as you mentioned,
but then dividing between what do we use in our
personal lives and what do we use at work helps
us to recognize, just as you point out that we
can do a lot in our personal lives to reduce
the number of tools that we use. Sometimes it's harder
(08:47):
at work, although lots of great examples of people who
found that they're using a bunch of different technologies at
work and nobody really knows why, you know. So I
talked to one woman who was saying, well, we we
have Dropbox, and we have g Drive, and we have SharePoint,
and we seem to save our files on my team
and all of those and so I went and asked,
why are we using all three of these? And nobody knew.
(09:10):
So I just said to the team, the team was
about eight people, what if we just picked Google Drive?
And everyone's like, oh, yeah, that's fine, we'll just move
everything over to Google Drive. So often we're just stuck
in this tool creep right where we have more and
more devices and applications and we don't know why. And
so it's easier to take care of the ones at home,
slightly harder in the workplace. But I think both are doable.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Absolutely Well, We're going to take a quick ad break
and then we'll be back with more about digital exhaustion. Well,
I am back talking with Paul Leonardi, who's the author
of the brand new book Digital Exhaustion. We've been talking
about doing a tool audit of every tool you touch
(09:50):
on the course of the day and seeing which ones
maybe duplicates, which ones are solely for personal use in
er within your control, whether you think they add to
your life or not. But even if we are going
to use a tool, there are ways within the use
of the tool to sort of tone down its exhaustion
factor for us. I mean, one of the things you
mentioned is simply delaying responses and how does that work
(10:12):
to tone down the exhaustion.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
Sure, So this is I think a powerful rule that
I talk about in the book. It's rule number four,
and it's maybe the most controversial of the rules in
the book. You know, we're soingrained in quick response times
in at least the western industrialized world. You know, somebody
sends us a message, a text, an email, what's that message?
(10:35):
And we feel like, well, we just have to respond
right away. So there's a very strong cultural pressure towards
that response. What's interesting, though, is there's been a lot
of research about people and response times, and what the
research shows is, first, people overestimate how urgent they think
(10:55):
someone else's requests are, so we often think that we
have to respond away because this person needs this thing
right now. And if you go and survey the people
that sent the request, they often say, well, I didn't
really need this as quickly as they thought that I did,
so thinking about this email urgency bias, I think is
an important thing to remember. Second, the data also show
(11:17):
that people in train to our response patterns. So if
I'm someone who responds really quickly, then you're going to
respond quickly because I responded quickly, and if I respond
more slowly, you tend to respond more slowly because I
responded more slowly. So we get into this choreograph dance
pretty easily with the people that were exchanging messages to
(11:39):
So if you want to slow down the rate at
which you have to receive messages and respond to them,
like just don't send messages quite so quickly, or respond
to people's messages a little more slowly. I'm not suggesting
that we shirk our responsibility if there's a really important
and urgent thing, but many of the things that people
ask us aren't super and many of the things people
(12:02):
ask us resolve themselves if we don't respond right away.
I mean that you can probably think of many times
in your life where someone's asked you for some help
or asked you for this piece of information and you
don't respond for whatever reason, and then they email you
back or text you and say, actually, I don't need
that anymore. I moved on or I figured it out.
So delaying strategically sometimes can help us to reduce response time.
(12:24):
And the very last thing I'll say about this, because
I know we should move on, but is that a
lot of research shows that if we send longer messages
that are more thoughtful, people respond to them less frequently.
And that's important because what it means is that if
I just take a little more time crafting something that's
(12:46):
more thorough, then people will store that in their inbox,
they'll reflect on it. It'll help to answer their questions
maybe that they don't have right now, but they'll realize
that they have in five hours or in a week.
And that means that they're not constantly sending me these
small follow ups that get me out of the rhythm
of my work and really tax my attention for having
(13:07):
to respond when I'm trying to do something else. So
I think delayed response, slowing down a little bit is
a huge tool that we can have in order to
reduce our exhaustion.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Well, yeah, and you say you train people in what
you're like if I know that the emails I get
from Paul are thoughtful and explain everything, and you know
I'm not going to have a million follow up questions,
and I start to, Oh, the emails from Paul are
actually serious, I should.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Start paying attention to them and reflecting.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Upon them as they do what I think the things
I found sort of darkly humorous tell you like many
of us wind up using apps and group texts and
such in our personal lives, sometimes in the hope of
saving time, right, like the idea of Okay, I'm gonna
carpool with three other families to soccer, and because of that,
(13:54):
I am only going to have to go to soccer
twenty five percent of the time because we're all taking
each other's kids. And yet the mental management of that,
the mental load that winds up coming out of managing
the carpool group chat can sometimes be as much as
the time that you would have spent driving those children
to soccer.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
Yeah, darkly humorous is probably a good way to describe it.
You know, this particular chapter in the book that's sort
of about parenting in the digital age is really poignant
for me personally because I've got three, well two teenage
daughters and one almost teenage, and I'm just like a
chauffeur service, right, I'm just driving them around constantly, and
(14:36):
so it was really sort of horrifying but also gratifying
to talk to so many parents to hear about what
are your struggles and what are the ways that you
deal with them. And the concept that I would urge
us to think about is what I call shadow hours.
So we think about a typical task like driving someone
(14:57):
or carpooling, like how much time does that take? And
the mental calculation that most of us make is, Okay,
well how much time is this going to save me?
But what we don't think of are those shadow hours,
or the amount of time that happens in coordination to
make that carpool happen. And it's funny. So just I'm
just going to pull out my texts here while we're talking,
because just last night, my wife's friend sent her a
(15:21):
text and I'm going to see if I can read
it here, and it says, got eighty three texts today
about the carpool situation. I'm over it with a big
face with crime. Now, think about that all the time
that you're trying to spend to coordinate because someone you know, okay,
well my other kids siys, so I can't do the
(15:41):
carpool today, or it turns out, you know, this person
has to go here rather than there. We're spending so
much time trying to do these coordination activities that really
take our time, attention, and peque our emotions that in
many cases, if we step back a bit, we might think,
maybe I just drive the person instead, maybe just drive
my kid and I don't have to do all this
coordination and spend all these shadow hours. And the other
(16:05):
thing that I find talking to a lot of parents
is they say, these are really crappy connections with people,
you know, like, I'm not actually building relationships by saying Okay,
I'll pick up, no you pick up, No, I'll be there, No,
you be there. What people say that they do that
really helps is that they'll say, well, rather than let's
try to coordinate this on text when we both go
(16:27):
and we're here at this event, let's talk about it.
And then you actually see somebody, you laugh a little
bit with them, you joke about the ridiculous situation that
we're in driving our kids to and fro, and you
feel like you're actually making a connection with someone and
you're able to resolve a lot of those ambiguities that
would have taken thirty texts in fifteen seconds worth of talking.
(16:48):
So I think that the watchword here is think about
your shadow hours and think about how you can connect
so much that you actually lose real connection with people.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Absolutely, we're going to take one more quick ad break
and then we will be back with more on digital exhaustion.
So I am back talking with Paul Leonardi, who's the
author of the brand new book Digital Exhaustion, Simple Tools
for Reclaiming Your Life. So, I mean that's not to.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Say we should never try to carpool or to you know,
outsource anything. I mean I'm reminded of the fact that
like managing in general, like when you manage, when you outsource,
you're still a resource.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Problem.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Is we have to, you know, try to minimize how
many shadow hours we are devoting to different things, but I'm.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Curious about your scandle. Here, let's talk about your scandule.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Okay, do you have any routines, particularly around how you
deal with digital stuff or inputs that you feel make
you more productive.
Speaker 3 (17:48):
Yeah. So I've developed a number of different tricks over
the years, mostly inspired by doing the research for this book.
So one of the biggest ones is about my pattern
of response to incoming queer and that for me often
happens on email, but it also happens on LinkedIn, it
happens on text message, it happens through some group chat
(18:09):
devices that we use in my work and in my consulting.
And I used to be what I call a very
hardcore batcher, meaning that I would pick certain times a
day and I would say, Okay, this is my response period.
I'm going to give you a window right an hour
in the morning, and I'm going to give an hour
at lunch and an hour in the afternoon, and I'm
(18:29):
going to respond only during those times. In fact, when
I was really at my peak of doing this, I
think I really did it like once a day, and
I was really efficient with all the rest of my
work because I wasn't getting interrupted constantly by incoming messages
that took my head out of the space that I
was in and put in somewhere else, and my exhaustion
(18:52):
felt relatively low. However, what I noticed over time, and
after interviewing a lot of people who do batching versus
what I can streaming, which is kind of just taking
things as they come in and then responding to them
right away, is that I was actually letting a lot
of people down. You know, that I wasn't careful about
(19:15):
triaging my messages right and triaging the things that I
needed to accomplish, and so I put everything into the bucket.
I'll respond to this at the end of the day
when some things actually needed much more quick responses, and
so I was making it difficult for other people to
complete their work or to do the things they needed
to do. So over time, I've moved toward having a
(19:35):
system where I do dedicate chunks of time morning, right
before lunch and then about an hour before it in
my day to real in depth responses. But I'm also
just looking throughout the day to make sure that things
aren't coming in that will require a really quick response
that doesn't take a lot of my headspace so it's
a combination of figuring out about that batching and streaming
(19:57):
and what the ideal balance is on those two activities
for you that I think are really.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Important well, because it really is a balance, right, I
mean there are because there are people who are streaming
all day and I can tell you having studied their schedules,
they get nothing done. I mean, you know, everyone's excited
that you hear back from John immediately, but if John
has never gotten around to finishing his part of the
project of initially, it gets a little tedious set you
know that he was responsive but not effective.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
So I mean, I guess maybe people just need to.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Try different things and see, like where you get the
balance of people being unhappy with you versus where you
get the balance of being unhappy with yourself because you're
not getting stuffed.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
I guess I don't know.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
I would say that most of the inbound things that
we get right this is after talking to twelve thousand
people over the twenty years of studying this. Most of
the inbound things that we get are not urgent, you know,
and most of them require some amount of thought from us,
other than the ones that we quickly delete. Right, So,
like hat your inbox, you can probably quickly delete, but
(20:58):
things require some focus. So I do think it's worth
figuring out how do I dedicate times in the day
where I can really just focus on dealing with these
issues and not in a time when I'm trying to
write this report or put together this presentation or debrief
with this client. But we also have to recognize that
there are going to be the periodic things that come
(21:20):
in that require quick response, and usually the responses that
we need are not pulling us mentally out of a
space to get us to be able to respond, and
so we can deal with those quickly without really breaking
our concentration. So my recommendation is that you think about, Okay,
how do I batch most of these things into different
(21:40):
times of the day, but just make sure that I'm
only responding to those things that are really urgent that
I need to as they come in. And finding that
balance for you is going to be slightly different.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
For everybody, absolutely so, Paul, one of the questions I
always ask everybody on this show is what is something
you have done recently to take a day from great
tip to awesome?
Speaker 3 (22:00):
That question, and for me, it actually relates to one
of the concepts in the book, which when I talk
about flow, and you're probably familiar with that concept most
of your listeners are. You know, where you're really engrossed
in an activity and you're just there because the more
you're there, the less you want to be elsewhere. And
there's all kinds of positive energy that comes from being
(22:22):
in a state of flow in a fun activity and
a work activity doesn't really matter. But one of the
things that I tried to do recently was just to
really be where I am. And I know that sounds
kind of funny, but you know the other day, I
was driving my daughter somewhere and I was thinking, so
I started the drive, thinking, oh, like, I have the
(22:42):
driver here right But then when I thought about this
rule number eight in the book, I was thinking, Okay,
what if I'm just really here right now, drive because
I've made this choice, so I just will be right
in the car with my daughter. And that really changed
my day dramatically because I really listened to her talk
(23:03):
about her day and we were driving along and she
pointed out this beautiful bird that was flying along and
I was like, oh my gosh, that is a really
beautiful bird. And the drive went by like that, right,
and like three felt like three seconds because I was
in the drive. I wasn't thinking about what email is
going to respond to in my head or think about
the numbers I needed to crunch in my Excel spreadsheet later,
(23:26):
and that took my data great in a way that
almost nothing else has in a while.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Would that all our driving children around could be that amazing?
Speaker 3 (23:35):
No kidding.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
There was no traffic and there was the birds were.
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Singing, birds were singing, and the clouds parted. It was amazing.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
It was amazing. My teenager wasn't mad at me. It
was great. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Paul, What are
you looking forward to right now?
Speaker 3 (23:50):
Let's see. I this sound a little geeky, but I'm
really looking forward to AI. Like there's so much talk
about it that kind of is exhausting, you know. But
I've been doing work with a lot of different companies
that are building AI tools and starting to implement them,
and I really am excited about the possibility of how
(24:10):
these different technologies are going to really change the way
we work and the way that we enjoy our leisure time.
There are certainly some things to be scared about, but
I'm actually quite optimistic that if we make some smart choices,
we're gonna, I think, have a better world. And maybe
that sounds a little pollyannish, but I don't know. I'm
kind of excited about it.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
Yeah, I mean technology can be great.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
You know, cares are amazing that we get to use them,
even if they are occasionally exhausting.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
So, Paul, where can people find you?
Speaker 3 (24:39):
Yeah? So you can find me at LinkedIn. That's a
great place to interact. I'm on x p Leonardi one
is to handle there, and then my website, Paul Leonardi
dot com is a great place to get updated on
some latest writings and places like Wall Street Journal, Harvard
Business Review, and other books I've written. But check out
Digital Exhaustion.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Please please do book well. Paul, thank you so much
for joining us. Thank you to everyone for listening. If
you have feedback about this or any other episode, you
can always reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and
here's to making the most.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If
you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts
from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Before Breakfast News
Host
Laura Vanderkam
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