Work has never felt heavier. Teams are logging longer hours, juggling endless demands, and still struggling to keep up. Productivity is stalling, stress is peaking, and burnout is becoming the norm. If you’re thinking, “This isn’t sustainable,” you’re right.
But here’s the twist: it’s not the workload that’s wearing people down — it’s their thoughtload. The invisible tax on our ability to perform.
In a recent article for Fast Company, Liane Davey, an expert on building effective teams and increasing leadership effectiveness, explored this phenomenon.
“Cognitive research finds a key link between working memory and performance,” she writes. “What separates peak performers isn’t just effort, but also the discipline to balance their mental load. In other words: their ‘thoughtload.’”
The Three Forces of Modern Thoughtload
Thoughtload shows up in three compounding ways: the mental strain of competing priorities, the emotional toll of uncertainty, and the chronic exhaustion that makes even simple tasks feel hard.
When it runs high, even skilled, driven people fall short of their potential. Elite performers understand this — sustained performance isn’t just about working harder; it’s about protecting the mental space to do your best work.
How to Reduce Your Thoughtload
So how do you begin to reduce your own thoughtload? Liane outlined four strategies that can help.
1. Flip Your Focus
Too often, we start our day with our inbox and calendar, letting them dictate our priorities. Liane recommends flipping that script and beginning our days with the outcome you’re being rewarded for, such as sales outcomes. Then identify the few outputs that will move the needle and get you there.
2. Budget Your Attention
At work, we routinely let competing demands pull us away from the things that matter most, Liane writes. Think of your attention as a finite budget. Start by identifying one critical outcome and deciding how much of your focus it truly deserves. Then allocate what’s left across other important priorities and a few pursuits that simply energize you. Everything else gets deferred, declined, or delegated.
3. Use an Emotion Track
Even with clear focus, distractions can come from within. A missed target, a tense exchange, an unwelcome piece of feedback — emotions are unavoidable. But unprocessed ones quietly slow you down.
“You can reduce the hold of your feelings with an emotion track,” Liane writes. This helps pinpoint and reroute distracting emotions.
An emotion track consists of four simple steps:
- Place: Where are you feeling it? Pressure in your chest, a racing heart, butterflies?
- Name: What are you feeling? Frustration, anxiety, disappointment?
- Question: What story are you telling yourself about it? Question it. Why are you feeling that way and is it rational?
- Act: Choose one action that would help move you forward. That could mean addressing the issue head-on or stepping back to reset your headspace.
4. Hold an Energy Audit
Our energy is finite, but at work we often treat it as unlimited — until it suddenly runs out. Energy management isn’t about indulgence, it’s about making the right investments, so you have the physical, mental, and emotional energy when you need it most, Liane writes.
Back-to-back meetings, cascading deadlines, new initiatives launched before the last ones have landed. The fatigue accumulates quietly — and poor decisions follow.
Try an energy audit: write down three things that consistently energize you and three that consistently drain you. Then make small, deliberate shifts in both directions. Minor adjustments made over time can make even a heavy thoughtload feel far more manageable.
Help Your Team Work Lighter and Perform Better
Thoughtload management is crucial to sustaining high performance. In her keynotes, Liane introduces a radical reframe of what’s really driving burnout and disengagement. With groundbreaking research, sharp insight and relatable stories, she unpacks the three forces that make up the modern thoughtload and offers practical tools to lighten the lift, including how to reclaim focus, recognize and regulate emotional triggers, and tap into renewable sources of energy.
Contact us to learn more about Liane and how to book her to speak at your next event.
