How to Manage Tech Overload
Gloria Mark, a professor in the informatics department at the University of California, Irvine, has studied the interplay of stress, mood, and computer use for more than 20 years.
She labels her research the science of “human-computer interaction.” She has written extensively about the danger of multitasking and information overload on workers who make their living, in part, from reading and analyzing data through digital sources.
That’s 74% of all U.S. workers, according to the American Institutes for Research. It’s not like many people have a job description requiring superior computer skills. Instead, on a daily basis, almost three out of four employed Americans go to their smartphone, laptop, desktop computer, or tablet to: 1) answer a question; 2) confirm a suspicion; 3) prove a point; or 4) take a break.
This happens through sending emails, texting, internet queries, and scrolling social media. The “knowledge worker” label of the 1990s has spread.
In 2025, anyone with a cellphone, much less the latest AI program, can learn how to do a task, get help planning the task, complete the task, and evaluate the result, even though their job has no seeming relationship to creating or analyzing information.
Mark has identified ubiquitous computer use, and the stress it causes, as a problem of attention. Her 2023 book, Attention Span, introduced the idea of adapting to one’s own “rhythms of attention” for greater well-being, instead of obsessing about maximum productivity, whether at home or work.
Mark’s writing and speaking style (she’s a popular podcast guest) is comforting because she is so sympathetic to the irony of technology—namely, what it was supposed to do for us.
In a January 2024 podcast with New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein, she noted that “technology was created to enhance our capabilities: to write faster, to connect with people faster, to produce more.”
Instead, it’s tied us to our desks or kept us looking at our devices instead of whatever is around us. Mark’s research shows that in the office of the 1980s, people spent 30% of their day at their desks. In 2019, she and her researchers clocked people spending 90% of their work time at their desks. They were mainly static and seated in front of screens.
A brief review of Mark’s prodigious, decades-long curriculum vitae reflects a period of enormous advances in work technology with a consistent warning: Multitasking breeds inattention. In 2004, her scientific paper “Constant, Constant Multi-Tasking Craziness” examined the average two to three minutes that software developers spent on a specific screen task before switching to another “work sphere.”
She computed the “disruption cost” of being asked to completely switch topics in 2008 and included it in her presentation, “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress.”
She found that people compensate for interruptions by subsequently working faster, but at a price: higher stress, frustration and pressure.
In 2014, she proposed a way to measure an employee’s engagement in work as “the capacity to take action.” In that paper, “Bored Mondays and Focused Afternoons: The Rhythm of Attention and Online Activity in the Workplace,” Mark described various “attentional states” in the workplace. The ultimate is cognitive absorption, defined as “when people experience total immersion in an activity [with] deep enjoyment, a feeling of control, curiosity, and not realizing the passage of time.”
When Mark spoke to Klein, he addressed her as a “scholar of attention,” and he asked, “Why is tech worsening our attention?” Mark replied, “Now people have an additional workload on top of their other workload, which is answering email, Slack messages, texting.” She cited the statistic that people check email, on average, 77 times a day. She thinks email does not just correlate with stress, it causes it.
Inevitably (and importantly), Mark has now researched the effects of artificial intelligence on workers. In an April 2025 podcast with UX magazine, Mark shared some good news.
Well-designed AI might “help extend attention spans by offering structured, low-friction interactions,” she says. Apparently, it’s the doggone friendliness of that AI voice that soothes one’s attentiveness state. The “gentle guide” of conversational AI could, Mark posits, increase focus and allow for “mental rest.” Sounds like the kind of work friend even Mr. Rogers would have liked.
