Saturday August 15th 2026
This article has been written by local coach Kate Flory
How often do you wake up in the early hours with a to-do list running through your head, or can’t get to sleep due to the previous day's events, or start the morning with the feeling that you are already on the back foot?
That’s your Thoughtload at work.
Author, Liane Davey wrote an article on Medium titled The Problem isn’t Your Workload, where she said: "I’m pretty convinced that thoughtload is a bigger problem than workload. It’s the cognitive and emotional labour, not the physical labour, that’s killing us."
Before you start blaming yourself for not being better organised, let’s put some things into reality. For some of us, we can remember a time when at work there were memos not emails, and a time when someone would telephone us instead of sending an emailing, or when work stopped at 5.30 pm and no-one would think of contacting us out of work hours.
In today’s working world, there are more cognitive and emotional demands made on us all the time, and with less energy reserves. The outcome is often increased stress and, at times, burnout.
So how do you change your workload to stop being a thoughtload?
Liane suggests that we consider and list our activities.
1. Your Activities: These are the projects, tasks, and people that you agree to carry in your thoughtload. More than just a list, this is a live document that you should be reflecting on, anticipating, planning, and monitoring daily.
2. Others’ Activities: These are the projects, tasks, and people that you are aware of and contributing to but not leading. There is a more responsive, rather than proactive, approach to tasks.
3. Side Activities: These are the projects, tasks, and people that you have been assigned to but were not on your radar. These are the activities you should be deleting, distributing, and declining to ensure they don’t add to your thoughtload.
(*Ask us for our worksheet on how to say ‘no’)
In other words, Do, Delegate, Decide what to do.
Once we’ve got our dairies sorted, we can then tackle our emotions. We need to understand the difference between what we are ‘feeling’ about our workload, and what we are ‘experiencing’.
For instance, when you feel overwhelmed by your to-do list and you feel stressed due to telling yourself that you are ‘too slow’ or ‘not good at your job’ (cognitive thought). Versus s feeling you can't breathe properly and feel sick, which is an emotion that you are experiencing.
The final step is to find your waterfalls and wells of positive energy.
Waterfalls are tasks that create a natural flow of time, with a clear start and finish, often following the Pomodoro Effect of 40 – 45 minutes.
Wells are the structures you put in place to give you energy, such as mindfulness or exercise, and by understanding your way of working, such as lark vs owl.
By reducing the drains and strains of our workload, we can give ourselves more space to think, be creative, and be more resilient.
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