Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life - Hardcover

Leonardi, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593851234 ISBN 13: 9780593851234

Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A revelatory examination of why you’re feeling so worn out—and practical daily strategies to change your relationship with your devices.

Unplugging is not a long-term solution for the stress caused by technology. If you want to keep your job, participate in society, and maintain meaningful relationships, you can’t escape your many apps and devices.

Paul Leonardi maps out an achievable path to reducing your digital exhaustion, drawing on extensive research to show how real people can use technology in healthy ways. These are realistic approaches that won’t fragment your attention and deplete your cognitive and emotional reserves. Many of the changes are simple yet surprisingly effective, like waiting longer to respond, making sure you’re using the right tool for your task, and being more conscious of the time and energy we allocate to our devices. He also explains the emotional traps that lead us into dysfunctional relationships with our technology, and how to escape them.

With Leonardi as your guide, you can build stronger connections, be more creative and productive, and create the mental space to reclaim your energy and your life.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul Leonardi, PhD, is the award-winning Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a frequent consultant and speaker to a wide range of tech and non-tech companies like Google, Microsoft, YouTube, GM, McKinsey, and Fidelity, helping them to take advantage of new technologies while defeating digital exhaustion. He is a contributor to the Harvard Business Review and coauthor of The Digital Mindset.

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Chapter 1
Attention:
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 people slept with their phones next to the bed and were instead asking if they slept with them in bed. Sixty percent of adults admitted to doing so, and a whopping 89 percent reported that they checked their phones within the first ten minutes of waking up. Were Maya and the rest of us just glancing at the time or waking up to read one article on our phone, these stats might seem unremarkable. The real cause for concern is that we mercilessly divide our attention across so many different and incommensurate information inputs that we are literally fatiguing our brains from the moment we wake up.


A long...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Riverhead Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593851234
• ISBN 13: 9780593851234
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland