We keep blaming screens for our exhaustion (or not even realizing how exhausted they’re making us).

Too much email… too many meetings… too many texts… too many platforms… too many notifications.
Screens are a real problem, there’s no denying it, but when add in the constant pulse of urgency, that’s where the real damage masticates.

Not the occasional, real kind of urgency.

The artificial kind.
The constant hum of implied emergency that sits beneath everything we do.
The way you text someone the moment a thought enters your head, without pausing to consider where they are… or what state they’re in… or what you’re interrupting.

While editing my conversation with Paul Leonardi on this week’s episode of Thinking With Mitch Joel, it really all came together for me.

Paul (an expert in digital transformation and an educator) recently published, Digital Exhaustion – Simple Rules For Reclaiming Your Life.
And one (of many) big ideas landed hard:
We’re not just overwhelmed by volume.. we’re overwhelmed by inference.
Every message now comes with a subtle question attached.
Is this urgent?… Am I late?… What does my response time signal about my commitment… my competence… my care?
Nothing ever just arrives anymore… it demands some kind of acknowledgment and interpretation.

So we live in a permanent state of readiness.

Alert… scanning… waiting to react… waiting for the next… interruption.
That’s not productivity… that’s vigilance.
And vigilance, it turns out, is exhausting.
The real cost isn’t the number of tasks.
It’s the absence of a baseline.
No shared agreement on what “reasonable” looks like.
No clear sense of when it’s okay to respond… now… later… tomorrow… never…
No cultural permission to be unavailable without making the sender wonder what, exactly, is going on.

So everything feels urgent… even when nothing is actually an emergency.

We’ve quietly trained ourselves to treat responsiveness as responsibility.
Availability as engagement… speed as care.
And leaders, often without realizing it, reinforce this every day.
A late-night Slack.
A “quick question” on a weekend.
A calendar that leaves no margin for thinking.

None of it malicious… all of it cumulative.

I’m thinking that digital exhaustion isn’t burnout in the traditional sense.
It’s the fatigue that comes from never standing down.
Your body doesn’t know the difference between a real emergency and a perceived one.
Your nervous system just knows it’s always on call.

Which raises an interesting questions for leadership:

If urgency is the default…
What are we training people to believe about their time?
Their attention… Their value to the organization?
Because cultures don’t burn people out with workload alone.
They burn them out with ambiguity.
When every message implies expectation, silence feels risky.
And when there’s no baseline, people invent one… usually harsher than anything you intended.

The irony is that most leaders want calm, focused, creative teams.

But the systems we design reward constant reactivity.
Paul reminded me that exhaustion isn’t solved by better tools… it’s solved by better norms.
By naming what actually matters.
By restoring a sense of proportion.
By deciding (clearly, publicly, repeatedly) what doesn’t require an immediate response.

Because urgency, left unchecked, becomes culture.

And culture shapes how people feel long before it shapes how they perform.
So maybe the real question isn’t how we manage time.
Maybe it’s this:
Are we leading organizations where urgency is intentional…
or ones where urgency has quietly taken over?

And do we even notice the difference anymore?

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