Episode #1046 of Thinking With Mitch Joel is now live.

This conversation with Dr. Liane Davey gets into one of the biggest traps inside modern work: we keep trying to solve productivity by reducing workload, when the deeper problem may be thoughtload. The work itself is not always what breaks people. Often, it is everything around the work. The constant context switching. The emotional residue. The meetings that create more meetings. The urgency that makes everything feel important but very little feel clear. Liane has spent her career helping leaders and teams perform at their best. She is an organizational psychologist, bestselling author, trusted advisor to companies around the world and, in full disclosure, a dear friend. Her previous books, The Good Fight and You First, have helped many teams understand conflict, collaboration and the human dynamics that shape performance.

Her latest book, Thoughtload – Manage The Madness And Free Your Team To Do Great Work, may be her most urgent idea yet.

What makes Liane’s work land is that she is not simply talking about burnout or workplace wellness. She is pointing at a more precise problem. Many organizations have become obsessed with outputs instead of outcomes. They measure activity, productivity and speed, but often fail to ask whether the work being produced is actually moving anything that matters. That is how teams end up drowning in dead work while everyone still looks busy. In this conversation, we talk about the productivity trap, why constant urgency can undermine effectiveness, and how thoughtload shows up in everything from return-to-office debates to overloaded meetings to AI-generated work slop. We also get into why collaboration breaks down when people are cognitively and emotionally maxed out, and why leaders need to become much better at helping teams decide what deserves attention in the first place. Mostly, this is a conversation about the invisible tax on performance. The cognitive load, emotional burden and depleted energy people carry before they even start doing the actual work. AI may eventually help reduce some of that load, but only if leaders use it to clarify priorities, improve communication and remove friction instead of industrializing more noise.

The episode is now live. Listen to my conversation with Chris Bradley here: Productivity Breakthroughs With Liane Davey – TWMJ #1046.

Before you go… ThinkersOne  is a new way for organizations to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video content (live and recorded) from the best Thinkers in the world. If you’re looking to add excitement and big smarts to your meetings, corporate events, company off-sites, “lunch & learns” and beyond, check it out.