Let’s start with a common scene: it’s 10:42 p.m., your eyes are dry, your tabs are multiplying like rabbits, and Slack is still open in the corner, glowing like a tiny portal to yet another task. You tell yourself you’ll just check one last thing. You don’t. And even if you shut the laptop, your brain spins like a buffering video, mentally debugging your day.
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Now, whenever people talk about burnout in tech, the solution often sounds like a bumper sticker: “Unplug!” “Go off-grid!” “Digital detox!” As if the antidote to modern overload is to temporarily pretend we don’t live in the 21st century.
But what if the problem isn’t that we’re too connected? What if it’s that we’re connected in the wrong way?
The Lie of “Less Screen Time”
Here’s the issue with the unplug-and-recharge narrative: it treats screen time like sugar or alcohol. Something inherently bad. Something that, if indulged in, requires repentance.
But tech burnout isn’t a problem of quantity. It’s a problem of quality.
People aren’t burning out because they check email. They’re burning out because they’re trapped in an infinite loop of “low-value” friction: bad UI, context switching, app notifications, Slack pings dressed as emergencies. It’s death by a thousand asynchronous cuts.
Unplugging from this mess might feel like relief. But it’s like taking a vacation from a broken treadmill. You’ll feel better, sure, but the machine is still busted when you get back.
Friction Isn’t the Enemy. Bad Friction Is.
Let’s talk about friction. In UX circles, friction is a dirty word. Designers obsess over eliminating it. But friction isn’t inherently bad. In fact, the right kind of friction is what makes work meaningful, habits sticky, and technology useful.
Think about it: no one ever burned out from solving a genuinely interesting problem. People don’t get tired from effort. They get tired from pointless effort, repeating the same steps because a system is obtuse or broken.
One 2023 Microsoft study found that the average knowledge worker spends nearly 57% of their time communicating about work, not actually doing it. That’s not friction. That’s bureaucratic fog. And in fog, everything feels hard, including the things you used to love.
Automation Helped, Then Hurt
I know someone who automated 80% of their job using ChatGPT. You’d think that would be the end of burnout, right? But what actually happened is a shift: instead of slogging through tasks, they now had to constantly oversee the machine.
The new mental strain wasn’t about time. It was about vigilance.
And this is the paradox. As we offload more to automation, the “job” becomes more like QA for a robot intern: alert, analytical, and constantly second-guessing. We traded boring labor for emotional labor.
So yes, automation cuts friction, but often it replaces it with a subtler, more draining kind.
The Case for Choosing Better Tools (and Saying No to Bad Ones)
Let me be blunt. Most enterprise tools are designed like bureaucracies. That is to say, inefficient by design.
And if you’ve ever spent five minutes looking for a “share” button in a B2B dashboard, you know the pain.
Here’s where “choosing better friction” comes in. It’s not about abandoning tools. It’s about picking the ones that match your thinking style and ditching the ones that make you feel like a machine translating for another machine.
Some teams I know ban internal email entirely. Others use asynchronous video over meetings. Personally, I set my Slack to “only notify for DMs and mentions” and never check it outside a small window each day. That’s my friction sweet spot: just enough resistance to avoid chaos, not so much that I want to flee to a cabin in Montana.
Tech Burnout Is Cultural, Not Just Personal
It’s tempting to see burnout as a personal failure—something that happens because we didn’t meditate enough, didn’t plan better, didn’t unplug.
But most tech burnout is systemic. It’s what happens when the incentives of a platform (engagement, speed, visibility) are at odds with the incentives of a person (clarity, focus, rest).
If your value at work is measured by how responsive you are, not how thoughtful, you will burn out. If your tools reward urgency over depth, you will burn out. If your week is a blur of tabs and pings and ticket dashboards, you will burn out.
Unplugging doesn’t fix that. Designing for better friction does.
What Better Friction Looks Like
- Intentional onboarding friction: Tools that force you to write a short description before launching a new task can reduce the chaos later.
- Focus modes with real teeth: Features that block all but mission-critical apps for a set period aren’t annoyances. They’re lifelines.
- Thoughtful delays: Some email clients let you “schedule send” or delay messages by default. This introduces reflection friction, which reduces impulsive misfires.
- Asynchronous defaults: The healthiest teams I’ve seen don’t just tolerate async. They prefer it. They design their workflows to encourage thoughtful updates, not performative urgency.
I’m not against taking breaks. Go outside. Close your laptop. Take your PTO.
But don’t fall for the lie that peace lies in total disconnection. It doesn’t. It lies in better connection. In tech that respects your brain, not just your time. In workflows that prioritize progress over presence.
The fix for burnout isn’t a digital detox. It’s choosing tools, habits, and environments that offer the right kind of friction—the kind that helps you slow down, focus, and actually do something worth the energy.
Because the problem isn’t the machine. It’s how we’ve wired ourselves to use it.
