Gabriela Nguyen

Work-life balance is a high priority for Gen Z and other workers. But most businesses haven’t caught up. Gabriela Nguyen says that the companies that proactively shape digital communication boundaries and show respect for workers’ lives will gain happier employees and, ultimately, better work.

In this talk tailored to corporate audiences, Gabriela draws on her own experience as a Gen Z employee and now as a founder running her own team. She shares a fresh perspective on our youngest workers and citizens, showing businesses why the way they use tech might be creating a culture of “work-creep,” and how to change that to increase employee commitment to the company and culture. And she shows audiences why trying to get ahead on social media is actually setting businesses back (and why this represents an opportunity for leaders who are willing to think differently from the competition). In this new era of work, she says, the most forward-thinking organizations may not be the ones adding more digital tools, but the ones most adept at creating low- or no-tech systems that support creative work, meaningful relationships, and loyal employees.

Technology touches every part of modern life, but too many of us feel like we have no control over how it impacts our personal, professional, and internal lives. Gabriela Nguyen has a solution: opt out of addictive technologies, and make sure the tech in our lives works for us.

As the founder of the “appstinence” movement, Gabriela has developed a robust framework for reclaiming your relationship with technology and using it to support your own priorities. Developed with her team at the Harvard Innovation Labs, her 5D method helps audiences not simply subtract persuasive technologies, but replace them with the things they actually want: time with family, passionate hobbies, meaningful work, and deeper relationships.

In this personal, practical talk, Gabriela explains what appstinence is and why your brain and social and professional lives benefit from it. She walks you through the 5D method, drawing on her own experience becoming appstinent and coaching other people to do the same, and leaves you better able to deal with the nagging feeling that you don’t have a good relationship with your phone (and the apps on it). Audiences leave with a more hopeful framework for digital wellbeing and a path towards greater attention and agency.

Students are facing rising mental health challenges at the same time that smartphones, apps, and digital tools have become inseparable from campus life. Gabriela Nguyen argues that universities can address the mental health crisis from day one: by treating students’ relationship to technology as part of their education, not as a problem students are left to solve on their own.

As a member of Gen Z growing up in Silicon Valley, Gabriela has been at the front lines of hyper-digitization and the fight to make technology work for us. Drawing on her experience going through college during the pandemic, as well as her work experimenting with screen-free classrooms at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Gabriela explores how media literacy and intentional technology use can help students protect their attention, mental health, and ability to learn. She also shows how professors and administrators can create screen-free or low-tech learning environments without ignoring students’ needs around disability, parenting, and access. “Giving professors and students agency over their attention creates a jointly curated learning environment that benefits everyone,” she says. This talk is a must-listen for anyone looking to help students learn and thrive in an increasingly digital world.