You see our icons and browser tabs are designed to be psychologically appealing through careful selection of colours and notifications. Maximising your windows makes it less tempting to open another browser or app when you get stuck with your work and stops you from becoming a ‘tab hoarder’.

One of the reasons we go down the digital rabbit hole is because technology has been frictionless. Having your digital weaknesses on the home screen means we’re much more likely to open and use the apps we may want to resist.

Do you unlock your phone with the best of intentions to make a call or just check the weather app, but before you know it, you’ve clicked on LinkedIn, opened the news app, or checked another tech-temptation that’s vying for your attention on the home screen?

You have the best of intentions to make today as productive as possible. Then ping, beep, buzz! Your attention is thwarted from the important tasks you’d prioritised and it’s now distracted by the alerts and notifications that hum along in the background on your laptop.

Do you sit in a Teams or Zoom call, triaging the avalanche of emails that have accumulated in your inbox, or replying to the myriad of Slack or Teams notifications? You’re not alone.

How often are you checking your emails? A study by RescueTime found that the average knowledge worker checked their emails and instant messages every 6 minutes.

Have notifications, alerts, pings and dings become the soundtrack of your day? You might be doing some deep, focused work and your attention is fractured by an email ping, or calendar reminder.

Do you sometimes pull out your To Do list and start to feel even more overwhelmed than what you did before you looked at the list? Other times we look at our To Do list and select the ‘easy options’ or quick wins- those tasks that are relatively simple to do and require little cognitive effort.

Working in a noisy open-plan office, or working at home and hearing your neighbours chatting, your partner on their Zoom call, or your kids running around in another room can not only distract you (as your brain cannot multitask) but it can also elevate your stress response. Truly it can.

When we shifted to remote work arrangements, many people found it challenging to focus and reported feeling exhausted, despite not significantly increasing their working hours. And the reason why is because of how the brain works.

So many of us start our day by rolling over and reaching for our smartphones. Before we’ve had time to have a cup of tea or coffee, or even let our feet hit the floor, we’re triaging our inboxes, checking news sites and even scrolling social media.

Have you ever spent a full day in front of your laptop or desktop computer, wondering what you really accomplished after about the fourth hour? I think ‘we’ve all been there.

Do you remember the days when you’d work in an open-plan office and all you could hear all day was your noisy, chatty colleagues? It was so difficult to get any work done. And it was very stressful!

Would you believe it if I told you that just seeing your phone makes you 10% dumber? Well the research tells us that’s the case.

We’ve all worked with someone who has no qualms sending you emails and Teams chats at 11pm on a Wednesday evening and not because you’re on a tight deadline, it’s just what they do!

Wendy planned to take a day off work as she was feeling unwell. However, she forgot to put on an out-of-office message on her inbox and her emails and phone calls did not stop throughout the day.

After a long day in front of a screen many of us experience feelings of fatigue and depletion. Why? When working online, there’s a lot of sensory input that our brain needs to process.

Shutting the lid on your laptop and walking to the kitchen to pull out your smartphone and check a news site, or social media, is not considered a ‘good’ break.

Karen took the fifteen minute buffer time to go for the walk and she came back and powered through her work in far less time than she’d anticipated. Why? She recharged her battery by getting outside in nature.

There are things that we do that deplete our brain and there are things we can do to rejuvenate and recharge our brains. We cannot keep depleting our brains and expect that they’ll work at an optimal level.

Working online is often stressful. Studies have shown that many people suffer from ‘email apnea’ where they literally hold their breaths when going into their inboxes, dump a whole lot of cortisol, the stress hormone, their heart rates elevate, their blood pressure increases and their pupils dilate.

Have you ever had days where your phone doesn’t stop ringing, your Teams notifications are endlessly pinging and you go from one virtual meeting to the next?

Have you ever unlocked your phone, opened up LinkedIn or Facebook with the intention of scrolling for just a couple of minutes and before long you’ve found yourself down the digital rabbit hole?

Just because you like working early in the morning, or perhaps late at night, doesn’t necessarily mean your colleagues and clients do too.

We need to create our own digital borders, or our digital guardrails as I sometimes refer to them.

Our brains and bodies are not machines. We need regular breaks to ensure our physical health & mental wellbeing and boost our focus and creativity.

Having designated spaces where technology doesn’t fill can give you some much-needed respite. Some research suggests that adults sit for an average of 9 hours per day! Remote and hybrid work has exacerbated this problem for many of us, as we’ve displaced the incidental movement we used to do as we moved to, around and from the office.

Having designated spaces where technology doesn’t fill can give you some much-needed respite.

Digital eye strain can occur after hours spent in front of a screen. In fact it sets in after just 2 hours of staring at a screen.Do you fall asleep doing one last triage of your inbox, binge-watching Netflix, or perhaps doom-scrolling social media? It’s probably no surprise that you’re having trouble falling, or perhaps even staying asleep.

Digital eye strain can occur after hours spent in front of a screen. In fact, it sets in after just 2 hours of staring at a screen.