Coping with Digital Overwhelm: Meaning, Work, and Grace

If your days feel like swimming against a current you didn’t choose, you’re not imagining it. Researcher and communication coach Dr. Craig Mattson joins us to map the hidden “rip tides” of digital life—why tools that promised efficiency now burn our attention, how inboxes became group chats in disguise, and what it actually takes to protect focus without disconnecting from your team or your values.

We trace Craig’s path from small-town roots and radio work into scholarship on modern work culture, then dig into practical fixes that are humane and realistic. We look at email through Cal Newport’s “hyperactive hive mind,” share ritual-level tactics to reduce chaos, and talk about Oliver Burkeman’s reminder that constraints aren’t flaws—they’re the shape of a life. Craig brings a surprising companion to the conversation: the wisdom books of Job and Ecclesiastes. Awe, finitude, and the acceptance that most work won’t be immortalized can lighten the pressure to make every task meaningful—and still point us toward daily joy, craft, and integrity.

We also explore two slippery topics many teams miss: using AI as scaffolding (not a substitute for voice and judgment) and the power of indirect communication—those signals around the words that matter most for people with less organizational sway. If you’ve wondered whether to quit a job that feels hollow, we offer a grounded way to test redesign vs. exit, name harm clearly, and move with patience instead of panic. By the end, you’ll have a clearer map for navigating overwhelm: fewer threads, cleaner decisions, kinder culture, and a practice of waiting that makes room for better choices. If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review—what’s one change you’ll try this week?

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Dr. Greg Madison
• 1:09 Roots, Values, and Small-Town Influence
• 2:46 Defining Digital Overwhelm
• 4:27 Tech Rip Tides and Human Upwelling
• 6:47 Individual Willpower vs Systemic Forces
• 9:53 Mental, Social, and Spiritual Costs
• 12:25 From Radio to Researcher
• 15:50 Email Overload: Causes and Fixes
• 18:33 Job, Awe, and Unmanageable Worlds
• 21:48 Using AI as a Creative Tool
• 23:39 Should You Quit an Unmeaningful Job?
• 27:18 Indirect Communication as Power
• 29:26 Where to Find Greg’s Work
• 30:37 A Closing Word: Wait with Patience

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:15

Hello everyone, thank you again for joining me on another episode of the DOS to us show. Today we have a special guest with us. His name is Dr. Greg Madison. He is a researcher and communication coach. He is close to intersection of speakerly and professional and a profession well. His newsletter, The More Equit, offers insight for early career professionals and managers. Dr. Craig, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

SPEAKER_01: 0:50

Well, I'm really pleased to be with you, Dorothy, and I appreciate so much the work you're doing. Uh too. It's great to great to meet you in this format.

SPEAKER_02: 0:58

Yes, thank you. I I always like to open up with a icebreaker question. And today's icebreaker question is where did you grow up and did that affect who you became?

SPEAKER_01: 1:13

Mm-hmm. Yes, I grew up in Adrian, Michigan, which is a rural town on the southeast side of Michigan. And I grew up in a sort of conservative Protestant home, and my community, family, um a deep appreciation for what you might think of as kind of basic human values of caring for people, respecting others, trying to do your best work. And then also a lot of spiritual and religious values as well. But yeah, I mean, I think my parents and my community, um, the sort of farm community I was in, gave me a deep appreciation for the scriptures, which continues to this day. I certainly don't read the Bible in exactly the way I did when I was seven years old, but I uh continue to carry some of the values of that sort of small town life into my current life and work.

SPEAKER_02: 2:32

You wrote a book, and maybe that's one of the reasons that piqued my interest in interviewing you. You wrote a book called Digital Overload, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. What is that book about and what made you write it?

SPEAKER_01: 2:49

Mm-hmm. Uh, I appreciate the question. You know, authors are all too willing to talk about the books that they have written. So you have to be careful when you ask an author, like, tell me about your book. You might, you know, regret the question a little bit later. The title of the book is Digital Overwhelm, a mid-career guide for coping at work. And I wrote this book out of a series of conversations, kind of like the one you and I are having, with uh rising professionals. I called them quarter lifers, not midlife, right, but quarter life. And that includes people from ages like 20 to 40. And I started interviewing them in the winter of 2020 and continued interviewing throughout 2022. And the stories and the insights of these people trying to make sense of their life and work in the early 2020s moved me deeply and provoked me to describe their experience as digital overwhelm. So that's the origin story. It came out of conversation, storytelling.

SPEAKER_02: 4:06

Was it because they were too much on their computers or on their phones or watching too much TV? And what what does the book teach, or what does the book talk about?

SPEAKER_01: 4:21

Yes, you're asking helpful questions here. Where does digital overwhelm come from is a huge question. We all feel it. I've only met one person who said, no, I'm not digitally overwhelmed, but that person was an outlier. Most people say, yes, I am digitally overwhelmed all the time. But where does it come from? Kind of imagine it. Again, I'm from Michigan and I'm not far from Lake Michigan. And so I think about it in terms of the kinds of currents or tides that you see in a body of water like Lake Michigan. So if you show up at the beach, you'll sometimes see a flag that indicates the tide conditions. If it's a green flag, like everything's okay. If it's a red flag, you should probably watch out. There might be rip tides, right? So I think there might be an orange flag. I can't remember all the flags. Technological development in the last, well, I'm not even going to give that a frame, but technological development in our time has become so accelerated. It's so fast and it's so constantly changeful that we experience this technological change as like a riptide. And we're just in it. It's carrying us somewhere. And we're not sure if we want to go there or how to get out of it or what. And most of us are, you know, we just kind of say, well, I got to ride this thing out like you would if you were stuck in a riptide. Um and these technological developments can be as mundane as having to update your phone, which is kind of annoying, or you need to change your password or something, to really big stuff, like the rapid development of large language networks and artificial intelligence today. So a lot of digital overwhelm comes from those riptides of tech development. But in the middle of that, humans have feelings. And I think of those as like an upwelling current. An upwelling current is it comes from the deeps and it brings with it a lot of the silt and a lot of the plant and fish life. Um, and some of it is nutrients. But an upwelling current when it meets the sort of top-of-the-water currents, the shore, the long shore currents or the rip tides, yeah, that's a hard place to be. It's a hard place to stay afloat. So that for me is the sort of second factor, digital overwhelm, is our personal emotional experience of that. Some people experience it as really energizing, and some people experience it as a bad kind of overwhelm. Uh, you know, a sort of almost an experience of drowning. I guess the sort of summary statement here is digital overwhelm is not something that I would trace just to people's laziness or their addictions, but to forces that are really bigger than any of us, and that we have to learn how to navigate because we can't seem to uh avoid them entirely.

SPEAKER_02: 7:35

So if I'm understanding you correctly, you're not because we're saying about how often we're on the digital, you know, app or digital phone TV itself, but you're talking about how fast the digital, you know, phones, apps, you know, TVs are thinking. Is that what I'm understanding?

SPEAKER_01: 8:02

Yes, that is what I'm trying to communicate. I think there's a tendency to approach a condition like digital overwhelm as an individual problem. So you see a lot of self-help books that I think these are good books, by the way. They're books that try to help you to form practices that will resist technological um overwhelm and exhaustion and burnout and fatigue. And those books are really important. So uh don't hear me saying you don't need those books. I am just saying my book was identifying a different factor at play. And for me, the acknowledgement that there are well-moneyed, large corporate forces that are really trying to harvest our attention, I think that allows us to give each other some grace. You know, when somebody's on their laptop just a little bit too much in a particular committee meeting or a classroom, I always have to kind of temper my response because A, know that I myself have done the same thing. We cannot simply resist the forces of technological development by sheer willpower. That's ludicrous. Some of the smartest and wealthiest people in the world are working constantly to sort of capture and hold our attention. And to think that you could resist that simply by willing it is probably naive. So I look for uh multiple ways to kind of navigate those currents rather than to eliminate them.

SPEAKER_02: 9:39

Can digital overwhelm affect us, you know, in any adverse way, whether it be mentally, emotionally, physically, you know, maybe even spiritually?

SPEAKER_01: 9:52

Mm-hmm. I I think so. I think most people that I talked to, and you'll hear me kind of going back again and again to my interview data, because that's what I feel like I can offer here. But most people that I talked to did experience it as an adverse set of conditions. I think that there were sometimes people who sort of enjoyed it. Kind of the you might enjoy the surf at the lake on the shore. Like sometimes it's really fun when a big wave comes in and sweeps you off your feet and you're not sure which way is up. That can be kind of joyful and fun and playful. But too much of that, and you start to feel like it is adverse. The researcher Jonathan Haidt has done some work on the adverse effects of something like digital overwhelm for teenagers. And I think there too much sort of social media engagement can be definitely adverse on adolescent um social habits and kind of self-image. And so there's lots of depression recorded for adolescents who are experiencing something like digital overwhelm. For people in my research set, uh, the people I was interviewing, the adverse conditions, I don't know if they ever traced solely to digital overwhelm. It was just always a factor in the kind of exhaustion that they were feeling, or maybe the bewilderment they were feeling, or the sense of, I'm not exactly sure what the rules in this situation are for how to relate to my coworkers or how to relate to my new manager, or that sort of thing. So those were some of the adverse conditions that I noted in talking to rising professionals.

SPEAKER_02: 11:45

Going on to a different question, you know, like we talked about before the interview, you're a professor at the school at Calvin University in in Michigan in um Michigan, is that correct? And also, you know, you're also well, how did you get involved in what you do?

SPEAKER_01: 12:07

Mm-hmm. Yeah, how did I get into this? You get to a certain point in your life and you're like, how did I get here? I appreciate the question, though. I guess my last year of college, I got hired by a radio station. I didn't have any training in radio. I was a speech major in college, which was by and large about presenting or performing in live situations, but somebody came to a performance of mine or a presentation of mine and said, maybe if we train this guy, maybe he could do radio work. So they tried me out, and I ended up staying with that for about a decade. So I think I developed interest in, you know, different kinds of communication that were often digitalized. When I started radio, there was still quite a lot of analog, but the shift to the digital was beginning to happen. We had these uh old-fashioned uh technologies called digital audio tape players, DATs. And oh my gosh, I don't think anybody uses DATs anymore. But that was sort of my first experience of digital tech in radio, oh, besides CDs and things like that. So I think you know that was sort of the seedbed of my interest. How do we do modern life today, technologized life today, digitalized life today in deeply human ways?

SPEAKER_02: 14:34

How do we deal with email overwhelm and what does that look like?

SPEAKER_01: 14:41

I wish I had a short answer to that question. So there are hacks, you know, that you can use to address email overwhelm. It's a real phenomenon. Um, it's a paradoxical phenomenon. We developed email with a great deal of optimism that it would, you know, make our communications more efficient and more manageable in organizations. And the actual reality was exactly the opposite, that this tool that we had hoped would create greater efficiency became itself the source of tremendous inefficiency. So I think like one thing you can do when you're dealing with digital overwhelm in your inbox is to take a look at some of those productivity hacks that are out there. I think one especially good author on this point would be Cal Newport. Uh, he has a book called World Without Email. And he tries to help you to kind of pare down your email usage and kind of rein it in and constrain it, not treat it like a sort of direct messaging technology that requires an always almost like a hyper-reactivity, I think is the term he uses. Uh he calls it the hyperactive hive mind, where we're just like all pinging each other with all these thousands of emails and creating a lot of organizational load. So that's maybe one recommendation. Another author that I've really learned a lot from is Oliver Berkman. And his book, 4,000 Weeks, has a wonderful chapter in it called The Digital Nomad, and he addresses the kind of overwhelm that you're asking about. But I guess the last thing I would recommend self-interestedly is for people to check out my book, Digital Overwhelm. I do have a chapter trying to understand what it is that makes email work or not work for us. And I also offer advice for ways to use email in more humane and personable ways. One of the distinctives of my book is, I think, important to the values of this show, is that I do think with the help of the wisdom literature of the Bible. So you might be surprised to know that a lot of people who write about digital technology refer to the book of Job, even if they're not people of faith. There's something about that text that really explores the dynamics of human communication and community in a changeful and unmanageable world that a lot of people really closely identify with. And my book does the same thing. I explore the book of Job and your inbox. So those are a few recommendations. Does that help, Dorsey, or raise another question?

SPEAKER_02: 17:48

Why do people look at the book of Job when dealing with digital overwhelm or dealing with email overwhelm?

SPEAKER_01: 17:57

Yeah, that's a that's a that's a doozy of a question. So I think that people are interested in the book. So let me back up just a little bit. I'll I'll tell you that I encountered the book of Job in tech writers through an author named Megan O'Giblin. Um, and she wrote a book called God, Human, Animal, Machine, which I adored. I just thought it was a beautiful book. And in that book, she explores like interpretations and misinterpretations of the book of Job from her perspective, and she connects it closely to digital tech and its development. But why is it so important to so many people who write in that space? If you remember, the book of Job is it's sort of set up with a kind of frame story of this very wealthy man who loses almost everything he has, including his children and his own health. And then for much of the book, there's a series of dialogues between Job and his friends. He has three or four friends that show up throughout the book. And then at the end of the book, they're all basically sitting in silence. They've kind of run out of things to say, which you're sort of relieved about because it's a long dialogue and uh frankly it's quite repetitive. But yeah, at the end, they're all like, we have no idea what to say to you, Job. And Job is like, the words of Job are ended. You know, he doesn't have anything more to say either. And after a brief, you know, sort of, you know, uh monologue from a very young whipper snapper of a guy named Elihu, um, a whirlwind shows up, and it's a huge storm. And out of the storm comes the voice of God or the voice of the Lord. And what does the Lord say to Job? Job has been asking for God to talk to him and listen to him for chapter after chapter, and the Lord has been silent. So when God shows up, we're all like, what is God gonna say to Job? And what God communicates to Job is very curious and unexpected, and that is he talks about the details, the intricacies, and the scale of God's creation. He talks about various sundry, strange creatures in the world. And what's interesting is that humans are not talked about in the Lord's speech. God doesn't talk about people. I think there's one reference to people in these three or four chapters, this long monologue from for the Lord. And so Job is in a certain way kind of de-centered as a human, and he's just like put in the middle of creation, and there's this tremendous sense of awe and truly overwhelm at the vastness of and unmanageability of the creation. So I don't know. I think that experience of awe and unmanageability is so much the human condition, yeah, even in technologized spaces, or maybe especially in technologized spaces, where we feel like, oh, the world is moving too fast, it's too big, I don't feel like I'm at the center of it, and it threatens my personal significance and meaning. And so I think that that story and those conversations are really ripe for reflection on technologized society.

SPEAKER_02: 21:40

Yeah. We even see, you know, AI popping up everywhere now, you know, it on our phones, it's on our computers, it's on our on our podcast, you know, sites that we can write out, you know, an introduction to, you know, uh we can write out, you know, what the episode was about, and we can have AI do that for, you know, f for ourselves. We don't have to write it out anymore.

SPEAKER_01: 22:09

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Do you uh do you find that that uh how do you interact with that that opportunity? Do you do you resist it? Do you kind of use it as a tool? Do you what yeah, what's been your practice?

SPEAKER_02: 22:23

I I use it as as far as the podcast part of it goes, I use it, you know, to help me, you know, to to write it out and you know, write out a blog or write out, you know, to write out the what the episode was about and you know, things of that nature, even you know, help me think about a title of what the episode could be about, and then I can pick out a title and if I don't want to use that, you know, what they have, I can make up my own.

SPEAKER_01: 22:56

Yeah. I mean, I do something similar to that. I often find that, you know, I I write a long prompt, right? And uh especially for help in creating, like you said, introductions to podcasts like this. And I often find that it's not speaking in a voice that sounds like me, so I need to really change a lot of it, throw a lot of it out. But yeah, it does, it sort of gets away from the problem of the blank page. Like it gives you something to work with to edit and revise and amplify and extend. Um, so yeah, it's a really wonderful tool. And I think in many ways, like the people that I was talking to aren't, you know, in my book project, they're not particularly worried about this. Mostly they just see it as like, you know, the uh continuation of the story of technological development that they have just you know sort of been born into. For the rest of us who knew life, you know, well before the digital, uh that's you know, it is pretty disconcerting in in many ways.

SPEAKER_02: 24:01

Yeah. Going to a different topic now for a minute, if my job didn't feel meaningful, should I quit? And I I saw that uh question as like I need to ask that question because I think even for myself, that's a very, you know, meaningful, if you use a word, you know, meaningful question and an interesting question to think about.

SPEAKER_01: 24:28

Yeah, if my job doesn't feel like it has a point, or it doesn't, if it doesn't feel significant or meaningful, should I just find a different line of work? You're right. I mean, that is a huge, huge question. It's a question, again, that took me to the wisdom literature of the Bible and the book of Ecclesiastes. What does the worker gain from their toil? Is the question that the philosopher who's writing the book of Ecclesiastes or who is speaking and it keeps coming back to. What's the point of our work? Is there any point to it? Is it absurd? And I think, especially in digital spaces, it's easy to feel like maybe this is a gift, honestly, Dorsey, but it's a gift that being in contact with so much of the world all the time reminds us of how unimportant we are, how small our lives and our work. Um, but it can also be really upsetting, too. And so, yeah, about halfway through my book, I I have a chapter on meaning and work and what digital overwhelm does to your sense of the point of your job. But your question was more, should you quit? And you know, that there's no sort of binary answer for that. Yes, you should quit right now, or no, you should never quit. It's it's always going to be based on how you're making sense of your work and the conditions you find yourself in. I think there are some easy answers in the sense that like if you're experiencing abuse at work, or if you're experiencing, you know, um inequity or profound, you know, sort of moral wrong, yeah, get out of there as fast as you can. Keep your soul intact. Um, but the harder questions are when the work feels like it, it's it's just like that's just a thing I'm doing, and I'm not sure if there's much significance in it, much meaning in it. So in the book of Ecclesiastes, the way that this is approached, the teacher sort of agrees with you and says, yeah, your work is not gonna last, your work is very small, and it will quickly be forgotten. It will probably be picked up by people who don't share the commitments you do, and they're gonna do something else with it. And so, yeah, that's all true. But still, try to enjoy it. That's the refrain that keeps coming through in the book of Ecclesiastes. So I guess, you know, as much as you can, try to enjoy the work that is in front of you. If that becomes impossible and it just remains impossible, then I think, yeah, I think it would be wise to look for another line of work where you can find some joy. I'll just add one more thing, and that is that most people in the world don't do work that allows them to really feel fulfilled and to feel a deep sense of significance. Most people who've ever lived don't feel that their work had this kind of deep satisfaction to it. For most people in the history of human life, it's just been toil, it's just been labor, it's just a thing you gotta do. And it's in those conditions, I think, that the philosopher in the book of Ecclesiastes is saying, as much as you can, work hard at it and enjoy it. So that's my sort of attempt to answer your your really, really good question. What are you thinking after I've said that?

SPEAKER_02: 28:01

I agree, I agree with you. I agree with you that you know, at there are times that depending on the situation, like you said, maybe it's a more situation that, you know, the company's doing, people at work are doing that, that you should get out of it and just run away from it as as quickly as you can. But like you said too, what helps me is to try and enjoy the work that you're doing as much as you can. You know, even though you may not like it, you may not, you know, enjoy it as much, but try to enjoy it as much as you as much as you can.

SPEAKER_00: 28:45

Yeah. I think that's right. I think that's right.

SPEAKER_02: 28:49

One last question. What role should an indirect communication play in everyday work and life?

SPEAKER_01: 28:57

I think this was another sort of finding in my my research and reflection about the research. It's the indirect communication. Matters every bit as much as direct communication. So think about direct communication, the most elemental form of communication. You have a sender, you have a receiver, and you know, the sender transmits a message to the receiver. And uh it's like when I was a kid and I played with a tin can with a string to another tin can, and you know, we'd have like 50 feet between me and the other person, and we're both holding a tin can, and you know, I say something into the tin can and they hear it on their end. That's direct communication. And it's really important. It's important to do that well. But at the same time, indirect communication is all the stuff we do kind of around that direct communication. And a lot of that is relational, a lot of that is emotional, a lot of that is embodied. It's in our gestures, it's in our posture, it's in our nonverbal communication. And sometimes, especially if you don't hold a lot of power in your organization, indirect communication is all you got. I often tell a story of one of my interviewees who was a Haitian American, and she was working in a nonprofit, and they were doing some training on um equity in their company, and they were watching a video, and it was like a workshop sort of thing. And because she was a black woman, she experienced the video in a different way than her white co-workers did, and it made her weep. And for them, it was just like, oh, this is another sort of HR workshop that we're doing. And um she, you know, she had to turn her camera off and kind of get herself together because she was crying so much. And when she came back on, uh she adopted what she called the face, and this was a facial expression that. That allowed her to kind of contain her emotion, but also to kind of set up an appropriate distance from her colleagues who were really kind of oblivious to what she was feeling. And that's a form of indirect communication ways. But yeah, I think especially people who don't have a lot of sway in their organizations, that indirect communication may be the most important kind of communication.

SPEAKER_02: 31:35

Yeah. Where can people get your book and you know learn more about you and even your newsletter that you have?

SPEAKER_01: 31:46

Thank you. I appreciate that, Dorsey. The easiest way to get a hold of my work is to go to my website, The Mode Switch. So that's three words, but all put together, themode switch.com. And my newsletter is called The Mode Switch. And it explores work culture in much in the way that you and I have been talking. So if you have listeners who are feeling a little bit confused or bewildered or frustrated with their organizational cultures and the companies that they're employed by, my newsletter might help you to cope a little better with those conditions. I take up a different question every week. If they're interested in my book, they can also find that on themodeswitch.com. But they can also just look for it on Amazon if you just search for the book Digital Overwhelm. It'll pop right up.

SPEAKER_02: 32:37

Okay. Sounds good. Well, Dr. Craig, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

SPEAKER_01: 32:44

My pleasure, for sure. It was great to meet you, Dorsey, and I appreciate the work that you're doing with so many different guests.

SPEAKER_02: 32:50

Thank you. And one last uh thing. Would you give my audience a word of encouragement or word of knowledge about what we discussed today?

SPEAKER_01: 33:01

I'd be pleased to. I think one of the for me, the kind of words of wisdom I try to keep in mind is that digital overwhelm is something that requires patience with ourselves and with others. So as you feel digital overwhelm, the first impulse is to try to avoid it or to run away from it, to flee it, or maybe to combat it in some overt way. But I think that, you know, the word of scripture again and again is wait. And I think when you feel that sense of technological exhaustion settling over you, uh, when you, as one of my colleagues put it the other day, commit digital overwhelm, you need to sit quietly and wait. I think it will become a little bit more navigable as you do that. And then also sometimes you have to wait for others who are also similarly overwhelmed. So that's a word of grace and wisdom that I try to live out.

SPEAKER_02: 34:08

Yeah. Well, guys and girls, thank you so much for coming on the show today and listening and being encouraged and hopefully a little inspired. And please go and like Dr. Greg's information and uh book. And until next time, God bless. Bye bye.