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It's Not the Workload, It's the Thought Load with Dr. Liane Davey

The Remarkable Leadership Podcast · 2026-07-01 · 34 min

0:00--:--

Key moments - from our scoring

Substance score

49 / 100

Five dimensions, 20 points each

Insight Density10 / 20
Originality9 / 20
Guest Caliber13 / 20
Specificity & Evidence10 / 20
Conversational Craft7 / 20

Dr. Liane Davey, organizational psychologist and author of Thought Load, distinguishes between workload and thought load - the latter being the crushing combination of cognitive demands, emotional dysregulation, and depleted energy reserves that plagues modern knowledge workers. The episode dissects why thought load has become worse than ever: technology fractures attention (the average North American worker toggles between 1,200 screens daily), emotional outrage farms and societal anxiety drain emotional reserves, and matrix organizations with multiple Slack channels, committees, and stakeholder groups create fragmented attention. Davey explains how multitasking, driven by anxiety about to-do lists, paradoxically increases stress and creates depressive symptoms while reducing actual output. The conversation pivots to practical solutions for leaders: creating 90-minute flow blocks for deep work, identifying personal energy wells (fiction, exercise, relationships), and plugging energy leaks - wasteful meetings, draining relationships, ignored health issues. Critically, Davey warns that leaders amplify thought load across their teams by failing to establish true priorities (not just multiple "priorities"), denying the legitimacy of emotions at work, and celebrating productivity (output volume) over effectiveness (outcomes that matter). The episode positions energy renewal as a competitive advantage, comparing knowledge workers to high-performance athletes who obsess over recovery and rest.

Key takeaways

  • →Thought load - rising cognitive demands plus emotional dysregulation plus depleted energy - not raw workload is driving burnout and declining productivity.
  • →Multitasking alleviates immediate anxiety but leaves you more anxious, more behind, and burning energy faster; creating protected 90-minute flow blocks restores both output and psychological wellbeing.
  • →Leaders must shift from rewarding activity and productivity (volume of output) to measuring effectiveness (outcomes that actually move the business needle).
  • →Energy is a renewable resource, not a finite tank; protecting it through breaks, personal wellsprings (reading, exercise), and plugging energy leaks is a performance multiplier, not a luxury.
  • →The biggest leadership mistake is failing to establish true priorities (the Latin singular concept) and treating emotions as obstacles rather than data, which pushes thought load underground into covert resistance and passive aggressiveness.

Guests

Dr. Liane Davey

Topics in this episode

Leadership communicationMatrix organizationsThought loadMultitasking mythFlow state and deep workEnergy renewal and recoveryEmotional dysregulationPriorities versus urgencyProductivity versus effectivenessCognitive demands and attention fragmentation

Questions this episode answers

What is the difference between workload and thought load?

Workload is just the tasks you do; thought load is workload plus all rising cognitive demands (1,200 screens, notifications, kids reaching you all day), emotional burdens (outrage, anxiety, existential dread), and declining energy reserves. Thought load is the treacherous triad that's actually killing productivity and morale.

Why does multitasking make anxiety worse even though people do it to manage anxiety?

Multitasking starts as an anxiety response to a long to-do list, but it slows you down, creates more errors requiring rework, depletes energy faster, and makes you feel like you're spinning your wheels - all of which increases anxiety and can mask depression.

How can leaders stop transferring thought load to their teams?

Leaders must establish true priorities (not multiple "priorities"), extract data from emotions instead of denying them, and model energy renewal through breaks and personal wellsprings instead of celebrating exhaustion as a badge of honor.

What are the three ways to restore energy according to Dr. Davey?

Fill your cup from waterfalls (90-minute uninterrupted flow blocks), tap into your wells (identify your personal energy source and protect time for it), and plug the cracks (eliminate energy-draining meetings, relationships, and ignored health issues).

Why is the shift from productivity to effectiveness important?

You can produce a lot of output (especially with AI) without moving the needle on the business outcomes that matter; celebrating volume without questioning impact leads to wasted energy and false progress.

What our scoring noted

Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.

Insight Density

10 / 20

The episode offers a handful of genuinely non-obvious points - multitasking triggering depressive symptoms, the emotional anxiety loop that drives it, and the AI-as-cognitive-offloading risk - but much of the runtime is filler, affirmation, and familiar advice about sleep, breaks, and prioritisation that most B2B operators have already heard.

multitasking is creating mental health challenges that can, in the short term, even mask or mirror depression
the word priority is Latin for first. 500 years the word priority existed in the language without a plural

Originality

9 / 20

The 'thought load' framing - a treacherous triad of cognitive demands, emotional burden, and depleted energy - is a modestly fresh organising lens, but the individual arguments (multitasking is bad, urgency vs. importance, breaks improve performance, emotional contagion from managers) are well-worn, and the episode does not push any of them to a truly counterintuitive conclusion.

it's not the workload that's killing us, it's the thought load
where I'm feeling anxious about how Long our to do list is. So it starts with an emotional reaction. The response to that is to try and divide our attention

Guest Caliber

13 / 20

Davey is a credentialled organisational psychologist with 25+ years of field work and a NYT-bestselling back catalogue, giving her legitimate practitioner standing; however she operates primarily as a keynote speaker and author rather than an operator who has scaled a business, which caps the ceiling on practitioner-level depth.

I have walked around the world, uh, with this organizational psychology, both lens and toolkit, in my backpack for about 30 years now
Each morning at 7am I get the daily command center and I've built into it what my goals are and what matters. I've even built in some of my foibles and what mistakes I'm likely to make

Specificity & Evidence

10 / 20

A handful of concrete figures add credibility - 1,200 screens toggled per day, 11-minute interruption window, 2 - 5% genuine multitaskers, Microsoft EEG break research - but most are passed on without source attribution, and the practical prescriptions (fill your cup, find your wellspring) stay at a metaphorical rather than empirical level.

the average North American employee has to toggle between 1200 different screens every day
The average person can only go 11 minutes without their work being interrupted

Conversational Craft

7 / 20

The host is agreeable throughout, frequently echoing the guest's points rather than probing them, and never challenges a claim or asks for evidence; the few moments where he adds perspective (urgency vs. priority, break-scheduling practice) are useful but do not amount to genuine intellectual pressure.

100%. That's a great list of stuff. I mean a great list of stuff to not do.
I love that. So.

Conversation analysis

Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.

Share of words spoken

  • Speaker A63%
  • Speaker B37%

Most-used words

load29energy19attention15problem14book13three13teams12back12first10question10trying10meeting9sense9minutes9world8second8

Episode notes

How much of your team's struggle is really about the work and how much is about everything else? In this episode, Kevin talks with Dr. Liane Davey about why the real challenge many teams face isn't simply workload, but "thought load". Liane defines this as the rising cognitive demands, emotional burdens, and depleted energy reserves that make work feel heavier than it may appear. She explains how multitasking, constant urgency, oversized meetings, unclear priorities, and poor energy habits quietly drain performance and create more rework, stress, and burnout. She also shares practical ways leaders can help, including replacing urgency with true priority, creating space for focused work, taking real breaks, managing emotions rather than ignoring them, and modeling healthier boundaries. Listen For 00:00 Introduction & today's topic: thought load vs. workload 01:38 Introducing Liane Davey, the "Teamwork Doctor" 02:48 Why Liane wrote Thought Load 04:01 The big idea: it's not workload, it's thought load 05:31 Why this problem is bigger now than ever 09:13 The myth of multitasking 11:42 Sense of urgency vs. sense of priority 13:19 Busy vs. productive vs.

Full transcript

34 min

Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: M. You want to do great work. Your team wants to do great work. Even hearing those statements, there is tension. The tension between great work and maybe more work. My guest today says that the workload isn't the real problem. That our problem is the thought load we carry and even our and even transferring that thought load to others. That is our focus today. So welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Leadership podcast where we are helping organizations and their leaders grow and lead more effectively to make a bigger difference across their teams, communities and the world. If you are listening to this podcast, you could join us on a live stream in the future on your favorite social media channel. You can find out when those live episodes are happening so you can interact and learn these valuable ideas and insights sooner. And you can do that by joining our Facebook or LinkedIn groups. Just two of the platforms where these are live streamed. Just go to remarkablepodcast.com facebook or remarkablepodcast.com LinkedIn and if you do that, you can get in the know. Be ready to go and join us and get this information sooner. If you like what you're hearing today, uh, and want help in developing the leaders in your organization, we should probably talk and you can reach out, uh, to me and get to me@infoevenikenberry.com and we'll schedule time to learn more about your needs and share how we might be able to help. And with that, I'm going to bring in my guest and I'm going to introduce her and then we're going to dive in to what you really came for, uh, which is to get uh, some new insights. So, uh, my guest today is Leanne Davey. She is an organizational psychologist, a CEO advisor and a 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 front line to the boardroom, across industries and around the world. Through her work, hundreds of teams, uh, with hundreds of teams, she has developed a practical research based approach to solving the challenges that prevent teams from working effectively together. She 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 new book, thought load, manage the madness and free your team to do great work. That will be our focus today. And Leanne, welcome.

Speaker A: Thanks Kevin. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker B: So, uh, we should probably start with, you know, you've written other books and all that sort of thing. And I'm curious why this one? Like, why did you decide or what was the prompter to you to write this book?

Speaker A: Yeah, so the easiest answer is because I needed to read it. But. But I would say, uh, that, you know, which is why most nonfiction authors, I think, write the books.

Speaker B: If they're honest.

Speaker A: Yeah, they're honest. Right. I was really struggling with my thought load, and every one of my clients, this is what they were struggling with. And so the. Really, the. The most succinct answer is because I have walked around the world, uh, with this organizational psychology, both lens and toolkit, in my backpack for about 30 years now. And, you know, about every six or seven years, there's a new problem that I see wearing that lens and that I think I can help with with that toolkit. And. And this was the one. So, uh, it's been a few years of making sure that I understood the problem well, both, you know, from the research and in the field. And then it was time to. Let's get this out there. People need help with their thought load.

Speaker B: So, uh, we'll get to what thought load is. It's probably partly the same question, but the question is, what is the big idea here?

Speaker A: Yeah, the big idea is that we are, you know, our productivity is plateauing and declining for human productivity, for the most part, um, we're seeing levels of engagement as low as they've ever been, levels of burnout and stress and even heart attacks and stroke and all these things as high as they've ever been. But we keep zeroing in on claiming that it's a workload problem. It's because we're doing too much work. And the big idea is it's not the workload that's killing us, it's the thought load. And that's where we probably have to define the difference. Thought load is sort of everything. The work plus everything. So, um, one, the rising cognitive demands. Just the gajillion things from both work and home that you have to pay attention to that are dragging on your attention at every moment. Plus, if only it, uh, were just how much we have to pay attention to. But we also have these emotional burdens. We're living in a really emotionally dysregulated society. So we have all of that roller coaster. That's the load. And unfortunately, we're carrying that load with depleted energy reserves. So that's the treacherous triad of thought load. Rising cognitive demands, increasing emotional burdens, and declining energy reserves. And that's what we all feel like at the moment, I think.

Speaker B: So that's what we're going to talk about. Uh, those sort of, sort of the combination of those three things, uh, over the next little bit. So from, from your perspective, um, and you've sort of said this, but I'd like you to dive a little deeper. Like why is this a bigger problem now than ever?

Speaker A: Yeah. So if you take each of the three pieces. So you know, why is it such a big problem that our attention is being diluted? Well, um, technology has done a number on our attention and it turns out there are lots of people in the world who profit from stealing our attention. So you know, partly it's the, you know, the phones and the notifications and the technology. It's the tech stack we have to work with. So the average North American employee has to toggle between 1200 different screens every day. Um, plus it's, it's like all of the things competing for our attention. Our, our kids can reach us all day, every day. Now my, my parents, I could never reach my parents during the day. Um, so, so that's one piece of the puzzle. Second piece of the puzzle is that emotionally dysregulated society goes back to the same theme, which is there are a lot of people who make more money when we're outraged, when we're upset, when something is triggering. And so like the amount of people in uh, you know, other countries in farms putting outrage farms, just making sure that people are getting comments or things in their feed to freak them out. Plus real things, existential dread over the climate or wars that are happening or you know, all of those sorts of things. So there's a lot going on there. Plus at home we're raising the most socially anxious generation of children ever. Um, and then on the energy reserve side, it's just a lot to do with terrible habits. We're putting ultra processed food into our body, which does not actually give our brains the fuel they need. We're doing terribly on sleep often because we're sleeping beside those little machines that are, you know, competing for our attention. So it's really a whole bunch of reasons. I think in organizations a big thought load driver is the Matrix organization. You know, we used to work in a small team and we had our job and we had our five or six teammates and it was all very kind of focal and controlled. Now we're in our seven slack channels coping with our priorities and, and you know, seven other for, you know, committees were in or account teams. We have to be a part of or um, so it's all of this. The amount that is getting into our thought load every day is higher than it has ever been.

Speaker B: Yeah. I think it's really an amplification. Right. Like, uh, in each of the three areas, there's. There's always been stuff there. I think the thing here is the amplification. That's, that's. That's the key. And one of the things that you say in the book, uh, it's an. You talk about the fact that this thought load stuff is hidden, and you call it a hidden drag on sort of everything. Uh, and certainly in terms of a drag, as I framed it and as your subtitle frames it as a drag on getting great work done, accomplishing great work. So. And I'm pretty confident that anyone who's watching us or listening to us, you know, wants to do great work. I mean, I think most people do, but certainly if people are choosing this to use some to. For some of their time, that they want to do great work. And so, uh, and I think that, you know, this resident is probably resonating with people. And I wanted to say, Leanne, that I hoped it was resonating. I really hope it's not resonating. Which means it's not a problem for you.

Speaker A: That's true.

Speaker B: I think the reality is it probably is. So, um, I. I want to kind of get into each of these areas a little bit. Yeah. And just dive into a few things that I thought were. Were interesting. Um, and I have been teaching people and talking about multitasking for a long time that multitasking is a myth. And yet I'd like you to. And I'm always surprised that although it's getting less true, that generally speaking, anytime I bring it up, you get a bunch of people raise your hand, say, I'm really good at that. I'm really good at that. Almost with pride. Um, that's getting a little less true. Uh, but I'd like your take on multitasking specifically as it relates to how it's actually furthering this problem. We think it's helping us. It's actually hurting us.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I'd say the research suggests about 2 to 5% of people can do it. So maybe that if you have 10 hands go up in the room, just give them a like.

Speaker B: Huh?

Speaker A: Uh, sure. Um, so it is a. Multitasking is a great example of why we need all three pieces of thought load. So, um, where multitasking often starts is with something emotionally triggering. So. So we're feeling anxious about how Long our to do list is. So it starts with an emotional reaction. The response to that is to try and divide our attention. Right? And like, oh, I can do this and this, I can attend this meeting and knock off three emails or whatever else. Um, what happens is as we multitask, we get fewer things done, right? So we go slower and we make more errors, which means we probably have more firefighting and rework to do. Um, as we multitask, we know we burn energy more quickly, so we're depleting ourselves as we do it. And interestingly, some. Some new research emerging that multitasking is creating mental health challenges that can, in the short term, even mask or mirror depression. You get these depressive symptoms because you're getting further behind, feeling like you're spinning your wheels, putting in so much energy and getting further behind, and that can have a depressive effect. So multitasking is terrible, Terrible. Uh, it will make your thought load higher and won't do much to reduce your workload.

Speaker B: Yeah. I was trying to find the thing that you said directly that I wanted to comment on. While you're anxious about how much you have to do, you tend to multitask to alleviate anxiety. Ironically, it leaves you more anxious. Uh, so that was, to me, the piece that, uh, was a, uh, was an insight that I think that we don't often hear. Uh, and I love that. So.

Speaker A: And I think it's so true, though. Like, I, I've talked to. I. I'd be interested if you hear this from your clients as well. I hear so many senior executives say to me, we just don't have a sense of urgency. My people don't have a sense of urgency. And when I look like. No, I think the problem is we have a sense of urgency for everything,

Speaker B: and we don't have a sense of priority. That's what m. We don't have.

Speaker A: That's what we don't have. And I caught myself where this sense of urgency is so physiological, it is so emotionally triggering. And one day I was going down the stairs to start my workday and trying to put on my hoodie while going down the stairs, wiping out. Like, what am I doing? What was it in my body and my brain that decided I had to get to my computer so fast that I couldn't wait the three seconds to actually put on my hoodie and. And try to multitask stairs and. And a, uh, very crazy garment. Right. But that's what it feels like is that. That's how urgent it is. I can't Wait to get down the stairs. And that's my brain telling me a lie. But it's a lie that's being perpetuated across society. So leaders stop with the sense of urgency, go to the sense of priority and focus. You'll see there's a lot of energy to move quickly. If people know just one thing they can move quickly on urgent versus important.

Speaker B: Urgent is always going to win. Uh, so we have to, we have to make the important more of a touchstone for what we're really trying to do. And then you, you'll move, you'll move the urgency in the right direction. And oh, by the way, back to your rework thing. We're having to rework stuff. That's what creates that urgency. So uh, you talk about, uh, you talked about the word busy. Ah, I say that busy is the most dangerous four letter word in the English language because it's all about activity, which you, um, and then you talk about being more productive, which is about outputs. But then you further say when you isn't really just productive, but to be explicit, it needs to be effective. So talk about that just a little bit because, uh, because people need to hear it.

Speaker A: Yeah. So we, we were in an activity trap and probably lots of people will relate that their manager still has them in an activity trap, but which is just like how many hours are you putting in? How responsive are you? How fast do you reply to my email? That's just celebrating busy. Some of us have made the leap to go from um, paying attention to activity to paying attention to outputs. But I do think that that is a massive problem. Our society is very stuck on rewarding productivity. Who can churn out the most stuff without asking the hard question? Is that stuff moving the needle on the business outcomes that matter?

Speaker B: It's the right stuff. It's back to what we were talking about before.

Speaker A: Right. And so, uh, and this is a big AI challenge, right, is we now have, very many of us can now produce a lot of stuff with AI in a very short order. Right. But is it actually moving the needle on the outcomes, the ways we need the world to be different? Um, you know, in some cases yes, but in lots of cases no. So does it matter that you're more productive if what you're producing is not creating the outcomes you look for? So watch that you don't fall into the productivity trap of patting yourself on the back for how much you are producing without asking the very hard questions about is that creating the outcomes?

Speaker B: What am I accomplishing? Right. So, um, some of you are watching this on LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is a perfect example of that. Right? Because now you got all these things that are showing up in your LinkedIn feed that people are feeling great about the fact that they created them and don't they look pretty? And yet they're not moving the needle because mostly we're just scrolling on past them because they're not adding value. They're not really helping that that person's feeling like they got another thing posted.

Speaker A: Yep, exactly. And what did it do? Right? It, it just, it did nothing. So it's really, really important that we. And, and I, I know of this because I have made this mistake, like 13 years of patting myself on the back for producing a blog. And you know, 13 years ago, uh, a blog was uncommon. Um, people would read it and comment and think about it and change their behavior because of it. Now nobody's got time for that. Nobody's. And everybody in their brother has a blog. And so, um, I was so proud of myself for consistently producing and I lost sight of. But is it helping people achieve amazing things together? Because that's the outcome I'm after. So I've fallen into the productivity trap myself.

Speaker B: So the two parts of the book that um, were most interesting to me and I think, um, we could spend this whole conversation on the productivity stuff and it would be of great value without question. And yet that's not where in this book I think you're adding the most sort of new value. Um, if you will. No disrespect to the.

Speaker A: No, no, I agree with you.

Speaker B: Right. So I want to talk about that, the energy piece, specifically in restoring your energy. What are a couple of things that people can do from your perspective to help restore their energy?

Speaker A: Yeah. So the book takes it as three things. Thinking about it as with the metaphor of filling your cup. So number one, fill your cup from waterfalls. And what that means is find places where the energy just flows through you. And, and you don't get that if you're trying to do all your work in 11 minute chunks that are interrupted. That's the data. The average person can only go 11 minutes without their work being interrupted. So if you're only going 11 minutes, you are not finding the energy of working in flow. So create. Where's 90 minutes in your day where all the distractions are off, where you've set up everything mise en place before you start so that you can just literally start and do a piece of work. So that's finding a waterfall second, um, tapping into Your wells. Because sometimes you can't fill your cup from some beautiful waterfall. Sometimes it's, I got to get the well, I got to dig deep. And that's in understanding. So, um, on Thoughtload, uh.com, i have this assessment that allows people to understand what is my specific kind of overwhelm. And for four different types of overwhelm, you probably have a different well of energy. So it's understanding what's your well. But I think the biggest thing for smart folks like your listeners is not knowing what your wellspring of energy is. It's changing the story you're telling yourself. Because most of us know. I know for me, it's reading fiction, that reading fiction just takes me to another world. It gets me away from screens. It's really, really good for restoring me. And then I tell myself it's book launch week. I don't have, uh, it's so busy, I don't have time to read this week. And that's the mistake. Because when you need the energy, when you need to carry a heavy thought load, this, the line that should come out of your mouth is, it's so busy, I can't afford not to prioritize my reading this week. So that's a big one.

Speaker B: Maybe you do a little less, but you don't not do it right.

Speaker A: And so I've been good this week. I actually finished a book this week, which I'm very proud of. So, uh, and then the third one is, if you go back to the cup metaphor, you know, you can be filling your cup all day long if it's got cracks in it. Uh, that's a huge problem. So the third thing you have to address is where are the cracks in your cup? Are there meetings you're going to that you haven't spoken in three years? Uh, you know, are there relationships you have that are really draining you? In what ways do you need to fill the cracks? Maybe a health issue you've been ignoring. So whatever, the cracks are in the cup. So, yeah, really thinking about, I think so many of us are treating our energy right now like fossil fuels. It's like I have a finite amount. I'm, um, I'm burning it and then I'm going to be burned out. The tank is going to be empty

Speaker B: instead when you're dead. That's what people think.

Speaker A: I, I literally have heard. I did, I was in, I was in a meeting where somebody proclaimed in a three and a half hour meeting, breaks are for losers. Like, excellent. Um, and of course breaks are for winners. The Microsoft um, EEG studies on what just 10 minutes of break um does for you know, changing your beta waves and like it works and we're ignoring it. So we m need to treat ourselves as the ultimate renewable energy machines and behave that way. Um, because you know, otherwise we're just, we're doing ourselves damage and our work is not as creative. Um, it's, it's going back to old playbooks that aren't up for the task of what our world looks like now. So there's a lot of reasons why our organizations deserve for us to be renewing our energy.

Speaker B: You know one of the things that I do in, in if I'm teaching a, a two hour virtual um, session. Yeah we're gonna take five minutes at the end of the first hour if I'm teaching an all day workshop, uh, seven minutes every hour. And the number, the number, what you just described is the number one reason why.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: And, and people go wow, this is so great. Well first of all there's uh, all sorts of reasons. But there's first of all like okay, Normally people take one 15 minute break, uh, and we're way better off with two sevens or in that same amount of time maybe it's two and a half sevens, uh, depending on how that would play out. But the difference is uh, is tangible and it's, it's even observable by me, um, as the, you know, as the person in the front of the room. And, and so we ought to be doing that for all kinds of stuff that we're doing. Um, and it's not for losers. Uh, it's, it's for winners.

Speaker A: I always think, I would say if

Speaker B: you're taking that three and a half hour meeting and if you took the breaks, you'd get the same amount done. You'd get better quality work in the same three and a half hours. If 30 minutes of it or 20 minutes of it was a break, you'd get better work in the uh. Because we also know that the work expands to the time allotted.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah. I just look at high performance athletes. Right. Would a high performance athlete ever skip the rest? Never. Never. They're obsessed with getting their training schedule, their rest schedule, their um, performance get right because that's how you optimize performance. So I'm not sure why we think we get high performance out in an office environment by just trying to like go four hours without a break.

Speaker B: So we have to have this, we have to have this conversation for a second. And that is, and I hinted at it in the opening when I said that the, what our thought load is doing to us and how we're transferring it to others. So let's just take a minute or two, because I'm presuming based on the title of this, this show, that most everyone here is a leader, but positional leader. And so what are we doing as leaders that we are unaware of that's transferring this thought overload to our folks?

Speaker A: Yeah. So take the three categories. So first, we are failing to prioritize, right. So we've lost the plot on the fact that the word priority is Latin for first.

Speaker B: There was, there was no, don't get me going on, on this, that uh, that there was no plural.

Speaker A: 500 years the word priority existed in the language without a plural because we understood, I think in the 80s some consultant decided that it means important, not right. And now we can have seven priorities. So that's the first mistake that we're making. Um, not helping people with the really hard trade offs of what comes first. Second, we are making the mistake as leaders of thinking that emotions slow us down in the workplace and treating emotions as something unwelcome when emotions are in the human operating system. And by trying to invalidate or deny or smooth over those emotions, we're probably leaving ourselves stuck with them. Either they'll become explosive or they'll go underground into covert resistance or passive aggressiveness. So I think the second thing we're getting wrong is, is that we're trying to, we're failing to extract the data out of emotions and in doing so we're allowing the drama of feelings to kind of mount and take us down. Big, big problem. Plus we're not addressing our own feelings, we're not making places for those. And so we're creating emotional contagion to our teams. Managers spread emotional contagion to their teams very readily. So that's the second thing. And the third, we're being terrible role models on energy. We're, we're making it look like we should be able to go non stop. We're responding to messages at, you know, 11 o' clock at night. We're answering, do it, don't do it. We're answering everything while we're on vacation. What are you doing? You're just saying to me, if I'm invested, I guess I better work on my vacation too. Terrible role models. So we're making a lot of mistakes because we haven't managed our own thought load. And, and when we have a very high thought load as a Leader. We create a big wake behind the boat. So there's a big wake behind the boat for a lot of us.

Speaker B: 100%. That's a great list of stuff. I mean a great list of stuff to not do. Uh, so we talked about AI earlier and you talked about how uh, it could be hindering us. But I'm curious what your thoughts are about how AI might be able to help us manage our thought load.

Speaker A: Yeah, I definitely think it can. I've been using agentic AI for a couple of things that have been super helpful to me. So one is it has access to my email, my calendar, my Google Drives, all those sorts of things. And Each morning at 7am I get the daily command center and I've built into it what my goals are and what matters. I've even built in some of my foibles and what mistakes I'm likely to make. And then it says, here's what you need to be paying attention to. And my favorite thing is the last thing is something I'm likely to procrastinate based on what it knows about me and why I need to do it today. So it's lovely. That's very helpful because I'm not good at the detail. There's a lot coming at me and having AI just monitoring all of that. Super good. The second thing is my work is very research oriented. So each Sunday it goes, it's read all my books, it knows all my work and I send it out into the world looking for new research that may be very topical or relevant. Um, and it creates a digest and helps me to make sure I'm on top of the latest research. That's great. But what I'm really being careful not to do is when I'm writing for a little while, I would be like, oh, I'm going to write this blog and put it through, you know, chat GPT and see what it says. And the first few times I was like, oh, this is so good, I love it, it's better than me. And then like the third time I was like, oh, it's all starting to sound very the same. And I started noticing that I would uh, I uh, love alliteration. And I would be looking for an alliteration and I wouldn't even think for 10 seconds. I would be like, okay, what are three words that start with F that? I was like, okay, I don't want to outsource my brain. So the thing for AI with me is which pieces of thought load are central to who you are, what you love? The value you bring. Don't give that thought load to AI, but what are the pieces of your thought load that are detracting from your unique value that are a bad fit with your personality, your style, your skills, whatever. Give it that stuff. So that's what I've been working on for the last year or so is to get a better sense of the difference between those two lists. Because if I think about what I did with Google Maps, I outsourced my entire sense of space and place to Google Maps and now I'm an idiot. I'm an idiot.

Speaker B: I will walk relationship with Google Maps. I love real Maps. And second of all, I, I get in the car with someone who's going to go someplace they've been to 712 times and they put it in there. Like, don't. Why? Why? Don't, don't do that.

Speaker A: Well, you know why? Because they might have been there 712 times and they literally couldn't find it with it because they have never paid attention, they've never been present.

Speaker B: I'm talking about where they definitely knew before and now they're still. But yes, but your point is equally, yeah, equally accurate. So, um, people are some, some people are here listening, thinking about this with the organizational hat on. Right? Not just. So we've asked the end. We've talked about some individual stuff, we talked about some leader stuff. But what, what can organizations be doing? Or, or is it. Well, what is one thing organizations could be doing if someone's in the C suite in a senior leadership, a divisional leader role, uh, L and D role. Like what's one thing that you'd recommend them to do besides buying a copy of your book?

Speaker A: Okay, so that, that'll be like point zero. Now we'll make 0.1. Um, not just one copy, copies for everyone. Come on, Kevin. Um, okay, so if I go down to one, just to make it something very practical, I have a chapter called Shrink Teams and Strengthen Communities. I think that's the one. So cross functional collaboration and matrix structures. All of a sudden now I've been going to meetings where there's a meeting room with a table that fits 10 people and then there's a back row. Like, what do you mean the back row? In a meeting? What are we doing? At Amazon, they call it a two pizza meeting. Uh, that Jeff Bezos, that was one of his sort of founding principles, is no meeting that you can't feed the participants with two pizzas. Uh, and we've really lost that. And so the problem is first uh, of all, it makes for a very ineffective meeting. Right. Everybody's trying to say something and take up space so you don't get very far. Um, but if you think about it from a thought load perspective, that's way too many things I have to pay attention to. But also importantly now I'm, I've got 20 people around the room who I don't really know, I don't trust. They don't trust me. We're probably not giving each other the benefit of the doubt. A lot of my energy as a human animal is going to trying to read their body language and like, are they, do they like me? Do they, Am I in trouble with them? And all of that just is huge thought load with zero workload benefit. So shrink your teams down to very core groups of people that need to do the work, but then strengthen the communities. We don't have a very strong community so that I could tap into ad hoc knowledge I need, or so that I would say for leadership. The matrix has run amok. We gotta bring it back. Smaller teams, stronger communities.

Speaker B: Uh, I love that. So, um, there's a question that you knew I was going to ask you, so I'm going to ask it right now. What are you reading these days, Leanne?

Speaker A: So I mentioned the importance of fiction to me. Um, and I just finished a book called There Are Rivers in the sky. And it was an absolutely beautiful, beautiful, beautiful novel. So that was amazing. And then, um, I like, I'm. This is about how far I always am from my book. Oops. Uh, from my books. So I'm reading two really good ones. Dan Pontefract. I don't know if you've had Dan on the show.

Speaker B: No, Dan, I do. Yeah.

Speaker A: Dan's a great guy. So his brand new book just out last week about how the future of work is gray. And are we thinking about, um, the rubies in our workforce that are, ah, how the workforce is changing. Super, super interesting. And then, um, this because when you are talking about thought load, um, you know, it's so interesting to me to know how much our brain is trying to keep up with while we're sleeping. So. The brain never sleeps. Karen Van Campen. Those are the two, uh, non fictions that are within arm's reach at the, at the moment.

Speaker B: We will have all of that in the show notes. Yeah, I hope that you will take advantage of that. So, uh, now the question, Leanne, that you most want me to ask is where can people get a hold of you? Where do you want to. How do you want to connect with people you've already mentioned thoughtload.com. i know you have other websites, so, like, where do you want to point people, um, to learn more about you, your work in the book.

Speaker A: So my work would be leandavy.com, but when you spell your name as crazy as I do, that is hard. So, uh, thoughtload.com is easier. And that's all of the tools around thoughtload. And then I would love if folks connected with me on LinkedIn, because that's where we can actually, you know, you can ask me a question. We can have a conversation. Um, so that's some, some places to find me.

Speaker B: All right, so before we go, everybody, now, I've been asking questions of Leanne, and now I have a question for you. Even though you can't really respond, this is the most important question of the day. And it's simply this. Now what? Uh, you've been with us for 30ish minutes, and the question is, what are you going to do with what you got? Uh, I guarantee you, if you were paying any attention, you have ideas about what you'd like to try or would like to go do, pick one and go take that action. Because until you take that action, uh, nothing's going to change. Your thought load's not going to be moderated in any way, shape or form. In fact, if you don't close that loop, that might actually add to your thought load, like, pick a thing, go do it, and get started. And if you do that, this will have been a much more beneficial time for you. I hope you will do that. Leanne, thank you so much for being here. It was a pleasure to have you. Thanks for here being. Thanks so much.

Speaker A: Thanks, Kevin.

Speaker B: And with that, everybody, that's the end for now, which simply means I'll be back next week. And so next week, come join us again for another episode, uh, of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast. We'll see you then.

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