Introduction
There is a conversation that plays out with remarkable consistency among senior leaders. Ask them why they are not investing in their visibility – on LinkedIn, at industry events, in the broader professional conversation – and the answer is almost always the same: I just don't have the time.
It is, on the surface, a reasonable response. Senior leaders are operating under enormous pressure. Competing demands, complex stakeholder environments, relentless meeting schedules. Of course they are stretched. The problem is that "I don't have time" is not actually a time problem. It is, as New York Times bestselling author and organisation scientist Liane Davey would put it, a ThoughtLoad problem.
And until you understand the difference, the visibility conversation is going nowhere.
What ThoughtLoad Actually Is
Liane Davey's latest book, ThoughtLoad: Manage the Madness and Free Your Team to Do Great Work, reframes a challenge that most people have experienced but few have been able to name precisely.
Workload, Davey argues, is not what is exhausting us. Most people are not burning out because they are completing too much work. They are burning out because of the invisible cognitive and emotional weight they are carrying – the constant decision-making, the ambient anxiety, the emotional residue of a world that is increasingly dysregulated. That is ThoughtLoad.
The framework has three components: attention, which is fragmenting under the pressure of constant interruption and competing priorities; emotion, which is the often-overlooked driver that, once activated, supersedes almost everything else; and energy, which functions as the denominator – when it is depleted, even a manageable load becomes crushing.
What makes ThoughtLoad particularly relevant for the visibility conversation is this: high ThoughtLoad does not just make people tired. It makes them reactive. It pushes them toward old playbooks, toward shallow processing, toward activity over outcomes. It is precisely the state in which strategic thinking – including thinking about one's own visibility and positioning – becomes the first thing to fall off the list.
The "Too Busy" Myth
Davey is characteristically direct on the subject of busyness. When a leader says they don't have time for visibility, she hears something else entirely: their priorities are not clear.
This is not a criticism. It is a diagnosis. The word "busy" has become a default response that obscures what is really happening. As Davey points out, everyone has the same 24 hours. The question is not whether time exists – it is whether the activity has been connected to an outcome that genuinely matters.
This is where visibility strategy and ThoughtLoad management converge. If a senior leader sees LinkedIn as a content obligation – one more thing on an already overwhelming list – it will never make it to the top. But if they understand that their LinkedIn presence is directly connected to being considered for keynote invitations, board roles, advisory opportunities, or the kind of trust-based reputation that attracts the right clients and collaborators, the calculation changes.
Davey puts it plainly: disconnect the activity from the outcome, and it will never feel like a priority. Connect it to something you genuinely value, and you will find the time.
Visibility Is a Long-Term Trust Investment
One of the most useful reframes to come out of this conversation is the distinction between broadcasting and building. Many leaders who do engage with LinkedIn treat it as a broadcast channel – a place to announce things, share company updates, post when they have something to promote. Davey's own two decades on the platform tell a different story.
Effective LinkedIn presence is not about volume of posts. It is about consistent, authentic participation over time. It is about leaving a thoughtful comment on someone else's work. It is about sharing something genuinely interesting, without an agenda. It is about staying in the peripheral vision of people who may not need you right now – but will remember you when they do.
Davey cites a striking piece of data: at any given moment, approximately 95 per cent of potential buyers, collaborators, or employers are not in an active decision-making cycle. They are not looking. But they are noticing. The leaders who benefit most from LinkedIn are not those who post the most. They are the ones who have maintained a visible, credible presence long enough that when the 5 per cent moment arrives, they are already in the room.
This is precisely why visibility cannot be treated as a crisis response – something to attend to when a role disappears or a business pipeline dries up. By that point, the groundwork has not been laid.
The Attention Problem and Depth of Processing
One of the most thought-provoking threads in Davey's framework concerns what fragmented attention is costing us at a deeper level. It is not simply that we are distracted. It is that distraction is preventing the kind of depth of processing that generates genuine insight.
Research on digital reading retention suggests that after 48 hours, people retain roughly 20 per cent of information consumed digitally – and that figure falls further when consumption is hurried or interrupted. Leaders are ingesting enormous volumes of information and retaining almost none of it at a level that allows for genuine synthesis or original thinking.
This matters for visibility because the most valuable contribution any leader can make – on LinkedIn, in a keynote, in a published piece – is not a restatement of what everyone already knows. It is a perspective that could only come from their specific experience, their particular vantage point, their considered view. That kind of thinking requires time, stillness, and depth. It requires what Davey describes as the conditions for flow.
Creating the Conditions for Flow
Flow – the state of deep, energised focus described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – is not a luxury. For senior leaders trying to produce substantive work, it is a practical necessity. And according to Davey, most leaders are not experiencing it even once in a typical working week.
The conditions are specific: a block of uninterrupted time of at least 45 to 90 minutes, no notifications, no open email, everything prepared in advance. Crucially, flow also requires a period of no-input time beforehand – time without podcasts, news, meetings, or screens – to allow the brain's default mode network to do its consolidating work. Without that soak time, the creative depth required to reach flow simply does not materialise.
For leaders who want to produce genuinely valuable visibility content – the kind of thinking that establishes real authority rather than just maintaining a presence – this is not abstract advice. It is the operating condition that makes it possible.
The One Thing to Do This Week
Davey's practical recommendation is disarmingly simple. Before anything else, identify the single most important outcome you need to advance – in your business, your career, or your positioning. Not a list of priorities. One outcome.
Once that is clear, everything else becomes easier to evaluate. The content worth writing, the conversations worth having, the LinkedIn presence worth maintaining – all of it becomes legible through the lens of that outcome. And the vast majority of the activity currently consuming time and attention, without advancing anything that genuinely matters, becomes much easier to set aside.
Visibility, approached this way, is not an addition to an already overcrowded agenda. It is a direct line to the outcomes that matter most. The ThoughtLoad framework simply helps clear enough space to see that.