Guard against thoughtload, the silent tax on your performance

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Toronto psychologist and executive coach Liane Davey says it’s not your workload that is overwhelming you. It’s your thoughtload.

Thoughtload is the cognitive demands on you plus your emotional burdens, divided by energy reserves. “Thoughtload is a silent tax on your performance and productivity,” she writes in her new book, Thoughtload.

She advises reducing your overall burden by tackling your divided attention because without that under control you stand no chance of taming emotions or restoring energy. She suggests a four-pronged approach:

• Chase outcomes, not outputs: If you are focused on the many activities before you – for example, meetings, preparing research reports and writing emails – she says you will merely become a busy person. If you switch your focus to outcomes, however, you will be a productive person. “Outcomes are the changes you are creating in the world. The results. The things you can’t control directly but are ultimately what determine whether you’re successful: A signed contract, a reduced accounts receivable balance, a shift toward higher-priced products, a highly engaged team, an increase in web traffic, a more confident board of directors or a reduction in clicks on phishing emails,” she writes. You need to know the important outcomes associated with your job and the outputs that drive those outcomes, rather than frantically tackling the many activities piling up before you daily.
• Make three priority lists, not one to-do list: Your most important outcomes and associated outputs go on the first list. The second list are activities others are counting on you to deliver. The third list are activities that are table stakes for an organization to keep running: Time sheets, monthly reports and the like. By their very nature, those separate lists help you to understand how to better organize your time. But in addition, on each you want to prioritize items according to importance, whether you are the only person that can handle it and urgency.
• Schedule in slots: There’s no point in putting your tasks in categories if you don’t also sensibly manage the time slots in which you put them. First should be time you carve out for deep focus, when your energy and creativity is at its peak, and you are best able to handle the vital items on your first list. A second category is connect and collaborate time, when you are still relatively efficient and effective, and can devote your attention to the items on your second list, which involve collaborating and delivering for others. “For me, this slot is in the afternoons from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. I’m still cogent at that hour, but not creative,” she says. The final category is tidy and tend time, when she says “you’re one notch above drooling on the desk,” good enough for the keep-the-lights on activities.
• Protect your focus: As well, you need to reduce time spent in low-value meetings, limit the intrusion of digital notifications and human interruptions and plan for how you will generally move on from disruptions when they happen.

Emotions happen. But they add to your daily thoughtload toll, so you must watch for and regulate emotions. Learn to process them. Understand what triggers you and how to combat the stories your inner critic conjures up. “Ask yourself: ‘Why does this bother me?’ Don’t stop at the first answer – keep asking ‘why’ until you get to a deeper belief or need,” she says.

She urges you to understand your personality better so you can tap into renewable energy resources. If you are a social person, the best way to fill your cup is to connect with someone and talk things through. Active personalities should get up and get out – walk fast, allowing the movement to unscramble your brain and recording notes in an app on your phone. Orderly types handle overwhelm by building systems. Creative types might doodle in a notebook, turning notions into works of art.

Together those tips combat excessive thoughtload by better handling cognitive and emotional demands and allowing you to harness your energy more effectively.

Quick Hits

• In The No Club, a team of academics urged women to avoid being swallowed up by non-promotable tasks, low-value work that somebody must do yet doesn’t lead to career advancement. But executive coach Yue Zhao points out that some of those tasks can still build your relationships and influence, as others reciprocate for you helping them and living up to their expectations. So before automatically saying no, think of whether you want to build influence with the asker and whether fulfilling the request helps on that score.
• Two lessons productivity writer Laura Vanderkam has learned from tracking her time over the years: She is very productive, getting a lot done in the hours she works, and she wastes a lot of time, scrolling or otherwise puttering around. Time is vast, she says, and there may be limits to how many hours she can productively work, so she is accepting of the fact she mixes productivity with wasting time.
• Chase your dreams, advises author James Clear. It’s unlikely they will play out exactly as you expect, but they know the way.

Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.