Why does work feel so overwhelming, even when you’re getting everything done?

In this episode, leadership expert and bestselling author Liane Davey explains why the problem isn’t your workload—it’s your thought load: the hidden combination of cognitive demands, emotional burden, and depleted energy that makes work feel harder than it should.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why working harder won’t solve the problem of overwhelm
• The difference between workload and thought load
• How constant context switching and emotional stress drain your performance
• Why attention is your most valuable resource—not time
• A practical framework for prioritizing what matters most
• Simple strategies to reduce overwhelm, regain focus, and protect your energy

You’ll walk away with practical tools you can use immediately to feel less overwhelmed, improve your focus, and do your best work without burning yourself out.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/liane-davey

Buy Liane Davey’s new book, “Thoughtload”, subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, and join the PathWise membership community today at pathwise.io.

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Listen to the podcast here

Why You’re Overwhelmed At Work ( How To Fix It), With Liane Davey

A lot of us are feeling overwhelmed in our professional lives and a lot of times, we blame our workload for that. Too many meetings, too much email, and all the administrative work. The priorities that are constantly changing with unrealistic deadlines. What if workload isn’t the problem? What if the real issue is in how much work you have but everything that comes with it? The constant context switching is like multitasking. The emotional labor of managing up and down and sideways. The mental tabs that are probably still open as you’re trying to fall asleep at night.

If you’re a manager, the pressure of knowing that you’re accountable for your team success, but also knowing that you’re barely keeping your own head above water. Our guest Liane Davey argues that we’ve been diagnosing this all wrong. That it’s not about workload, but about something she calls thought load. The hidden combination of cognitive demands, emotional burden, and depleted energy. That’s the real killer performance.

If she is right, then working harder isn’t the solution. Working differently is. Liane is a New York Times bestselling author, leadership, advisor and someone who has spent decades inside teams trying to figure out why smart capable people so often feel stuck and burned out and ineffective. In her new book, Thoughtload, she offers a different lens in a very practical playbook for escaping the madness. We’re going to be challenging some deeply held assumptions about productivity and leadership and what it takes to do great work. I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions.

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Liane, thanks for joining me.

I’m so glad to be here, J.R. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

It’s nice to speak with a fellow page to offer. Your book is coming out in a few weeks. It’s called Thoughtload. Let’s get right into it. You make a key argument in the book that what’s over all of us isn’t our workload, but it is our thoughts. Explain the difference for us.

Workload is the effort that you put into producing outputs that are the key piece of your job. I sent the report. I got the signed contract or whatever. Thought load is much bigger than that. It’s everything other than the actual works. I call it an invisible tax on our performance. It comes from rising cognitive demands. Everything we have to pay attention to, so the work and everything else. Increasing emotional burdens because we’re living in an emotionally dysregulated society.

There’s a lot of emotional residues sitting on us and how we’re trying to do all of that with declining energy reserves. Workload is what you have to accomplish for your job. Thought load is what you have to cope with as not only an employee, but a human and all you carry with you. The problem is, the higher your thought load the harder it is to get through your workload.

It makes intuitive sense once you explain it that way. As I was reading the book, I was thinking about my most recent full-time experience. The workload was always high, but it became impossible, when you’re getting assaulted from all sides. Assaulted from vendors and employees. Not in a physical sense, to be clear. Assaulted from above, board, boss, all of those things.

When all of that is hitting here, it’s a lot harder to maintain that emotional regulation and the multiplier effect if you want to think about it in the way of thought load being a multiplier on workload. It goes from being like 1X to being like 10X. It makes it almost impossible to keep up with things because you’re never at your best and you’re constantly having to play defense on one of those things and the work is still there.

Exactly. You finally carve out an hour to make some meaningful progress, but the thought load is so high that you get distracted as you’re going or the emotional stuff is making you feel like, “Am I even up to doing this?” All of that means that hour doesn’t get you as much forward momentum as you hoped it would. You spend the next hour feeling crappy about the fact that you just wasted the last hour. It is a multiplier effect in a negative direction.

What was the moment where you had the a-ha about the idea of thought load?

There were two key spots. Before COVID, people kept asking me as a keynote speaker to talk about change management and I had this reaction. As a psychologist, our reaction to change has been the same for Millennia. Anyone who’s trying to tell you differently doesn’t understand how the brain works. I thought it was a little dull until I started looking at, not how the human reaction to change is any different but how change has changed in organizations.

Gartner released a study that was probably the first moment that showed that, in 2016, the average employee faced two enterprise level transformations each year. Only six years later, it had gone from 2 to 10. That’s the moment when I had my first realization that change has changed. We need to manage differently in this perpetual change than we did in our simpler era. That’s when I started thinking about how we have to manage our attention, our anxiety, and our energy.

The core of the thought load equation came then, but it was in front of a live audience, giving a keynote. Somebody asked a question at the end and said, “Isn’t our workload way too high to do this?” Live from the stage, I just came out with, “It’s not our workload that’s killing us. It’s our thought load.” As soon as I created the word live in front of an audience, the room went silent. All I could do was go, “Could somebody write that down?”

You probably wanted to run off the stage and go make a bunch of notes on it.

Those two pieces. First, I had to have this realization that change has changed and we need to manage ourselves in one another differently in perpetual change. Secondly, realizing that we’ve been putting way too much attention on workload and what we have to think about is our thought load. Those were the two pennies I had to drop before I was often running.

I have done a lot of transformations in my day. You do realize as you do more of them that it’s not just managing people through change like, “I have to do something differently than I did it yesterday.” It’s more of the human part of getting through that. Even for the project team themselves. They’ll be completely committed to the end state but when these things go on for months and months or even multiple years. The adage of, it’s a marathon. Not a sprint. It’s a little bit trite but, at the same time, it’s true.

I was giving a talk at a conference over in London on this very topic of, how do you manage the human element of these big transformation programs? That’s arguably the hardest part. It’s not technology. It’s not the process of change. It’s just bringing people in the project team and around the project team for the duration of that journey and keeping them engaged especially to your point. It’s like, “This follows the last change or it’s going on in parallel with three other changes.” It’s constantly changing. It’s hitting us all the time. It’s hard for people to keep up with that. That’s a big factor that’s hitting at this idea of thought load as well.

That changes the team, it’s their primary role. Think of all the people who are on the receiving end of the transformation and the thought load equation is terrible. A) You’re asking me to do this off the corner of my desk with a tenth of my attention. B) You’re probably not creating a forum for me to process the emotions that are coming up for me about whether this change is going to make me redundant or change my control or whatever else. You’re expecting me to just do this change after the last change and burning me out. It’s one thing for the team that’s central and focused on the transformation. If you think about everybody on the receiving end, it’s even worse. We’re amplifying this thought load effect in our organizations at our peril.

I agree. We talked a little bit about the three things you talk about in the book, the cognitive demands, the emotional bird and the energy depletion. Why is it so important to think about all of them in combination and not individually?

There’s a lot of people out there talking about each of them separately, but nobody’s talking about all three together. The reason is, and this is partly my husband and my business partner who’s a neuroscientist who helps me understand. That each of the three components, both amplify and exacerbate the others. I’ll give you a couple of science-based examples. As your energy reserves run out, particularly your frontal lobe, which is your executive functioning. Which runs out fairly quickly, because it burns a lot of glucose and releases a lot of glutamate.

Your frontal lobe goes offline fairly quickly. When it does, one of the first things to go is your ability to calibrate what should I pay attention to and what should I not. All of a sudden, the cognitive demands go up as you’re paying attention to everything. The next thing to go is your ability to differentiate between something that’s a social threat and something that was a sarcastic remark or whatever. As your energy goes down, your emotional burden and your cognitive demands go up.

Another interesting one is one of the most common emotional burdens for us as anxiety. Particularly anxiety about our workload and how much we have to get done. What we find is that, as your anxiety rises, you try to multitask. You increase your cognitive demands. As you multitask, your energy depletes faster and your productivity and your quality suffers. You’re doing that in the wrong direction. The reason you need to understand and try to tackle all three is that, if you only solve two of them, particularly if you try to ignore the emotional things. Our brains are very wired for fear to just take out everything else.

You could be building the nicest time management plan whatever else. If something hijacks you, because you’ve decided it’s a risk to your belonging in the group or whatever else. It doesn’t matter how great your time management plan was. That’s why we need to think about them because physiologically, each one of them amplifies and exacerbates the other so we have to deal with them together.

It’s especially hard for managers or leaders because they’re not only having to worry about themselves. They also have to worry about this for their teams. How do you help managers figure out even where to start with this?

The answer for managers is start with yourself because managers with a very high thought load, leave a very big week behind them. If you are struggling to know what to pay attention to and trying to juggle many balls. Your team is going to be looking to you for prioritization and they’re not going to find it. They’re just going to be looking at somebody who’s like, “It’s all important.” If you are emotionally triggered in some way, impatient, frustrated, or feeling demoralized, the emotional contagion from a manager to their team is incredibly potent.

You’re going to leave them just feeling deflated as well. Start with yourself as the answer and in starting with yourself, I encourage folks to start with focusing their attention. It’s hard to deal with the emotional stuff or to get your energy back if you haven’t zoomed in on what matters first. Start with your attention, then learn some of the emotional literacy that we don’t have so that you can process your emotions more quickly, then you can work on the energy.

Certainly, you can dabble in them all but the first thing is your attention. Once you’ve created some order in the chaos in your own head, then you’ve got a hope of going out and supporting your team. If you are leaving a big week behind you, both terms of priorities and emotional residue. There’s little hope you’re going to help your team.

A lot of people think that time is the most precious resource. I’ve certainly said that to my team again and again, but you make the point that it’s your attention. Time is limited. Attention is even more limited, which is what makes it more precious. You’ve got some great tips to help people think about how to focus themselves on what matters. Share some of those for us just to give our audience some practical takeaways.

I love it when we talk about time as if somebody magically has more than 24 hours a day. No time is fixed. We all have the same amount of time. What do you think about both your attention and your energy at that time? That’s what I was alluding to earlier. If you have one hour and you have that one hour with a low thought load, with real clarity on the most important thing you need to accomplish. With everything ready to go when you start the hour, with the things that are weighing on you parked for a time when you address them.

In that hour, with both strong attention and good energy, you will move through so much. You’ll get so much accomplished. I had this. I thought I had a meeting at 9:00 AM but it turned out it was 10:00. I sit down at my desk. I get my microphone ready. I’m all good to go. I open my calendar and see that I have an hour. Interestingly, I wasn’t ready to have an hour then. I didn’t know what’s the most important thing. I’m in the middle of a book launch. There are a million things I should be doing.

I didn’t know. I didn’t have focus. It was in the morning. I hadn’t gotten moving yet. I made very little use of that hour that could have been really meaningful. It’s figuring out, how do I have a clear quest? What is it that I have to accomplish? How do I have mise en place? How do I have everything ready so that when I start to work, I don’t have to open my email to find something? If you open your email to find something, I promise you something else is going to distract you or if you have to go on the web and search for something or whatever else. How do I do that?

How do I go in with clarity and remove the distractions? It’s not having the hour. We can usually make the hour. It’s what we make of the hour so that we get something meaningfully done. If that happens at the end of the hour, then also, you get this emotional lift. It’s like, “That feels amazing. I shipped that code. I sent that contract. I did the thing.” The next hour is going to have benefits. I always talk about it. If we have to do something hard, start on a downhill. If you’ve just had that hour, the next task is going to feel like you’re starting to go downhill. I got momentum here. Let’s go. Follow that energy. Time is not the issue. When you have the time, the same 24 hours as I have, how do you use it?

I was a CEO of an asset management company. At one point, that is thousands of people working for me. It’s a big role and I say that not to brag about it, but just put it in stark contrast to the life I’m living. My days there were very busy but they were also very programmed. You knew how certain pockets of your time were going to be used a day in advance, a week in advance and sometimes even longer in advance.

What I’m finding out that I’m doing my own thing is I got to figure out what every day looks like. I have found it much harder to be focused and much harder to get good use out of my time because there’s a million different things that I could be doing. I’ve literally had to block like, “I’m going to spend 30 minutes on this task. I’m going to spend an hour on this task.” That’s the only way that I am finding that I am able to get through things and to do them while and to feel like I’m productive.

Otherwise, I get to the end of the day and feel like I got pulled in fifteen different directions and I didn’t get anything done. That’s something I never felt to the same degree even running a big organization in a corporate job. That’s been a real learning for me over the past roughly a year that I’ve been doing this and I’m still learning, to be honest with you, about how to focus my attention and get as much out of those hours as I can.

I love that you’re being authentic about that because I feel every bit of it. This is year eleven for me in my owning business and I got to a pretty good point on being productive. All of a sudden, I ran into this massive very painful realization that while I was being incredibly productive, it was not effective. I realize that while I was patting myself on the back for creating a lot of output, that output wasn’t moving the needle on the things that I cared about. That was excruciating. For many years, I had written a blog every single week and I was so proud of myself. I would look down on the people who started a blog or a podcast and only did it for like seven weeks or whatever. You’re like, “Those people.”

I was so proud of myself for just churning it out but at some point, I said in 2026, is what people are looking for advice about achieving amazing things together. Are they looking in the same places? Do they need the same content? The answer was no. I was so proud of how productive I was and not asking the hard questions about but is that productivity in service of the ways I want to change the world? That’s the other thing.

If we can make the transition from focusing on activity to output, that’s good. That’s an improvement. Responding to a lot of emails never changes the world. It’s good if we get out of that and even harder shift because our world is incredibly focused on productivity and just not nearly focused enough on, is that productivity serving anything? AI is the greatest example of that. AI makes it easy to create a lot of schlock.

It’s not going to change anything. The good news for an entrepreneur is that, at some point, you go, “If I am clear on my quest in the world, on the outcomes I’m trying to create, maybe there’s a bunch of stuff I don’t need to do. Maybe I could have a better life while running this business.” It’s very interesting but I had to make the epic fail before I figured that one out the hard way.

All having to let go of a lot of things in terms of the way that we’ve done them in the past and AI is striving for that. It’s probably the single biggest factor at the moment, but it’s not the only one. That’s hard. If you’re a content creator, that world has changed tremendously in the last five years. You talk about activities, outputs and outcomes. You have to continue to focus on outcomes. Ultimately, if you’re an entrepreneur, your job is to bring revenue in for yourself and your company if there are others around you. It doesn’t matter how many likes you get or how many impressions you get or how many followers you have. None of that stuff. It’s all helpful.

Even there are places where getting views are not the views that are helpful. It can be vanity.

There are vanity metrics. People talk about that a lot in the creator space, but they’re vanity metrics in the corporate world as well. It’s easy to get drawn into them like, “I cleared my inbox out or I went to five meetings or I put out three articles on the corporate internet site,” or whatever the case may be. If you keep yourself focused on the things that matter then it will help Focus your attention. You have another framework that I thought that was helpful, this idea of the three priority lists.

When you have a high thought load, having a to-do list is a nightmare. First of all, because every time you look at it, it’s demoralizing. Secondly, because when your thought load is high, you tend to pick what to do off that list using a terrible criterion. Maybe that criterion is, which of those tosses are associated with the scariest person or like, “What’s the one I just wrote down? What’s the thing that just came into my inbox? I’ll just do that one.”

When we have a high thought load, having just one long to-do list isn’t helpful. If we can understand that most of us operate on three to-do lists at least for work, the first one is, what are the things I need to do to advance my quest? The thing that I’m here to accomplish. What’s the number one? Number two, and number three things I could do that will significantly progress the things that matter most? We all need that list. If you work in an organization, there’s a second list because we don’t live in Pollyanna world.

The second list is other people’s very important quests that they think I need to be a part of. Maybe you’re an expert in the automotive industry and your firm’s automotive account team wants you to come and be part of the team. That may be important and there’s a wide variety for us in cross-functional organizations and matrix organizations where you need number 1, number 2, and number 3 to-do list for ways you support other people.

We all have the third list, which is the side quests. I got to do the compliance training. I got to send my invoices. I got to book my trip. If all of those things are on the same list, it’s easy to just look and pick off things for all the wrong reasons. If you start with, “I need to be making sure that the things from my number one list get slotted into the calendar first.” The things from that side quest list get put in the lower value part of my week, they get put in between tasks or when I’m on hold with the help desk or whatever else. Three party lists, not one, makes a world of difference.

You can’t compare one versus the other. The thing that’s important that your boss has asked you to get done may not be the most important thing toward your outcomes. You still have to do it or the thing that your kid wants you to get done with them that night when you get home for work or whatever. Managing things and thinking about both, the different lists and also how you use your time and marry your time up with that I thought was helpful.

It’s also a great thing to be able to take your list to your manager. If your manager asks you to do something, just share, “It’s Wednesday. I haven’t made any headway yet on the things on my most important list. Where does that thing you’re asking me to do fit in? How do you want me to prioritize that?” When you’re managing it that way and you look accountable and take ownership of your time. That’s a constructive conversation to have with your manager.

Let’s talk a little bit now about the emotional aspect, the second of the three. You describe it as an invisible load. You also talked about the fact that people in the middle of the organization are arguably dealing with even more conflict because they’ve got to below, across, up, and at home. What advice do you give people to help them think about their own emotional load? Also, this issue that you talked about in terms of emotional contagion where a manager can infect their team for lack of a better way of saying it.

Maybe be infected by their team and all managers have that day. What we’re missing is emotional literacy in our society. The starting place in the book is to talk about some of the neuroscience of how this works. Which is that, an emotion is a pre-conscious physiological experience we have in our body. There are a lot of data on emotions. There’s lots to learn from emotions. They’re there to keep us safe and help us be effective in our environment. They are very different from our feelings, which are the cognitive stories and narratives that we come up with to rationalize what we’re experiencing in our body.

Most of us don’t know that. Therefore, most of us believe our feelings as if they’re true. We give them too much credit. We take too much stock in them and while emotions can get us lots of data, feelings get us lots of drama. That’s the first thing we need to understand. First of all, there’s no such thing as turning off your emotions at work because they are pre-conscious but the key thing is to interrupt that fiction weaving process of telling yourself this grand story why they made you upset and all these things that make us feel not in control of our own emotional experience of the world.

First of all, understanding that and learning a process to intercept the emotional experience. Learn from it. Interrogate it before it turns into some great fiction. That’s the first piece. Once we understand that’s what’s going on, to be more attuned to it going on in the people around us, so that if they’re having an emotional experience, we don’t unintentionally or unknowingly pick it up. That’s what happens in emotional contagion. You can feel the whole room go down. One person is feeling deflated and all of a sudden, you feel the whole room go down.

The book takes you through a process for, how do I notice the emotion? How do I extract the data from that emotion? What is that about? Where is it coming from? What is it exactly? What story am I telling myself that is reinforcing how I’m feeling about this and then to get to some action to make things better. Teaching people how to process their emotions more efficiently and then what to do if you’re seeing that from somebody else and how to prevent that from spreading to you.

Learning that emotional literacy of the difference between emotions and feelings and then learning how to process our emotions more quickly so that they don’t take us down or leave an emotional residue for the day or the week. That’s just sitting in our thought load. You bought real estate in our thought load. I’m just squatting here and I’m not leaving.

I love the story in the book where you were describing the snow storm and being mad at your husband for taking one of your shoveling turns because you thought that it meant he thought you were weak. He was just trying to be nice. You describe this as an example of the fiction that we tell ourselves about why something’s happening when it’s not true. One of the things I took away from that part of the book because the idea of pulling the thread. You talk about knowing your treasure. It would be great if you could help our audience understand this idea of how you get to the why that you’re feeling that thing and sometimes how it’s a multi-step approach.

As I was writing the book, I was trying to make the book what I described as buoyant. How do I make this something that for somebody who has a heavy thought load that it’s enjoyable to read. It feels like something that lifts you up or helps you get your head above water.

Enter self-deprecation.

There’s a lot to share with you about all my failures. We started with the night on its epic quest. When we got to the emotional section, I shared a story I’ve used for a long time, which is when the dragon is breathing fire, it’s because they’re protecting treasure. If you, on your noble quest, bump into a fire breathing dragon, do not do what we tend to do, which is build a wall of facts between us and the dragon. You’ll recall the email of April 2nd that said this and this or in policy 17.3 point range. That does not help when a dragon is protecting their treasure. All it does is build this wall. The dragon is still back there.

The idea is that the fire from the dragon is the emotion. They’re angry, yelling, crying or whatever it is. If that’s what you see, that’s not the important point. That’s just a good clue that, “Somehow I’m encroaching on their treasure. They feel a threat. They’re triggered and that’s what I’m seeing.” The key thing is, I talk about it as they’re on the other side of the moat trying to protect themselves and their treasure. You need to get them to open the drawbridge. What can you ask? What can you try and understand? What’s at stake for you here? How do you imagine this playing out? What mistake do you think we’re making?

These kinds of questions that get the dragons open the drawbridge and draw you the map to what the treasure is in this situation. What is it that they value? What’s precious to them that feels under threat with this conversation or this plan? Once we understand the fire breathing dragon metaphor, at some point, you stop and you go like, “Sometimes, I’m the dragon.” When we have that emotional reaction, something feels at risk and that’s how we protect ourselves. You can ask yourself the open drawbridge questions. What story am I telling myself that’s causing me to react this way? How am I seeing this playing out?

You can then ask other questions, like what else might be possible? What else could be going on here? As you come up with answers, share those answers with the room, “The reason that I just raised my voice there is, I’m imagining having to go back to my team and tell them that I wasn’t successful in advocating for our project. I’m feeling like that reflects poorly on me as a leader. They’re going to be upset with me.” Being candid in the room about what’s going on for you. Not in a way that’s like, “I’m so angry.” You’re not like losing your cool, but you’re doing the investigative work to figure out what’s the treasure going on, open the drawbridge and share with everybody else what’s going on.

It just creates a much more constructive conversation. I tell the story in the book of a real team, where they were trying to figure out which projects to cut because they needed to do a big budget cut. The leader was not engaging in the conversation very honestly or with integrity. He was trying to defend his thing and it was because this is what he was imagining. Having to go back to his team and tell them that three months of work was going to be wasted. When he finally was able to say, “This is what’s going on. This is why I’m not having this conversation.”

Honestly, everybody else came right to his rescue. It was like, “How do we help you? How do we support you in getting the right message back to your team?” It was amazing, because until then, everybody thought he was just being a dragon. Once they understood, “That’s meaningful treasure. We get it.” All of a sudden, they were on his side trying to problem-solve about how they did it. It makes a massive difference.

You got to know your own treasure. The more you can understand the things that are likely to trigger you in any situation, the better prepared you are. Also, when it happens, to know, “I got to do the work myself to figure out what’s this about and to get that into the conversation.” It’s amazing how different it is. Once I tell people about when the dragons breathe fire, it’s because they’re protecting treasure. They’ll tell me ages later, “That’s so helpful. I think about it so differently now.”

That’s a powerful metaphor and it works well. Let’s talk about the last one. I think about energy management, Tony Schwartz. That’s how I was introduced to this. His firm came and did a training program when I was working at Fidelity many years ago. Help us understand where that fits into this equation of thought load and how you can manage your energy in a practical sense.

The top of the thought load equation is the cognitive demands in the emotional burdens, that’s the load. I’m sure you can think of a day where you were carrying a heavy load no sweat. You’re like, “I got this>.” You’re well rested and in a good place.

That was 1988.

It was a great year, but then you can probably think of another day where even something that wasn’t very heavy loaded at all just felt too much because you were depleted. That’s how energy factors into the equation. There’s three things I talked about. We take our night and we get them past the fire breathing dragons, and now they have to figure out how to fill their chalice. How do I fill my cup? How do I make sure I have the energy to keep going?

There’s three things. One, how do I find waterfalls to fill my cup from? How do I get flow into my week? Work that matters or work I’m interested in. Chunks of time where I am able to work unimpeded, undistracted. Finding waterfalls, but also finding wells. I have an assessment tool that I share with folks on the website that allows them to figure out what is your unique brand of overwhelm. We have people who are overwhelmed and become whirlwinds just like acting to feel busy. We have other people who become sticklers who just go back to the rules because that makes them feel like things are a little more predictable.

There’s four different styles. Knowing which one you are helps you understand what’s the well you can dig deep and find energy from. Whether that be planning and order or physical activity. Maybe you’re a rogue and you can deal with your overwhelm and build your energy by connecting with others more socially. It’s understanding that. When you can’t find a waterfall, you at least can tap a well of energy that you have. The third and final piece is, if your cup has cracks in it, no matter how much you’re doing to try and restore your energy. It’s not going to help.

Figure out what’s in your week. Are there a bunch of meetings in your week that are cracks in your cup? Are there relationships that are toxic? Are there conflict depths you have that because you’re trying to work around that conflict that you’re burning a lot of extra energy? Thinking about, what are my waterfalls, what are my wells and how do I make sure to fix the drains so that my energy becomes a renewable resource instead of what it feels like now. It feels like we’re burning fossil fuels in this finite energy like I got no more left. Humans are the ultimate renewable energy machines if we treat our machines well.

There’s a ton of things in the book, Liane. You did a great job of being practical and being buoyant. There’s a lot that people can take away individually for organizations and the leaders of those organizations. What message would you want to leave them with in terms of how they can better create the conditions for success to ease this following burden that’s endemic around organizations?

I would say stop managing workload and start managing thought load. Managing workload is not enough anymore. If you don’t know what’s in your team’s thought load, that could be tasks coming from parts of the matrix in the side door and the back door that you didn’t know about. Also, what are the stresses they’re experiencing or what are the things that are burning them out. Manage for thought load. Not workload. If we take one example. AI is that great example.

Whereas chatbots and agentic AI may be wonderful for their workload, the research is showing it’s hard on thought load. If you’re going to integrate AI into people’s workflow, great. We need to understand how it affects their cognitive demands, where it creates emotional triggers and makes people less productive instead of more. A lot of AI sends you off in multiple directions. How is it burning our energy? Is it doing it wisely? As leaders manage for thought load, not just workload. You will find you get so much more creative work, more innovative, more collaboration, and just so much less stress. It’s a positive thing when we can make that switch.

It’s easier said than done.

It is.

A lot of organizations and leaders are so output focused. They’re so financially driven. Taking that step back, even since the end of the COVID pandemic feels like we’ve taken a big step back and having this wellness, emotional health conversation that we are having in spades in 2020 because people view it as a distraction. They want to ignore it because it doesn’t help them hit quarterly goals. That’s unfortunate because we’re trying a lot of people.

I do think the way you said it is true. We’re focused on outputs and burning people out may get us lots of output. I’m quite convinced it does not get us the outcomes that we want. Those short-term measures that we’re using may look healthy but the long-term measures aren’t. I don’t even need a leader to believe that someone’s thought load is intrinsically meaningful.

If you want Innovation, sustained performance, or a great customer experience, all of those things, I promise you that managing thought load is essential to getting the outcomes you want. It’s when we’re stuck in this productivity trap of thinking the more we churn out, the more effective we are as a corporation. That’s why we’re stuck.

That’s a big part of why we’re stuck, too. Thank you. Thanks for doing this. As I mentioned at the outset, your book Thoughtload is going to be out by the time this episode airs. People will be able to buy it right then and there and benefit from it. Thanks for writing about it.

I needed to read it and I needed to live it. I’m constantly managing my own thought load, too.

Thank you again.

—

A terrific discussion with Liane. What I want you to take away from what we talked about, first and most importantly, is this idea that what is consuming you, what is overwhelming you is not just your workload. It is your thought load, which plays a multiplicative effect on top of your workload. This idea of cognitive switching is like multitasking, the emotional burden that we’re all carrying either because of things going on at home or at work and depleted energy. Which is definitely a crisis in the United States if not elsewhere. All of these things contribute in a multiplicative way to the work that you’re doing. It’s not just the tasks on your plate.

The second thing, as we’re talking about cognitive load. Attention is your most valuable resource. We talk a lot about time and time is definitely very valuable, but you’ve got to make sure that you are using your time well. You can use your time poorly. If you’ve got attention, it means you are using your time better. By definition, you will be more productive and more effective. We then talked about emotional load. That is a big part of the job. We are all carrying a lot. We’re always carrying a lot, whether it’s driven from things going on at home or at work.

If you’re a manager, you’re carrying that from your team and potentially contributing to their thought load because you are bringing your emotional burden and creating this sense of contagion to them in addition to them doing it to you. Finally, is this idea of energy being a huge performance lever. It’s how you manage both the things that bring you in energy and the things that deplete your energy. You have to constantly keep enough gas in the tank. If you’re not doing enough things that bring you energy and you’re doing a lot of things that deplete it. You’re just going to burn yourself out. You’re not going to be able to have attention. You’re not going to be able to handle the emotional aspects of your job.

All these things are related. Again, a terrific discussion with Liane. Her book. Thought load is available. If your interest has been piqued by this conversation, please go buy the book. Thanks for tuning in. I invite you to subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and YouTube and any of the other platforms that are available. If you found this discussion enlightening, sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and subscribe to our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

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About Liane Davey

Liane Davey is an Organizational Psychologist, CEO advisor, and sought-after keynote speaker with more than 25 years of experience researching and advising teams on how to perform at their best. Known as the “teamwork doctor,” she works with teams from the frontlines to the boardroom, across industries and around the world, from Boston to Bangkok. Through her work with hundreds of teams, including 26 Global Fortune 500 companies (and counting), she has developed a practical, research-backed approach to solving the challenges that prevent teams from working effectively together.

Liane is a New York Times bestselling author of You First: Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done, The Good Fight: Use Productive Conflict to Get Your Team and Organization Back on Track, and her forthcoming title, Thoughtload: Manage the Madness and Free Your Team to Do Great Work (Page Two, May 2026). Her work focuses on increasing productivity, strengthening engagement, developing leaders, and helping teams navigate conflict in healthier, more effective ways.