how does overload actually operate? So I want to take a closer look at that. And we'll do some questions about overload. And then we'll switch gears at the end to talk about something interesting. Alright, so let's talk about overload. When you get a work commitment that you agree to, it's broken into or we can break it into two different parts, execution and overhead.

So execution is actually executing the work required by that commitment. So if we take an article that you're writing, as an example, the execution is actually writing the article. You're at the word processor, you're putting the words there. The overhead is everything that goes around it. The back and forth communication to set up the interview with someone.

I'm trying to arrange a time with my editor to go over these changes. The fact checker and I need to get on the same page. So it's the collaboration and coordination that surrounds the actual execution of the work. Now, when most people think about being overloaded, they think about execution.

The total amount of things I actually have to do has piled it up to a point where I don't even think I have enough time to get it done. This is the classic understanding of overload. This is what students suffer from. When they realize tomorrow, I have to get this paper done and I have this test and I have to finish this problem set.

And if they look at the actual work they have to execute, the writing, the studying and the solving of the problems, the amount of time required to do that is more than they really have hours between now and when these things are due. So execution, if you have too much total execution to do for the time you have available can create a sense of overload.

In most knowledge work settings, however, we don't get anywhere near the execution demands being too large. The source of overload for a lot of knowledge workers actually comes from the overhead component. The coordination and collaboration activities that surround the work we do can fragment up, can muck up, can make hard to pass your schedule much quicker than the actual execution can.

And the reason why this is, is partially the nature of the work, not the time required by it. Overhead often requires coordination or collaborations with other people. This requires back and forth interaction. I have to send you an email, hey, what do you know about this? And you send back, I don't really know.

And you say, well, maybe we should talk about it. You say, sure, when are you free? And you say, well, how about Monday? And you say, well, Monday's not good, but maybe Tuesday or Thursday. Like, well, let me give you some time for Tuesday and Thursday. There is a lot of back and forth that happens.

And as we talked about commonly on the show, back and forth generates context switching. I have to keep switching my attention back to this conversation every time I need to service or move this conversation forward. Coordinate overhead also creates just other landmines on your schedule, such as meetings. Now we should probably just get together and discuss this.

We should probably hop on a call and just see what's going on about this. And now you have this part of your schedule where in the lead up to it, you have to wind down what you're doing, switch over and talk to someone. And then you have a period after a while to kind of switch your gears after that.

So you start peppering your schedule with these meetings that overhead creates. That also makes it difficult, makes the environment difficult to pass for execution. So you can fill up a schedule, making it so that very little execution can get done. You can fill up a schedule with overhead much quicker than you can fill up a schedule with execution.

Most of the things we actually do in knowledge sector jobs, if you add up the minutes or hours required to execute the core work, doesn't really take up much of your schedule. That's not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is we take the overhead for each of these tasks and we pepper it throughout the day.

And then we pepper this overhead with that overhead with this overhead. It doesn't take much before you're never far from more emails to answer, more slacks to get back to, and more meetings to jump from one after another. So I think the state of overhead saturation is the primary cause of overload.

And it's what happened to me. There was different small work commitments that entered my sphere of responsibility throughout the spring. And I said, look, I have these big things I'm working on. I gotta get this book manuscript in, I'm working on my courses. Let's deal with this in May once all that's done.

And any one of these things in isolation is not that big. Any one of these things, if you add up the time required in executing the task, it adds up to a handful of hours. None of them are outrageous in isolation. Most of them are important, but they all got pushed to this period for after the big things were done.

And even though the amount of execution work I put onto my schedule was incredibly manageable, the overhead was not. And that is why I found myself the other day spending two hours straight trying to triage and service these requests and conversations, and then went away for an hour and came back, and 16 more messages had shown up in my inbox.

It's why I was finding days where it was meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting with 30 minutes here, 20 minutes there, not enough time to get anything done. It's why I was saying, why do I feel so busy when I'm not working on anything? I'm not writing any chapters. I'm not getting any drafts of articles done.

It's overhead saturation. The overhead will kill you way before the execution gets close. So anyways, I was thinking about this when I came across an article in the Wall Street Journal, which I think emphasizes that my experience with overhead saturation is not unique, that this is actually a widespread problem in the knowledge sector.

So I'm gonna load this article up on the screen here. It's from May 9th in the Wall Street Journal. You can watch this if you wanna watch and see the article as I have it up here on the screen. This is episode 248. So if you go to youtube.com/CalNewportMedia or the deeplife.com, just look for the video for episode 248.

If you're just listening, I'll annotate what I'm showing on the screen right now. All right, so here's this article. It's by Ray A. Smith from May 9th. The title is, "Workers Now Spend Two Full Days a Week on Emails and in Meetings." Pretty self-explanatory, so I won't dwell on this, but let me just give you the specifics here.

This data comes from Microsoft. Microsoft is analyzing the activity of workers who are using their business applications, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, et cetera. Because more and more of this software is hosted in the cloud now, Microsoft can actually watch how thousands and thousands of knowledge workers, what they're actually doing with their time on their computers.

And they can actually put some pretty wide, draw from a pretty wide variety of data points to figure out how are people spending their time. So they focused in on what they call the most active users of their apps. What this means is people who are primarily using Microsoft apps for their business software needs.

These are the users you wanna focus on for this study. Because if the users are using other software, then that's not gonna get picked up in the data. But if I'm a Microsoft shop, Microsoft now can really tell how do I spend my time. So if we look on the people that actually use mainly Microsoft software, what they found as hinted by the headline is that these users spent an average of 8.8 hours a week reading and writing emails and 7.5 hours logged into meetings.

So that's gonna be digital meetings because that's what Microsoft would know about. That's two full days out of five. 2/5 of all of your time during the work week is spent reading emails and being in meetings. Now, if you could guarantee that you would consolidate those into two actual days, I'll do that on Monday and Tuesday.

And to be completely uninterrupted for Wednesday through Friday, maybe I would take that deal. But of course, that is not how that time is distributed throughout your landscape of work. That 8.8 hours of reading email is spread throughout the 40 hours of your week in such a way that you always have to come back and there's you're never far from having more emails to read.

Same thing with that 7.5 hours of meetings. It's two hours of meetings spread out over four meetings today, five hours of meetings this day, it gets sprinkled and peppered throughout your schedule. So you can get to that point of overhead saturation. We have one other data point here I wanna point to.

All right, so it's saying these figures don't include instant messaging, time on the phone, or impromptu conversations with workers. In all, the average employee spent 77% of the time they were using Microsoft software was spent in meetings, email, and chat. So that's the other data point here is during the time where they were using Microsoft software, the majority of that time was talking about work.

Only 43% of their time they spent using that software was for quote unquote, creating things. There's a bit of analysis here. This is subjective description, which I think is apt. Both workers and bosses complain that digital overload is hurting innovation and productivity a sentiment echoed in numerous workplace studies.

In a separate Microsoft survey of 31,000 people worldwide, nearly two out of three said that they struggled to find time and energy to do their actual job. So they struggled to find time and energy to do their job. Those people were more than three times as likely as others to say innovation and strategic thinking were a challenge.

We have a quote here from the leader of the research team. "People feel quite overwhelmed, a sense of feeling like they have two jobs, the jobs they were hired to do, but then they have this other job of communicating, coordinating, and collaborating." Folks, this is exactly what I've been talking about on the show for years.

This is exactly what I just talked about at the opening of today's deep dive. It is the overhead of coordinating and collaborating work that is causing all of these problems with overload and the subsequent symptoms of burnout that we are realizing have become epidemic in modern knowledge work. And it is very important that we recognize it.

It's overhead, not the work itself. It's the meeting about the report, not the writing the report that's really causing problems. Now, once we understand this issue, I think it clarifies potential solutions. One of the big discussions right now, of course, is around artificial intelligence. We've talked about this on the show before.

People are thinking, well, wait a second, maybe what we need to help work become more productive is artificial intelligence agents, artificial intelligence powered agents that can help us do our work, that can help gather sources or write the rough draft of the article that we need to write or gather the information I need to put together this spreadsheet.

And this is gonna really boost productivity. And my point is, let's say, even if that technology can do all of that, and that's a whole separate if, can it really do that? Let's put that aside for now. It is not gonna get to the core of the problem that is making people feel overloaded, which is the overhead around these tasks.

The needing to go back and forth on these nuanced, subtle, subjective, interpersonal issues about what about this? Do you know about this? When should we meet about this? Let me get your thoughts on this. Let me make sure everyone feels heard. This sense of overload is coming from this overhead, and that's not something we can solve by just making our software tools more efficient.

It's not something we can solve by having an artificial intelligence agent gather data from us. It's not something we can solve by making the interface for communication faster, that my email is going to auto-guess what words I wanna type. All of that might help a little bit at the margins, but if we wanna really get rid of overload, we have to start caring about, A, how we collaborate and coordinate work.

How do we take that activity of collaboration and coordination that surrounds the work and make its footprint much smaller and consolidated? How do we get rid of the ability of even a relatively small obligation to create 30 or 40 back and forth emails in four meetings? I believe that to be critical.

And B, we gotta manage workload. We have to say it's not just how many hours is this thing gonna take, but also what's the overhead gonna be. A lot of overhead is unavoidable, so the secret is do less things at a time. I only have two things on my plate at a time.

So now the overhead does not destroy my schedule, so I can actually execute pretty efficiently. And then those things are done, and I can do two other things, and the overhead is small, so I can execute that efficiently, and I get it done faster. And you know what? Those four things got done much faster than if you had put all four things on my plate at the same time.

Workload management has to be a critical part of this solution. And that's something that's gonna require systems, that's gonna require organizational buy-in. So I think this is where our focus should be, not how do we do our work faster, but instead, how do we make coordination and collaboration that surrounds tasks have less of a spread out footprint on our schedule?

And B, how can we have smarter workload management systems that keep less on your plate at the same time? This is not about doing less work. This is not a dichotomy between workers and management where they both have their own interests. And it's in the management's interest for us to have more on our plate, and in our interest to have less.

No, it's in everyone's interest for us to hold things back and only give people one thing to do at a time or two things to do at a time, 'cause it gets done faster. And the total amount of work produced per year is gonna be higher, but it just requires a system, and that's annoying, and that's hard, and we don't like change.

So I think overload is a real issue. It's caused by overhead. Overhead is where we have to focus our energy when it comes to trying to find solutions. So I think that Wall Street Journal article makes clear, this is a widespread problem. It's time to get more serious about thinking about how to get rid of it.

- Did you talk about overhead saturation in a world without email, that term? - No, no. I mean, I definitely talked about overhead being a problem, and the back and forth being a problem, and a world without email gets into the psychology and neuroscience about why all that context shifting is really bad, but I didn't use that term.

In my new book, "In Slow Productivity," which is coming out next year, I do talk about this. And actually, the terminology I use in that book is the overhead tax. Every obligation brings with it an overhead tax. And when the amount of that taxes get to a certain point, you get the saturation, I sometimes also call it an overhead spiral, where now suddenly you're spending so much time in the overhead of your work that you can't actually get the work done, which means more work piles up, which means more overhead enters the scene, and it spirals out of control.

And I think this happened, I talk about this more in the book, so I won't get, I can talk about it now, 'cause it'll be a year 'til that book comes out, but basically, a really short summary of the argument I made there is, we tend to keep our workloads right at the precipice of that spiral out of control.

So we say yes and yes and yes until we're so worried about things spiraling out of control that we finally have cover to say no. And what happened, this was exposed by the coronavirus pandemic, because for a lot of knowledge workers, when they quickly shifted remote, it's not like it doubled their workload, but it added a non-trivial amount of new work unexpectedly.

And since everyone was right on the edge, it pushed a lot of people right over that border, and that's why we had that phenomenon during that first year, year and a half of the pandemic, where we had knowledge workers at home who were doing Zoom meetings eight hours a day, who were emailing until late at night, and who were feeling like they couldn't actually get much work done.

It's because we pushed the whole population over that point where you get fully saturated by overhead. It's just really not a good place to be. And managers should really worry about this. I mean, it's a terrible way to actually deploy your resources if you have workers who are saturated with overhead.

I think that's important because, it's nice to have a dynamic where we can tweet indignantly about bad people, but the solution here is more complicated, and the issue is more subtle. It's not just mustache twirlers saying, "If I could just get more overhead on Jesse's plate, my plan to kidnap the queen's daughter and get a ransom is gonna come to fruition." It's not necessarily a mustache-twisting manager.

It's a haphazard work system. In the absence of other ways to keep track of how much work are you doing, to have ways to hold on to work that's not just on a person's plate, but in a centralized way, in the absence of these smarter systems, we're just gonna push ourselves till we get worried.

And so we're gonna push ourselves way past the tipping point of what's the right trade-off between overhead and actually getting things done. So we'll see. Too bad books take so long to come out. Like I'm almost done with this book. Next month, we're gonna be, it's called Transmittal or Transmission.

It's where you pass on the manuscript officially from editorial to the production teams. And this is where, and then it's a year. - A lot of overhead in publishing a book. - It really is. It really is, guys. But don't worry, you'll hear plenty about that next year. We're working on covers now.

That's exciting. All this stuff has to happen so early. Like you need a cover and advertising copy and marketing strategy really far in advance because it starts so early. Like if we're gonna release next February or March, the meetings, the sale of the books to bookstores that are gonna come out in that time happens pretty soon.

That'll happen later in the summer, which means right now, we have to be getting our ducks in the row so that the sales team can be, have everything they need to sell this book late summer for bookstores thinking about what are we gonna place in early 2024. So the book kind of has to be done before then.