From the Blog
We've Already Been Doomscrolling. Now AI Wants In.
Eight in ten people check their phones within the first five minutes of waking up. What begins with an email or a Slack message unknowingly switches into twenty minutes of watching or reading something completely unrelated. Textbook doomscroll.
Workers now spend nearly five hours every day on screens outside of work. That's two and a half months every year on memes, FOMO, and outrage. Deloitte data shows more than half of Gen Z struggles to keep their screen time at manageable levels.
Before anyone rolls their eyes: this isn't just about Gen Z and social media. Poor digital habits show up across generations. Repeatedly refreshing news headlines. Sneaking aimless peeks at devices during meetings. Bingeing shows instead of sleeping. Each habit shapes the modern human-technology relationship. Collectively, they determine how much cognitive capacity employees have available to bring to work.
For years, employers treated personal device habits as off-limits. This was framed as a kids' problem — something for schools and parents to manage. As long as the work got done, screen time was a personal matter.
Then came AI.
Agents Everywhere: A More Demanding Problem
Using chatbots to write emails or summarize documents was so late 2025. It sped up tasks but didn't quite translate into top-line growth for most companies. The AI story has now pivoted toward workflows mediated by AI agents, reimagining how organizational information flows up, down, and across.
In response, employees must learn the art of dividing work into agent-ready components. Front-line employees find their roles shifting toward monitoring outputs, overseeing results, and staying vigilant. Possible mistakes and misjudgments accrue back to the human in the loop. It's stressful.
The new shape of work simultaneously reduces menial work while increasing mental strain. In an article published in Harvard Business Review by researchers at Boston Consulting Group and the University of California Riverside, researchers coined the term AI brain fry to describe "mental fatigue that results from excessive use of, interaction with, and/or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity." In other words: doing too much with AI.
Attention and working memory are the core of cognitive bandwidth — and both have been bottlenecked by years of doomscrolling and fragmented digital habits. If AI adoption is going to deliver real performance gains, employers must help employees rebuild attention and free up working memory.
Digital Wellness: The Gap in Your AI Readiness Strategy
Organizations are pouring resources into AI literacy in their quest to become frontier firms. Prompt engineering, security, governance, agentic everything. Necessary, yes — but insufficient. Literacy doesn't expand cognitive capacity.
Digital wellness fills that gap.
Digital wellness — sometimes called digital wellbeing — emerged alongside the attention economy that monetized worker focus. The definition I find most useful: the intentional use of technology that empowers individuals and communities to achieve their potential.
Done well, digital wellness isn't about screen time policing. It restores human agency by teaching employees techniques to protect their attention, exit rabbit holes they may fall into, and accelerate cognitive recovery. It's not anti-tech. It's pro-human.
Three Things Employers Can Do Now
Name the problem
Digital overwhelm rarely surfaces in workplace conversations or surveys because it has been framed in media and culture as an addiction. Reframe it as a cognitive capacity issue. Treat it as a lever for high performance.
Measure it
You don't need to track personal screen time. Instead, assess how technology habits affect safety, quality, and cognitive readiness alongside AI rollouts. What gets measured gets managed.
Model it at the top
Leaders set norms — whether they intend to or not. Embed digital wellness into leadership behavior expectations and manager training. The behavior at the top becomes the culture below.
AI tools can become the new infinite scroll — draining employee attention and compounding the cognitive depletion that doomscrolling started. Or AI can help unlock new growth while authentically keeping the human at the center.
The organizations that choose the latter won't just be AI-literate. They'll be AI-ready.
Curious where you stand?
The free 3-minute Choice Score tells you exactly what your technology habits are costing you — in focus, sleep, creativity, and presence.