Digital Overwhelm: A Mid-Career Guide to Coping at Work

Why does doing your job feel so flooded and so pointless at the same time? Nobody knows better than millennial and Gen Z professionals how rapid technological development has inundated post-pandemic work. Organizational researcher Craig Mattson listens to their stories and builds a framework for coping with digital overwhelm at work. This book won’t tell you to declutter your digital life or to end capitalism now. But what you can do, suggests Professor Mattson, is change how you attend to zones where technological disruption meets emotional pressure. Calling these zones modes of communication, this book urges you to practice mode-switching. Addressed to millennial and Gen Z professionals, Digital Overwhelm draws on biblical wisdom literature to offer a primer on organizational communication. Each chapter is followed by a short Mode Switch Workshop addressing questions such as how to survive the Zoom room, how to write an email that sounds like you, how to get unstuck when tools break down, and how to get people to do things--so you can, too. Even technologically disrupted organizations are more navigable than they feel--if you know how to switch up your modes of communication.

Craig E. Mattson is professor of communication at Calvin University, where he holds the Arthur H. DeKruyter Chair in Faith and Communication. He is the author of Rethinking Communication in Social Business (2018) and Why Spiritual Capital Matters (2021).