Defeating the Digital Brain Rot Epidemic

Make a formal ‘digital hour’

A major source of modern workplace burnout is invisible work – before starting core project work each morning, employees have already spent time clearing inboxes, charging devices, sorting notifications, and managing AI-generated outputs. Traditional management models assume technology inherently saves time, so this administrative overhead is never accounted for in formal job descriptions or project timelines, forcing employees to do it during their personal time.

Bosses need to change this. Formally build a daily ‘digital hour’ into your team’s job expectations and schedules to acknowledge that managing digital communications is legitimate work that requires dedicated time during the normal working day. In academia, we have periodic ‘writing retreats’, which can be replicated in corporate timetables too: set aside a full day where your team comes together physically, but works individually on deep, single-task projects with no distractions from internal communications about ongoing work.

Set out explicit communication etiquette

Flexibility is a double-edged sword. When an employee logs on at 10 pm to catch up on emails after putting their children to bed, that might suit their lifestyle and workload. But the flipside is that recipients might feel compelled to check their phones and immediately respond – unknowingly destroying their own time out. Research calls this the ‘flexibility paradox’: one person’s freedom to work whenever they want can inadvertently constrain someone else’s flexibility.

Leaders can fix this by establishing clear, team-wide communication rules rather than relying on unwritten assumptions. Define expected response times – say, non-urgent emails should be responded to within 24 hours during the week, so no one feels a responsibility to snap back within 20 minutes. And designating a specific channel (like a phone call or WhatsApp) for emergency, time-sensitive issues will ease adrenaline-fuelled fears of a digital bombshell by email or Slack. 

Stop forcing outdated office habits onto digital tools

When work moved online during the Covid pandemic, a lot of firms attempted to recreate office social dynamics online through Zoom happy hours and virtual coffees. It was intended as an energising idea, but for many it turned into just another exhausting demand. Don’t stick to old ways of working when we’re doing things differently: our past experiences in physical offices create mental reference points that don’t always translate to digital environments. Thinking that multiplying video calls or another messaging channel will boost team cohesion actually often ends up triggering the opposite effect.

Audit your office’s weekly routines and kill any digital activity that exists purely because it always has. Replace unnecessary live video meetings or digital tools with brief written updates that people can read in their own time – this can cut down on a lot of digital noise. 

Group tasks by cognitive nature, not by project

Digital distraction often stems from task-switching: jumping from writing a complex report to answering a Slack ping, then writing an invoice, then back again. Workers can win time back by grouping contextually similar activities together to streamline their mental focus. In one of my studies, a manager needed to write employee reference letters, but also had to write a reference for a friend in her hobby, a cookery class. Instead of treating these as separate, competing demands that fractured her day, she grouped the jobs together.

Reducing ‘switching friction’ can ease the brain away from panic mode. Leaders should build team focus blocks – encouraging things like ‘no-meeting mornings’ or deep-work windows where team members can mute Slack and email without fear of missing urgent requests.

Dim your own ‘digital visibility’

Work-life balance is dead: it’s now all about ‘hybridity’ (blending work and personal life) and ‘liminality’ (operating in in-between states). But that doesn’t have to mean constant connectivity. Instead, it allows for creative control over digital visibility: dimming your digital noise to decide when, where, and how much of your presence is broadcast to others.

As an example, if you’re writing emails or updating shared documents at night or on the weekend, use scheduled send so notifications land in inboxes during the working day. You complete the task without adding to your team’s digital cacophony. Setting your phone to silent on the desk acts as a non-intrusive portal to home: a parent can glance at school notifications during a meeting without broadcasting distraction or signalling full availability. Configuring ‘focus mode’ or VIP notification lists on your phone allows calls from your child’s school or spouse, for example, to bypass silent mode while silencing work apps, or vice versa during family time.

These low-effort tweaks let workers toggle between roles on their own terms, staying connected without adding to the team’s digital noise.