Productivity Breakthroughs With Liane Davey - TWMJ #1046

**Mitch Joel** (0:00)
Well, hey there, and welcome to episode number 1046 of Thinking With Mitch Joel. It's Sunday, July the 26th, 2026 This is the show that used to be called Six Pixels of Separation. Let's get on with the conversation.
Why Does Work Feel So Exhausting Even When We're Getting More Done Than Ever Before? For years, we blamed the workload. Too many meetings, too many emails, too many projects. But what if that's not actually the problem? What if the real drain isn't the amount of work we have, but the mental and emotional burden of carrying it all? That's the premise behind this conversation with Dr. Liane Davey, one of my dear and close friends. Liane is an organizational psychologist, a leadership advisor, and bestselling author. Plus, she's one of the world's leading thinkers on team effectiveness. Her latest book, Thoughtload, introduces a simple but profound idea, that the invisible cognitive and emotional demands surrounding work have become a bigger obstacle than the actual work itself.
In our conversation, we explore why organizations have become obsessed with productivity while often losing sight of effectiveness, and it's a conversation that reframes burnout leadership and the future of work in ways that I suspect are going to stay with you long after it's over. Enjoy the conversation.
So who are you and what do you do?

**Liane Davey** (1:38)
Hi, I'm Liane Davey, and by way of background, I'm an organizational psychologist and I help teams achieve amazing things together.

**Mitch Joel** (1:47)
You're a dear friend of mine. You had a book out called The Good Fight and you have a new book out.

**Liane Davey** (1:52)
I do, Thoughtload, Manage The Madness and Free Your Team To Do Great Work.

**Mitch Joel** (1:58)
So we're going to level set here. We thought the term was workload, and then Liane had a strike of lightning in the work and realized, no, no, no, it's not workload, it's thoughtload. Talk about the bridge and what happened there.

**Liane Davey** (2:12)
Yeah. Literally, I was on the stage at a keynote and somebody asked a question about, well, don't you think our workload is too high for any of that? And just literally as if I was speaking in tongues, it came out of me. It's not the workload that's killing us, it's the thoughtload.

**Mitch Joel** (2:26)
Hold on, let me write this down.

**Liane Davey** (2:28)
I literally, literally, the room went silent and I said, could someone please write this down?
And so workload is the effort and energy and what's required to create the outputs of our work, the things we have to produce. And most people I talk to say, I would love to just do the work, that'd be amazing. It's not the work, it's everything other than the work. So thoughtload, you can think of it as an invisible tax on your performance that comes from three things, rising cognitive demands, just how much we're expected to pay attention to, then increasing emotional burdens, because we're living in a really emotionally dysregulated society, and that's kind of hijacking us all day, and then depleted energy reserves. So thoughtload, an invisible tax on our performance from rising cognitive demands, increasing emotional burdens, and declining energy reserves.

**Mitch Joel** (3:24)
So yeah, it's a lot, and when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. We talked about this idea as you were developing the book, go back and forth, and I think about it a lot. I've been thinking about it even more, not just because I've been preparing for the conversation, reading the final copy of the book, but it's interesting when I layer it against the idea that, in a weird way, we have been optimizing work for outputs.
And thought work in particular, this system that we have, whether it's from early days of intranets to even having Kaizen and other processes and other people like you introducing themes and theories to us in business and corporate life. So it's interesting that with all this technology and all of this optimization to getting to a place where we can have this roaring economy that we have, that yet on the other side, we have this. It is weird to me when I thought about it in that framework.

**Liane Davey** (4:19)
Yeah. We are stuck in a productivity trap.
So we convince ourselves that if we're productive, if we're creating a lot of output, that that's the gold star. That's what we're supposed to be doing. And way too few of us are asking, do those outputs create the outcomes, the changes in the world that we're trying to create? And so we're focused on productivity instead of being focused on effectiveness. And so if you're just measuring and thinking about productivity, you're going to work harder and harder and harder to do more and more and more.