Check out Paul Leonardi’s new book Digital Exhaustion: Simple Rules for Reclaiming Your Life, available on October 7, 2025.
Everyone feels tired sometimes, whether it be after long hours at work, physical activity, or even social events. However, in his upcoming book Digital Exhaustion, our Department Chair Paul Leonardi posits that there’s a source of energy drainage that you probably haven’t thought about: technology itself. Our current lives are so suffused with technological tools and digital novelties—from social media, to spreadsheets, to messaging apps, to AI software like ChatGPT—that we hardly notice how much we’re plugged in. And yet, Leonardi has spent nearly twenty years researching how much of a real effect this “digital exhaustion” has had on people across the world. Throughout his book, he aims to show that a significant portion of modern exhaustion comes from the way we use digital technologies, and that reducing its stressors is essential to prevent burnout. Then, he provides some rules and ideas about how to make this happen.
Part I: The Exhaustion Triad
In the first part of his book, Leonardi describes three forces that work together to drive our digital exhaustion: attention, inferences, and emotions. Through a series of anecdotes from his research and his own life, Leonardi shines a light on how these forces drain us as context for his rules on how to moderate our energy expenditure or find the right ways to recharge.
Here are a few standout arguments he makes to hammer the effect of digital usage on our psyches home:
About Attention
Each time we are exposed to a new stimulus, Leonardi says, we are shifting in and out of different modes of attention. And because of this, we’re expending energy in our brains and tiring ourselves out. He describes it in the same way as running short sprints: the first run is always the easiest. After that, even distances that would be simple at full strength (and after a good night of sleep) become a significant hurdle. With this in mind, Leonardi stresses that with digital media, we are never really able to truly unplug. While we can turn off (some) email notifications from work, it’s still not possible to eliminate every corner of overlap between work and home. Bleed is inevitable, whether it be from frantic phone calls from a coworker or student who needs immediate help.
About Inferences
According to Leonardi, digital technologies act as prisms, meaning that they reflect what we give, while also distorting it. Digital assets like social media allow us to see more than we’ve ever seen before about our coworkers, friends, bosses, and classmates, but because of this, we’re also able to infer more about them. It’s incredibly difficult to see your friends’ idyllic vacation photos on Instagram, and not compare yourself to them. It’s also incredibly difficult to scroll through your own history on Facebook and not compare yourself to all of those versions of yourself that you were before. What people don’t think about, though—and what Leonardi stresses here—is that all of this is inherently exhausting. Comparison is not only the thief of joy; it’s also the thief of energy.
About Emotions
Like the previous two forces, emotions require effort to experience, control, and manage. Most of us have experienced something stressful and know firsthand how mentally and physically draining it is. Adding onto that, the way we react to digital technology is inherently emotional. Interacting with new technology triggers feelings of fear, anxiety, guilt, anger, and excitement. The negative triggers, like worrying about being left behind or missing out, might seem self-explanatory, but even positive triggers that can affect us. Excitement about new tools can lead us to do even more with them, and thus repeat the cycle.
Part II: Simple Rules for Resilience
The bulk of Digital Exhaustion covers eight rules that Leonardi presents for reshaping how you interact with the technology in your life: whether at work or at home. These rules show you how to make these changes and build routines to help them last to start regaining your energy.
- Rule #1 - Stop Using Half Your Tools
- It’s not as impossible as it sounds. Leonardi suggests focusing on separating your work & home tools, and then breaking those down based on necessity, along with your ability to actually make those changes—which is obviously limited at work if you aren’t in a position of authority.
- Rule #2 - Make a Match
- Choose tech that matches the needs for the conversation. Email when you have references and other items that the recipient will need more time to assess, while you should set up an in-person meeting when you need the creative back-and-forth and collaboration.
- Rule #3 - Batch and Stream
- Batching is collecting data over a period of time and processing it together. Streaming is processing data immediately as it becomes available. Leonardi doesn’t prescribe one or the other, but posits it as something to consider in order to develop a strategy that keeps you energized.
- Rule #4 - Wait. One Hour. One Day. One Week.
- Fast responses don’t necessarily mean better results. Leonardi recommends assessing inboxes, text chains, and social threads for priority, and tackling items according to this list. Lots of items will end up solving themselves!
- Rule #5 - Don’t Assume
- It’s difficult not to make assumptions about what we see, especially on digital platforms like social media. Leonardi states that we should be spending as little time on our socials as possible, in order to limit our exhaustion based on assumptions we can’t help but make.
- Rule #6 - Act With Intention
- Regardless of whether they’re working at home or in the office, people are less exhausted if they have a goal and feel like they’re making progress on that goal. This rule highlights the value of always assigning a goal to the technology you use, including your phone.
- Rule #7 - Learn Vicariously
- Technology has always meant new sources of knowledge. We can take advantage of this by watching and learning from others as they interact through that technology. Avenues for this include looking at social media interactions, or workplace interactions in chat rooms.
- Rule #8 - Be Here, Not Elsewhere
- Get into a flow state! Distraction is so easy when technological wonders are always at our fingertips. It’s important to look for hobbies that require a complementary—but not completely separate—set of skills from your work to ground and energize you when your brain is tired.
Part III: Complex Contexts
In the final part of this book, Leonardi shows us how to leverage these rules in three different contexts: at work, while parenting, and when interacting with AI. Here are some action items and considerations from him that you can take into your day-to-day life:
About Work
- If you’re a manager, model the technology-use behaviors you want to see in your own workplace. When you set clear guidelines for what types of digital tools are allowed to be used in your office, and when, your employees will naturally follow.
- Encourage and facilitate informal and personal connections. Without interference from their supervisors, employees are usually not motivated to continue to speak over workplace social engagement tools or chat rooms, not realizing that this can actually benefit their workflow. Check out Leonardi’s STEP framework to help streamline AI usage in the workplace. We also go over it here, in this other Research Highlight about the framework.
About Parenting
- Be willing to miss out to protect your own energy. Research shows that parents spend much longer than they realize just coordinating efforts throughout their day, and this is making you much more exhausted than you realize.
- Find other ways of interacting that connect you with parents. Just being in group texts with dozens of other parents whose notifications are just exhausting you isn’t conducive to being more present in your kids’ lives. Stay off of your devices as much as possible in front of your kids. It can help mitigate your guilt, anxiety, and anger about being distracted, and it can also teach them healthier habits that they’ll parrot.
About AI
- Aim to use generative AI to reduce, not expand. AI has a tendency to produce much more content than we need (and that a human would in the same scenario), all while homogenizing that content and rendering it less valuable than its human counterpart. It would be much more productive to direct it toward condensing and providing more use.
- Taking advantage of areas where AI isn’t self-homogenizing. An example that Leonardi brings up here is hallucinations, where AI produces original but completely nonsensical content. While this may seem useless and even frustrating, it could be used to combat the way that AI does seem to generate in all of the same directions when working “correctly.”
Overall, this book isn’t a prescription for how to eliminate digital influence from our lives. Instead, it’s an invitation to think differently about how we interact with technology, and to always put our own health and well-being at the top of our priority lists.