Meet the Dirty Digital Dozen

I grew up with a single mom who was half Wonder Woman, half Mary Tyler Moore: She managed to combine a significant career with raising a kid on her own.

You know what she didn’t have to deal with?

7 p.m. emails.

Digital communications tools like email, Google Docs, Slack and social media should make it easier to run our careers and our lives from our preferred location, on our preferred schedule. Instead, they’ve become major contributors to overwork, exhaustion and work/life tension—because there’s always another message to answer, and another social update to post.

Hybrid makes overload worse.

Hybrid work makes it crucial to have the strategy and tools to deal with digital overload, because we can no longer rely on the commute to define the end to the workday. And stop praying for your boss or CEO to declare an end to after-hours email, because that just limits the flexibility, effectiveness and wellbeing of people who want to tackle their work at 10 or 11 pm—so they can reclaim some midday hours for family, creativity or personal self-care.