7 January 2026 by Mondo2.0

Digital Presenteeism: Always Available

The primary purpose of this blog is to anticipate and highlight some of the social changes brought about by the Internet. This is certainly the case with my 2015 article on smart working. In that article, I presented smart working as the ideal solution for balancing professional and personal life, quoting a couple of quotes:

It’s not just about relocating work, working from home, it’s about changing it, introducing new dynamic elements such as the ability to use videoconferencing tools or sharing documents and multimedia material via the cloud.

And again:

Smart working, or agile working, isn’t just beneficial for those who work in dynamic, itinerant environments—as managers, to be clear. In many cases, it also allows you to achieve a diametrically opposite goal: reducing travel and simplifying your lifestyle: traveling less, polluting less, working better.

The ability to work from home, avoid commuting, and independently manage one’s time represented an evolution toward a more humane and sustainable work model. An evolution I should point out, one I still deeply believe in today. It’s no coincidence that my article, so timely, concluded by highlighting a series of opportunities, all valid and reinforced by the events and working methods that have emerged in this decade:

..the opportunity to recruit people from elsewhere, the opportunity to hire competent people who cannot afford to make long daily commutes, the opportunity to dedicate one’s time and energy not to traffic but to one’s work, the opportunity to share the material produced instantly, the opportunity to pool one’s ideas “in real time”, the opportunity to create dynamic and transnational working groups based on the objective to be achieved.

The 2020-21 pandemic has effectively accelerated this digital communication journey, popularizing tools mentioned in my 2015 article, such as meeting platforms, chat, and the cloud. Today, it’s very difficult, almost impossible, in a dynamic work environment not to be familiar with tools like Teams, Google Meet, Zoom, OneDrive, Google Drive, or Dropbox.

These platforms have become the invisible infrastructure that supports contemporary work.

However, the rapid spread of remote working combined with the intense use of this new generation of digital tools has led to significant paradoxes. Self-learning and the lack of guidance during adoption have created a unique environment in which “everyone is using everything to the max” without a real awareness of the consequences.

We have rapidly moved from a distrust of these tools to a state of permanent overload, where the technology that was supposed to liberate us keeps us under constant pressure.

Any examples?

• A daily deluge of emails. Email has undergone a radical transformation. It’s not just a quantitative increase—many professionals receive between 50 and 200 emails a day—but a qualitative shift in their use. Emails are often misused for discussions that would otherwise require a direct conversation. The practice of copying numerous recipients, in an attempt to “cover” oneself or demonstrate transparency, generates endless chains where it becomes impossible to distinguish what requires immediate attention from what is purely informative. The result is a constant feeling of being inundated with communications, with the attendant anxiety of being unable to keep up or missing important information buried in the flow.
• The proliferation of online meetings. Video conferences, born as an efficient alternative to physical meetings, have increased exponentially. Not only are they more numerous, but they also tend to last longer: the absence of logistical constraints—no need to book a room or physically travel—makes it easier to schedule meetings lasting an hour or more for discussions that could be resolved in a few minutes. Furthermore, the technical ease of adding participants often leads to the inclusion of unnecessary participants, creating situations in which many passively listen to conversations that don’t directly concern them, and sometimes even do other things, but cannot disconnect for fear of appearing disinterested. This proliferation of online meetings erodes time for focused work, fragmenting the day into blocks too short to be productive.
• The ubiquity of connectivity. Round-the-clock access to email, chat, and the cloud is certainly an advantage, but even here, it has created significant side effects: we find ourselves checking emails while grocery shopping, replying to WhatsApp messages on the weekend, and participating in video calls on the go. Work is insinuating itself into every corner of daily life, eliminating those moments of transition and disconnection that once allowed the mind to rest, regenerate, and generate new ideas. The technical possibility of working anytime, anywhere has transformed into an implicit expectation of always being available.

These three factors have significantly changed the boundary between work and personal life, creating a condition of permanent availability that can generate stress, reducing the quality of both work and private life.

Even our homes have been transformed by new dynamics of online communication. The home, traditionally a place of rest, intimacy, and family relationships, has simultaneously become an office, a meeting room, and a productive space. These spaces risk losing their original identity and, with it, their ability to offer psychological refuge from work. A laptop open on the dining table can become a constant reminder of unfinished professional tasks, preventing the mental separation necessary for physical and mental recovery.

One of the most insidious aspects is the establishment of a culture of perpetual availability.

In the absence of visible signs of physical presence, workers feel the need to constantly demonstrate their availability. Often, I emphasize, they voluntarily feel this need, regardless of the demands and objectives set by companies and institutions, out of a simple, automatic need to frequently receive and respond to digital stimuli. Replying immediately to emails, being constantly online on Teams, and participating in all virtual meetings become ways to demonstrate their presence.

This is a true performative behavior in which the worker enters a “loop”: he acquires digital inputs, processes and shares them, receives feedback that generates new questions, responds by producing other stimuli that require further responses, in a never-ending spiral.

Another paradox is the coexistence of technological hyperconnection and social isolation. Video conferences replace face-to-face interactions, but they don’t replicate their quality. Informal conversations at the coffee machine, casual exchanges in the hallway, and the ability to sense colleagues’ moods through nonverbal cues are missing. Informal relationships in the workplace aren’t an “extra” but an essential component of workplace well-being. Their absence can lead to alienation and emotional disinvestment.

Digital work platforms and tools are designed to capture attention. Notifications and alert sounds exploit psychological mechanisms to keep us engaged. This attention economy applied to work fragments concentration. Every interruption, even if it lasts a few seconds, entails a cognitive cost of reorientation. The result is a day characterized by ineffective multitasking and the feeling of having accomplished nothing meaningful. Furthermore , the proliferation of different tools—email, chat, video conferencing, management tools—can generate cognitive overhead: mental energy spent not on substantive work but on managing the work infrastructure. This constant management of tools also becomes a performative behavior, where appearing up-to-date and technologically competent matters more than actual productivity.

To combat connection burnout, it is essential to artificially reconstruct the boundaries that the physical office naturally provided.

It is necessary to “simplify” without losing the digital benefits due to a smart approach and tools.

On a personal level, it’s important to separate work and home spaces whenever possible, or at least create symbolic markers. Establishing temporal rituals that replace commuting, such as a walk before and after work, can help mark the beginning and end of the workday. Turning off non-essential notifications and setting specific, explicitly communicated working hours are crucial practices.

Smart working represents a step forward and offers extraordinary opportunities, as described in 2015. The hope is that these tools will develop into mature use, so that in 2035 we can celebrate what this article envisions: a balance finally achieved between digital life, well-being, and productivity.

Mondoduepuntozero