Glossary What is Digital Debt?
By null / 1 Jan 2024 / Topics: Digital transformation
Digital debt is when knowledge workers are overburdened by the need to address, process and respond to emails, instant messages, application notifications and other data. Digital debt is the result of growing workloads and the increasing pace of work expectations. Employees don’t have enough time and energy to effectively address all the new information that grows each day — putting them in a digital debt.
Having too many ongoing projects, large teams, ineffective meetings and more can increase digital debt. Unchecked digital debt can harm productivity that drives innovation and growth by taking away an employee’s time to focus on completing tasks and experiencing deep work.
Addressing digital debt
Efforts to reduce digital debt can give employees more time back in their day to focus on projects that drive revenue and contribute to the business. Cultural changes, such as training employees to have valuable meetings and establishing focus times, can be helpful in reducing digital debt. However, the sheer amount of information being generated combined with the individual nuances of each teammate’s role in an organization can impact the effectiveness of these tactics.
Adopting generative AI tools is increasingly identified as an effective way to efficiently reduce digital debt. AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard and Microsoft 365 Copilot can be used to summarize content, draft responses, develop to-do lists and more. These capabilities can make quick work of overloaded email inboxes and large troves of information that a knowledge worker may have to address on a day-to-day basis, which can lead to more undisturbed hours in the day and more valuable stretches of productivity time.
