An Excerpt from Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life
An excerpt from Digital Exhaustion by Paul Leonardi, published by Riverhead Books and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Personal Development & Human Behavior category.
In Digital Exhaustion, 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. Digital Exhaustion has been longlisted in the Personal Development & Human Behavior category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below is adapted from the book's Introduction. ◊◊◊◊◊ [A]t 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).1 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,2 The New York Times published a well-read 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. This graph shows the average responses of 12,643 adults from twelve countries spanning the twenty-year period from 2002 to 2022.3 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-year-old 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.4 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.5 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.”6 The evidence shows that a vacation from your phone or your computer probably won’t solve much.7 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. 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. 
Excerpted from Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life by Paul Leonardi, published by Riverhead Books. Copyright © 2025 by Paul Leonardi. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Endnotes
1. The most widely accepted and empirically robust measure of burnout is the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). This inventory uses a twenty- two- item survey to assess three areas associated with burnout: Emotional Exhaustion (EE), Depersonalization (DE), and a low sense of Personal Accomplishment (PA). The problem is that the instrument, though accurate, is too cumbersome for most people. Several researchers have concluded that a single- item question is superior to the twenty-two-item tool when considering completion rates and respondent fatigue. For example, Barbara M. Rohland, Gina R. Kruse, and James E. Rohrer, “Validation of a Single-Item Measure of Burnout against the Maslach Burnout Inventory among Physicians,” Stress and Health: Journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress 20, no. 2 (2004): 75–79, validated a single-item measure of burnout against the full MBI among physicians. Colin P. West et al., “Single Item Measures of Emotional Exhaustion and Depersonalization Are Useful for Assessing Burnout in Medical Professionals,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 24 (2009): 1318–21, found that single-item measures of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization were effective for assessing burnout in medical professionals. Similarly, Emily D. Dolan et al., “Using a Single Item to Measure Burnout in Primary Care Staff: A Psychometric Evaluation,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 30 (2015): 582–87, demonstrated that a single- item measure was useful for primary care staff.
2. Jeremy N. Bailenson, “Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue,” Technology, Mind, and Behavior 2, no. 1 (2021): 1–5; Brian X. Chen, “It’s Time for a Digital Detox. (You Know You Need It.),” New York Times, November 25, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/technology/personaltech/digital-detox.html; Simon Read, “Are You Suffering from Digital Exhaustion? Microsoft Survey Finds Tensions over Remote Work,” World Economic Forum, October 7, 2022, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/work- productivity-hybrid-remote-microsoft.
3. Since 2003, I have published more than seventy peer- reviewed journal articles about technology use in organizations. Some of these studies will be explicitly cited here, while others will be referenced more generally. The data collected for these studies include observations of people at work, interviews, and surveys. This book marks the first time I have compiled all the data from these studies in one place. Across observations (N=512), interviews (N=2,642), and surveys (N=9,489), I have asked some version of the one item exhaustion question. To be clear, I have not asked it the same way each time, and I am under no illusion that it offers a systematic or error-free window into people’s exhaustion. However, the consistency of responses and the ease with which interviewees understood the question give me confidence that the patterns discussed here reflect a general trend of digital exhaustion.
4. Data showing that social media use jumped to more than five hundred million can be found on the amazing ourworldindata.org website: Esteban Ortiz- Ospina, “The Rise of Social Media,” September 18, 2019, https:// ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social- media. Data showing smartphone use reached more than one hundred million users comes from the survey “5 Years Later: A Look Back at the Rise of the iPhone,” Comscore, June 29, 2012, comscore.com/Public-Relations/Blog/5-Years-Later-A-Look- Back-at-the-Rise-of-the-iPhone.
5. Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (Penguin, 2019), xii. Newport argues that digital technologies are exhausting us and then develops a perspective he calls “digital minimalism,” which advocates a more purpose- driven use of technology to help people regain focus and attention.
6. Quoted in Sarah Kessler and Bernhard Warner, “Rethinking the ‘Digital Detox,’” New York Times, February 18, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/18/business/dealbook/digital-detox-social-media.html.
7. The first systematic meta-analysis of studies on the effects of digital detoxes suggests that trying to give up digital devices, even for a short period, is generally ineffective, despite its appeal. Theda Radtke et al., “Digital Detox: An Effective Solution in the Smartphone Era? A Systematic Literature Review,” Mobile Media & Communication 10, no. 2 (2022): 190–215.
