CHAPTER 3

DIGITAL ADDICTION AND HOW TO DEAL WITH IT

In 2005, when I had just been appointed editor of the Financial Times’s weekend edition, I gave an interview to the authors of a coffee table book called Bankside Defined about the London neighbourhood on the Thames where the FT then had its headquarters. The authors of the book described the stacks of newspapers in our offices and took a photograph of me peering through a shelf of them. Print was still important to the FT, I told the authors. Mobile phones provided only text snippets of the news. The FT did have a comprehensive website but, I pointed out, that was no use to people on their daily commute because they couldn’t take their computers onto the train with them.

What an innocent time. In 2007, just two years later, Apple released its first iPhone and the world was transformed. A little over a decade later, in 2019, about 88 per cent of people in the UK had a smartphone, and 95 per cent of them were using it every day, according to a report by Deloitte.1 Younger people, as we would expect from the last chapter, were the most prolific users of all. As many as 93 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds, and 94 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds, had smartphones. The figure was 90 per cent for 45- to 54-year-olds and 80 per cent for people aged 55 to 75.

The iPhone and the competing devices that followed gave us the world in our pockets: emails, text messages, social media updates, gossip, encyclopaedias, instant language interpreters – and all the news we could want, including the FT. And, as for not being able to take their devices on the train, ‘many commuters now find it essential to be online during their journey’, Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, said in a 2018 report.2

Our phones are, today, an extension of our lives. ‘They’re no longer phones. They’re digital prostheses, they’re part of our identity,’ Linda Papadopoulos, a researcher and psychologist, told an FT Forums meeting.

The Ofcom report said that people spent an average of two hours and 28 minutes interacting with their phones every day. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, this rose to 3 hours and 14 minutes. Surveyed for the Ofcom report, 71 per cent of people said that they never turned their phones off, and 78 per cent said they couldn’t live without them.

Is this good or bad? The advantages – the instant information our mobile devices give us, the opportunity to be in touch with colleagues, family and friends – are clear. But many find their phones a burden. Writer and broadcaster Tim Harford wrote of his relationship with his phone: ‘I spend more time interacting with it than I do interacting with my children. I am in the presence of the device more often than I am in the presence of my wife, although at least I have my priorities straight as to which I go to bed with.’3

Many people do mix their phones with bedtime. As the Deloitte report said, some check Twitter at midnight. FT writer Elaine Moore spoke for many when she wrote that she scrolled through her emails the moment she woke up.4 Some, including Tim Harford, describe their attachment to their devices as an addiction. Linda Papadopoulos endorsed this. She told the FT Forums meeting that we used to speak of young people being addicted to video games simply because they played too many of them. What is different about the devices we have now, she said, is not just that they are addictive: it is that they have addiction-inducing features designed into them. The creators of programmes and apps understand precisely how the addiction process works.

As a Harvard University blog explained: ‘Platforms like Facebook, ­Snapchat, and Instagram leverage the very same neural circuitry used by slot machines and cocaine to keep us using their products as much as possible.’ Our mobile devices rely on dopamine, a chemical produced by our brains. ‘It gets released when we take a bite of delicious food, when we have sex, after we exercise, and, importantly, when we have successful social interactions. In an evolutionary context, it rewards us for beneficial behaviours and motivates us to repeat them,’ the Harvard blog said.5

That means that Twitter retweets and ‘likes’, new messages in our ­WhatsApp group or the latest TikTok videos all feed our compulsion to check our phones to see if there are any new ones. But there’s an additional factor. It’s not just that our brains regard these updates as rewards; what keeps us hooked is that we’re not sure when those rewards are going to arrive.

The Harvard blog says that, in the 1930s, the psychologist B.F. Skinner found that this unpredictable timing of the rewards enhanced the anticipation and pleasure. In his experiments, mice responded particularly well to rewards that were erratic in their arrival. Humans are no different; if we know the reward can be delivered at any time, ‘we end up checking habitually’, the Harvard blog said.

The same phenomenon occurs when we gamble on slot machines. It feeds our excitement that we don’t know when or whether we are going to win. James Williams, author of the book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, told the FT Forums gathering that we have the same anticipatory excitement when we check our phones. ‘When you pull down to refresh, you’re kind of playing an informational slot machine,’ he said.

Before we go on to discuss how, as citizens and as leaders, we manage the profusion of digital information and its addictive effect, it’s worth pointing out that not everyone is convinced that digital devices are damaging.

While many observers have spoken about the deleterious impact of mobile phone and screen use on young people’s mental health, University of Oxford research in 2019, based on data from the UK, Ireland and the USA, found that there was little evidence of a relationship between screen use and emotional well-being in adolescents, ‘even if the use of digital technology occurs directly before bedtime’.6

This conclusion received support from a 2017 Unicef report, which found that ‘moderate use of digital technology tends to be beneficial for children’s mental well-being, while no use or too much use can have a small negative impact. In the arguably most robust inquiry to date, it was found that these positive and negative impacts were very small and not as relevant as other factors known to be of importance to children’s mental well-being.’7

All the same, some people, bothered by how much time they spend on their devices, would like to use them less. Surveyed for the Deloitte report, 39 per cent of people said they either used, or probably used, their mobile devices too much. But that left the majority feeling that their phone use was about right. The issue for leaders is whether they should be worrying about their staff’s digital use, or whether they should leave their employees, who are adults after all, to make their own decisions.

DIGITAL OVER-USE – THE LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE

The first thing many leaders have to confront when talking about digital use, or over-use, is that it is not just their employees and children who are inseparable from their devices. So are their customers – or at least they hope they are. Digital devices are, these days, vital to the success of many businesses, which rely on email, sales sites, customer service chat bots and corporate apps for their success. It’s not just our lives that have been transformed by the online revolution; so have our organisations.

Let’s take the Financial Times as an example. Back in 2005, when I gave that Bankside interview, the bulk of the FT’s revenue came from two sources: newspaper sales and print advertising. In fact, when I was FT Weekend editor, how many people bought the print newspaper became my obsession – because that was one of the metrics (the other was the quality of the articles) by which I was judged. I used to receive sales reports each week, telling me how many readers had bought the newspaper in locations around the world, from San Francisco to Seoul, from Perth, Scotland to Perth, Australia. In the quest to increase our print circulation, I went to visit our best-selling newsagent in a posh area of west London to ask for his insights into what our readers – his shop’s customers – were after. (Don’t add too many sections, he told me. Buyers of the other bulky weekend papers grumbled about how much they threw away, unread, each week. I listened to him.)

I asked the local newsagent in my home neighbourhood if I could stand behind his counter one Saturday so that I could watch how people behaved when they bought the FT Weekend in his shop. I discovered that they picked it up without glancing at it and took it straight to the counter to pay. So much for the hours we spent carefully crafting the front-page headlines to grab readers’ attention. I realised that the trick was to get them to buy the FT in the first place. Once they were hooked, they would pick it up from the newsstand without a second thought, whatever was on the front page.

The reason I had to do this legwork was that, in those days, we had no real idea what our readers wanted or which parts of the FT they were reading. We were always guessing. Our research methods were unsophisticated. We sometimes placed surveys in the FT, asking readers to cut them out and post them back to us. In the surveys, we would ask them to tick the titles of the articles they remembered reading. Beyond those who took the time to reply, we didn’t know what the rest of our readers thought of our journalism, unless they took the trouble to write a letter to the editor, which only a minority did.

Today, the FT is a very different business. Online advertising has grown; print advertising has shrunk. The company’s primary focus is ­making money through reader subscriptions, the overwhelming majority for FT.com. The FT no longer needs to guess what people are reading. It has precise metrics on how many people click on each article online, how long they spend on it, what they read before that article and what they go on to read next. In comments underneath each article, hundreds of readers give their opinions of the journalism, and the journalists.

News organisations worldwide have done the same. News is an industry transformed, and often damaged. Few news organisations have matched the FT’s success in its move to digital subscriptions and its reduced reliance on advertising. Many news organisations, notably local newspapers, have gone bust. In 2021, the media mogul Rupert Murdoch wrote down the value of The Sun newspaper, once the hub of his global empire, to zero.8

The upheaval in the news business, with its victors and casualties, is reflected in dozens of other industries. Sector after sector has been upturned by digitisation – and by people’s use of their mobile devices to consume goods and services. The music companies once made their living selling vinyl records and, after that, cassette tapes and compact discs. In the 1990s, their main worry was illegal factories that turned out pirated CDs. In the early years of the millennium, as the internet began to grow, the music companies anguished over the teenagers who were illegally downloading music. The companies even sued some of these youngsters. When, in 2004, I challenged the then-head of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry about the wisdom of suing a 12-year-old girl, he said: ‘Could I point out to you that that particular 12-year-old had a credit card, a broadband connection and thousands of illegal files?’9 A broadband connection. Imagine.

Look at the situation today. Digital piracy is still a problem for the music industry. But the arrival of legal streaming services, such as Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer, has handed the industry a lifeline. Legitimate downloading helped drive 2020 worldwide music revenues to their highest level since 2002, up 7.4 per cent to $21.6 billion. This is a huge turnaround from the early online years when the music business appeared to be in a death spiral. It is people downloading music to listen to on their mobiles – legally – that has driven the revival. Streaming accounted for as much as 62 per cent of music business sales in 2020.10 (The music industry makes the rest of its money from physical products, such as CDs, the fashion for vinyl records, performance rights and music used in adverts and games.)11

Other business sectors have also changed enormously. The film and television industries have been transformed by streaming services such as Netflix. The books business, and many other areas of retail, have come up against the behemoth that is Amazon. Companies such as Ocado have driven the growth of online supermarket delivery, which enjoyed a particular boost during the coronavirus pandemic when many were reluctant to go into stores.

The ranking of the world’s most valuable listed companies indicates how prominent online businesses have become. The world’s 10 leading companies by market capitalisation, as detailed by PwC in March 2021, show seven that were propelled to their heights by the digital revolution of recent years: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Tencent and Alibaba (although tech stocks tumbled in 2022).12 So, while music industry executives, and those in many other businesses, may worry about their children’s, and their own, over-use of digital devices, those whose businesses have survived and prospered know that their industries would not be in their current healthy states without it.

THE WORK–WORLD BALANCE

‘Auf wiedersehen, post – Daimler staff get break from holiday email’ was the headline on an article in the Financial Times in 2014. The vehicle manufacturer told its 100,000 German employees that they could sign up for ‘Mail on Holiday’, which automatically deleted all their incoming emails while they were on holiday. The sender received a message saying that the email had not been delivered to its intended recipient. They were told they could contact a nominated replacement instead. ‘Our employees should relax on holiday and not read work-related emails,’ Wilfried Porth, Daimler’s board member for human resources, said.13

The Daimler announcement won wide publicity and raised an important question. We have been discussing how much companies depend on customers downloading news, music and films, and making online purchases on their screens and mobile devices. But how much time do leaders want their own employees to spend on their phones and computer screens? We are not talking about the amount of time they spend on their devices in their private lives. That is their concern (although how much of their work time they spend on private digital business, such as shopping or ­communicating with Facebook friends, may be yours). The real issue for leaders is how much time employees spend on their devices when they are working for you.

Daimler made it clear that it did not expect staff to deal with their work emails while they were on holiday. But what about the evenings, the early mornings and the weekends when they aren’t on holiday? The arrival of email, Slack messages and other ways for organisations to keep in touch with their staff has blurred the boundary between work and home life. And the great work-from-home that began with the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 often erased that boundary completely. If you are sitting in your spare bedroom or at the kitchen table, when does your work stop – and cooking dinner or helping kids with their homework begin?

People who worked from home in 2020 put in 6 hours of unpaid overtime on average per week, compared with 3.6 hours for those who did not work from home, according to the UK Office for National Statistics.14

Even before the pandemic, governments began stepping in and laying down rules on the boundary between work and home. On New Year’s Day 2017, the French Government granted workers a ‘right to disconnect’. The government in Paris ordered companies with more than 50 employees to draw up a charter of good conduct, setting out the hours when staff should not send or answer emails.15

In 2021, the Portuguese Government passed a law prohibiting companies from contacting staff outside normal office hours (and forcing them to meet their employees’ work-from-home extra energy and communication costs).16

In the same year, Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s Enterprise, Trade and Employment Minister (and former prime minister), announced that his country’s workers would also have a right to disconnect, effective immediately.

Not only did Irish employees have the right to refuse to work outside normal working hours, they had the right not to be penalised for exercising that right. They also had the obligation, the Irish Government said, to respect other people’s right to disconnect, by not emailing colleagues outside working hours.

Varadkar’s statement acknowledged that worldwide lockdowns had changed the context for the right to disconnect. ‘The pandemic has transformed working practices and many of those changes will be long-lasting,’ he said. While many people had lost their jobs and companies had been forced out of business, working from home had been an improvement for others. They could spend more time with their families, and their working hours could be more flexible.17

This meant that, for some, the ability to send or receive emails in the evenings or on weekends had been a boon; they may have been supervising home schooling during their office hours. For others, it seemed intrusive that they should be expected to answer emails outside normal hours just because they were working from home. If the email came from someone more senior, or even from an ambitious equal that you feared might outpace you, you may have felt it was best to reply.

After a few months of lockdown, a colleague with senior management responsibilities and a young child sent me an email on the weekend with a note appended to it. It said: ‘Please be aware that I do not expect a response to my emails during the weekend or evenings – this is simply the time when I am sometimes able to get aspects of my work done but I do not expect others to have the same work style!’

I found this considerate and did not reply until the Monday morning. Other, more junior colleagues may have felt it politic to reply immediately, whatever the message said.

These ad-hoc arrangements about out-of-hours responses may work for some, but not all. Should companies follow Daimler and lay down rules, particularly if their governments have not yet said anything? And even if their governments have set out rules, governments like Ireland’s still leave companies with room to manoeuvre: the Irish announcement said employers and employees should work together to decide what was best. Many organisations discovered one advantage of online meetings: they widened the circle of participants. Discussions often involved people from more countries than in the past, even if they were in different time zones. This flexibility, the Irish Government said, ‘reflects the fact that many Irish employees are part of a global network, requiring contact with colleagues around the world’.

Some observers of digital life have proposed that companies deal with constant online meetings by introducing the idea of a ‘tech sabbath’, one day a week when we turn off our phones and take a break from Slack, email and LinkedIn, behaving as we did before the smartphone was invented. Tom Kegode, who is the future-of-work strategy leader at Lloyds Banking Group, told the FT event that a team at the bank had tried the digital sabbath. They saw the benefits of ‘recharging and looking at how they are using technology’. There were business as well as personal advantages to doing this, Tom Kegode added: ‘We need to take the time to recharge because, if we are stretching ourselves too thin, our productivity is affected. We are not doing our best work.’

Tim Harford wrote that something even longer than a tech sabbath might be a good idea: some experts have suggested a 30-day, or 6-month, break from digital devices. Tim Harford said we needed to rethink our entire relationship with our mobiles. ‘There is no intrinsic benefit to taking a month off from computers any more than one might recommend a brief, invigorating break from smoking or opiates,’ he wrote. ‘The aim is to change the status quo to allow a reassessment. It’s only after you put down the electronic rucksack overflowing with digital possibility and stroll off unencumbered that you’re in a position to make a sensible decision about whether you really want to carry it around all day long.’

For many organisations, breaks this long and reassessments of this sort, would not be an option. Business moves too fast; competitors close in too quickly. A one-day break on the weekend is one thing; a whole month, or six months, would be ruinous. So, what can leaders do?

We need to view digital overload in the context of overwork and presenteeism generally, problems that predate not just lockdown, but the digital revolution. Staying late in the office to create a good impression has long been what keen employees did. The best managers tell them it doesn’t impress. When I first joined the FT, I realised that news didn’t always happen in working hours and there would be nights and weekends, with a big story breaking, when I would have to muck in. But my departmental editor at the time told me that if he saw me persistently sitting at my desk beyond 7 pm, that wouldn’t persuade him that I was a hard worker. It would tell him that I didn’t know how to organise my time. It was a lesson well learned, and I recounted that advice to late-staying team members when I became a departmental editor.

As Linda Papadopoulos told the FT Forums meeting, which took place before the coronavirus lockdown, ‘If the ethos is to leave after your manager, to be the last one there, what are you doing? If you’re just hanging around, not doing anything, it doesn’t work.’ She recalled being in the USA when some companies started allowing staff to take holidays when they needed to. ‘And, lo and behold, it worked. It worked because most of us are adults, right? So, if I’m going to see my kid’s piano recital, it doesn’t mean I’m going to let the account go.’ Trusted to organise themselves and their time, people get the work done, as we saw in Chapter 1.

Just as staying late in the office is often unproductive, so is answering emails until the early hours. And, when it comes to ensuring that people don’t overwork to the point where they are no longer getting results, leaders need to set an example. It is all about, Linda says, ‘modelling appropriate behaviour’. However egalitarian leaders pretend the workplace is, there is a power dynamic. People watch what their leaders do, and they do the same. ‘So, it’s all well and good saying, yeah, you know, take a digital sabbath,’ Linda said. ‘If I’m not modelling that, if you see me not doing it, if you see me sending those emails, it’s not going to work.’

If leaders don’t send emails late at night, if they take time off over the weekend, their teams conclude that there is no need for them to do it, either. If leaders take time off, if they shut down their digital lives when they go on holiday, their staff realise it’s not going to do them any harm to do the same.

HOW MUCH EMAIL DO WE NEED ANYWAY?

On the eve of the 2021 Euros, the European football championship, Gareth Southgate, the England manager, wrote a ‘Dear England’ letter about what the tournament, and playing for England, meant to the players. One of the issues he addressed was social media. While football players these days no longer shared the lives of the fans in the ways they once did – ‘They don’t ride the same bus home from games, or meet in the pub for a pint and a post-match analysis’ – social media meant they still had a close relationship with the supporters. ‘In fact, I feel like this generation of ­England players is closer to the supporters than they have been for decades,’ he wrote.18

Social media and email have given people the sense of being in constant touch with each other. It’s not that we had no quick means of communication before then. We did. When I started out in journalism in 1981, we had the telex machine. I was a correspondent based in Athens then, working for South African, British, Canadian and US outlets from a borrowed desk in The New York Times bureau. After writing my story on an Olivetti typewriter, xxxx-ing out any mistakes, I would take it over to the telex machine and wait my turn, always remembering that The New York Times correspondents, particularly the visiting big-name reporters, had priority. I would retype my article on the telex machine, which produced a tape. After dialling up the telex address of the outlet I was writing for, I would run the tape through the machine. The telex machine in their faraway office would cough to life and print out my story.

After the telex, we had the fax machine, which seemed magical then – there was no need to punch out a tape; what you put in at one end came out as an exact copy on someone else’s fax machine. All that was needed was for someone to walk past the recipient’s machine: you could always phone to alert them, just in case.

Email, when it came to my office in the mid-1980s, was even more exciting. I was in London by then, working on a small magazine called International Management. My editor was so excited about emails that he took to sending me one and then running the short distance from his office to mine (no open-plan back then) to ask if I had read it. Soon, we were sending emails to people in other buildings and even other countries.

Email was even less trouble, and more direct, than fax, and much less bother than telex. You didn’t even have to be in the office to send and receive it. ‘With this new tool, the cost in terms of time and social capital to communicate with anyone related to your job plummeted from significant to almost nothing,’ Cal Newport wrote in his book, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload.19 That elimination of accompanying activity – the typing of the telex tape, the walk over to the fax machine – not only streamlined the sending of messages; it made it possible to send many more in a shorter time. ‘We began to talk back and forth much more than we ever had before, smoothing out the once coarse sequence of discrete work activities that defined our day into a more continuous spread of ongoing chatter, blending with and softening the edge of what we used to think of as our actual work.’

In other words, sending messages to aid our work turned into messages that were our work. ‘Email and its more fevered cousin, Slack, no longer simply interrupt important tasks. They fuel an endless, attention-draining digital discussion about those tasks that we have come to regard as both normal and unavoidable,’ FT columnist Pilita Clark wrote in her enthusiastic review of Newport’s book.20

During the coronavirus pandemic and working from home, these instant communication tools – email, WhatsApp, Slack – became even more important. They were a vital way of keeping in touch and ensuring that work continued to be done. But it took an emotional toll on home workers. As Olga Kokshagina, a research fellow at RMIT University in Australia wrote, it wasn’t just the amount of information that caused stress and anxiety – it was the number of ways people could access it.

Her and her team’s interviews around the world identified all the communication tools home workers were using. ‘More than likely you have software for writing, email, instant message, calendars, file sharing, conferencing, work organisation and password management,’ she wrote.21

We can add to this ‘Zoom fatigue’ – the long hours of video calls and conferences. And there wasn’t just Zoom; there was the added strain of switching between video platforms, from Zoom to Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or BlueJeans, depending on what suppliers, collaborators and customers insisted on using. Each video platform has its quirks: on some, you see people’s names at the bottom of their moving headshots. On other systems, you have to hover your cursor over the picture to see who they are. (Both are, admittedly, an advance over in-person meetings where you have to remember people’s names.) Some video platforms give you an ‘are you sure?’ warning if you inadvertently click on the leave button. Others allow you to unceremoniously eject yourself.

What can be done about this profusion of information – not only for those working from home, but those returning to the office or to hybrid working? Olga Kokshagina suggests three remedies. First, switching between tasks less often. ‘The idea of multitasking is a myth,’ she says. We can concentrate on perhaps two things at a time – working and listening to music, for example. Anything more and our concentration skips around. Second, we can schedule set times for tasks. ‘Behavioural experiments show those who check emails just a few times a day report lower stress than those who constantly check throughout the day. Make the effort to do related tasks in set time blocks (say 30 minutes).’ Third, ‘Limit unnecessary communication,’ she says. ‘Information in the digital age is a bit like food. Tens of thousands of years of scarcity has conditioned us to crave it. But abundance means we have to consciously check ourselves from consuming too much.’

FURTHER READING

One of the earliest and most influential analysts of the digital revolution was Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor who died in 2020. His 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, came in for later criticism, but remains essential reading. Before we get to the issues of over-use of digital technology discussed in this chapter, Christensen forces us to ask: why are we in business and will we be able to stay there? Once we have learned to think along these lines, we can address the questions of how we use digital communication to survive. Andrew Hill’s FT obituary of ­Christensen gives a good overview of Christensen’s work and life and it is available at: www.ft.com/content/54bb9216-3efe-11ea-b232-000f4477fbca.

Pilita Clark’s FT column ‘We should pull the plug on pointless after-hours emails’ is a highly readable overview of the issues discussed in this chapter, including references to other work, some of which we have seen here, available at: www.ft.com/content/29fc2a4a-cb50-4118-9d2d-f4c557626bc7.