What are practical strategies to avoid overload and exhaustion in today’s digital world? What norms can organizations create for tool usage, and how can finding offline activities that provide a mental contrast to digital work?

Paul Leonardi is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara, a consultant and speaker on digital transformation and the future of work, and an author of several works. His latest book is called Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life.

Greg and Paul discuss the complementary nature of his two most recent books: the first focuses on harnessing digital tools, and the second on mitigating the overwhelm they can cause. They also explore teaching technology management, including the importance of understanding technology’s impact on people and organizational processes. Paul explains the 30% rule, emphasizing the need to understand digital tools well enough to use them effectively. They also explore the concept of digital exhaustion, the subject of his most recent book, its symptoms, and how to manage it, both at work and in daily life. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

How can we reduce exhaustion?

41:29: One easy way of reducing our exhaustion is to match the sort of complexity of the task that we are trying to do with the affordances or the capabilities of the technology. And I say match, not over exceed, because we also have the problem where, like me, I am sure you have been in many, many meetings that should have just been an email, that there is not the need. And so what we have done in that situation is we have overstimulated people, right, in a setting with, you know, 15 other folks, and we have taken an hour out of their day and maybe the travel time to get there. And that has created other avenues for exhaustion when, if we had just perceived this information via email, we could not have had the meeting. So you do not want to overmatch, you just want to like match to the complexity of the task. And that is the key to reducing our exhaustion.

It’s not just distraction that exhausts us

18:28: I think we have failed to look at how it is not just being distracted that is a problem, but it is the act of switching itself across all of these different inputs really is a significant source of our exhaustion.

Inference is a big driver of exhaustion

32:45: Inference is really a big driver of exhaustion. And I would say the place that it most shows up, although not exclusively, is in our social media lives. Because, of course, people are curating their lives in terms of what they post, whether that is LinkedIn or TikTok or Instagram, that does not really matter. And we are constantly not only making inferences of them, but what I find is that we are also very often making inferences about ourselves because we see a past record of all the things that we wrote and all of the things that we posted. And then we are also making inferences of what we think other people think about us based on all the things that we post.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Human Multitasking
• Task Switching
• Fatigue
• Unsiloed Podcast Episode 612: Rebecca Hinds

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at UC Santa Barbara
• PaulLeonardi.com
• Wikipedia Profile
• LinkedIn Profile

Guest Work:

• Amazon Author Page
• Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life
• The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI
• Expertise, Communication, and Organizing
• Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World
• Car Crashes without Cars: Lessons About Simulation Technology and Organizational Change from Automotive Design
• Google Scholar Page

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