We’ve just launched the State of Workplace Wellbeing Report 2026, and one of the themes that really stands out is decision fatigue and cognitive overload.
This is something I’ve been thinking and talking about for a while, particularly in relation to the pace of work. Work has become faster, denser and more fragmented. But it’s not just pace alone that’s creating pressure. It’s also the sheer number of inputs we’re dealing with every day, and the number of decisions required to process them.
For many people, the working day now means being pulled constantly between Slack, Teams, email, project management tools, shared docs and multiple other systems. Add to that the running stream of “Could you just check this?”, “Can you have a quick look at that?”, “What do you think of this version?” and it’s no surprise that attention is under strain.
This is not simply about being busy. It’s about the cognitive overload of modern work.
Recent workplace data makes this visible. The average knowledge worker is now interrupted every two minutes during core working hours, adding up to well over 250 digital interruptions a day. Messages increasingly arrive outside traditional hours, with a year-on-year rise in early morning, evening and weekend communication.
When productivity tools create more thinking, not less
There’s another layer to this, too, and that’s AI.
AI can absolutely save time. It can accelerate drafting, summarise information, sense-check ideas and improve productivity. But there’s a paradox here. In many cases, it doesn’t reduce the need for thought, it increases it.
Why? Because AI often generates more options.
Ask it to review a piece of work and it will almost always find more angles to consider, more refinements to make, more possibilities to evaluate. That can be useful, but it also creates another level of mental load. We’re no longer just processing feedback from colleagues or clients. We’re also processing feedback from machines.
And that matters, because more options do not necessarily mean more clarity.
Often, they mean more evaluation, more comparison, more micro-decisions, and more time spent thinking about what to do next. That is where cognitive overload can quietly build.
The AI paradox
I touched on this recently in one of my SNAPS as the AI paradox.
Technology promises efficiency, and often delivers it. But it can also increase the number of choices, the number of iterations, and the number of things competing for our attention. In that sense, it saves time in one area while increasing cognitive demand in another.
That’s part of the broader paradox of technology and wellbeing.
The tools designed to help us work smarter can also intensify the pace of work, speed up expectations, and increase the mental effort required to stay on top of everything. It’s not just the volume of work that’s tiring people out. It’s the constant bombardment of information, the lack of stopping cues, and the sheer number of decisions people are being asked to make.
Why this matters
Cognitive overload doesn’t just make us feel tired. It affects:
- judgement
- focus
- decision-making quality
- patience and emotional regulation
- our ability to prioritise what really matters
When people are overloaded, they are more likely to default to the urgent over the important, react rather than think, and struggle to hold perspective. Over time, that has implications not just for wellbeing, but for performance, leadership and organisational effectiveness.
Here’s what we see within organisations, using proprietary data. Only 55% of said they handled unexpected challenges or events that required extra time and energy ‘reasonably well’ in 2025, down from 62% in 2024. 33% answered not well, up from 29% in 2024.
In the State of Workplace Wellbeing Report 2026, I explore the growing gap between the pace of modern work and the limits of human energy, attention and judgement, and what that means for sustainable high performance.
A question for you
Are you noticing this in your own work or organisation?
Are the tools designed to help people work faster actually creating more decisions, more iterations and more mental clutter?
I’d love to know what you think.
And if this is a topic that interests you, there are many more insights in the State of Workplace Wellbeing Report 2026, including much more on cognitive overload, pace of work and the wider wellbeing-performance paradox.
Download the report, have a read, and let me know what stands out.
