No Time, No Ideas, No Visibility – and How to Change That

Why “Too Busy” Is Not the Real Problem

The conversation starts with a line most senior leaders have said, or heard, many times: “I’m too busy.” Too busy for LinkedIn. Too busy to think about visibility. Too busy to do the work that would build their profile outside the organisation. In this session of Link·Ability [IN]sights, Lynnaire Johnston explored why that line – however sincerely felt – may be pointing in the wrong direction.

Her guest was Liane Davey, New York Times bestselling author and organisational scientist, whose latest book ThoughtLoad reframes one of the most persistent problems facing senior leaders today. Liane works with executives at organisations including Amazon and Walmart, and has spent years studying why capable, driven people end up burned out and under-productive despite working harder than ever.

Her answer is not that people have too much to do. It is that they are carrying an invisible cognitive and emotional load – ThoughtLoad – that makes it feel impossible to focus, prioritise or create. And until leaders understand that distinction, no amount of time management advice will shift the underlying problem.

KEY INSIGHTS

Session Summary

What ThoughtLoad Actually Is

• ThoughtLoad is the invisible tax on performance – distinct from workload, and made up of three compounding elements: rising cognitive demand, increasing emotional burden, and depleted energy reserves.
• The three drivers amplify one another. When emotional load enters the equation, it tends to supersede the others. And when energy is low, a load that would be manageable on a good day becomes impossible.
• Leaders and employees are frequently in disagreement about workload – employees say it is too heavy, leaders say they do not see it. ThoughtLoad explains why both are partly right: the work volume may be reasonable, but the cognitive and emotional demand surrounding it is not.

The Three Drivers – and What They Look Like in Practice

Attention

• Leaders who treat everything on a long list as equally important lose the ability to focus. The word priority, Liane noted, has no meaningful plural – it existed in English for five hundred years before anyone thought to make it plural, because you cannot have more than one first.
• Focusing only on activity produces busyness. Focusing on output produces productivity. Only focusing on outcomes produces effectiveness – and most leaders are currently stuck at the second level.
• Digital retention drops sharply within forty-eight hours. Skimming and scrolling without depth of processing means we are not retaining information or generating genuine insight from it.

Emotion

• Emotions are preconscious physiological responses; feelings are the cognitive stories we layer on top to explain them. When we do not process emotions well, those stories derail focus, productivity and decision-making.
• Emotional contagion – the spread of dysregulation through a team – is one of the most common and least acknowledged drains on collective output. Leaders who recognise and interrupt it create significantly better conditions for deep work.

Energy

• Low energy is a signal to do less, not more. The most effective leaders – the Warren Buffett types – protect energy deliberately, which looks counterintuitive to high achievers focused on output.
• Constant input – podcasts, news, back-to-back meetings, screens – prevents the brain’s default mode network from activating. That network is where insight, creativity and genuine recovery happen. Without time free of input, ThoughtLoad rises and never comes down.
• Microsoft research using EEG caps found that beta waves build continuously through back-to-back meetings, and it takes just ten minutes of genuine rest to return to baseline. Most people never take that break.

Debunking the “Too Busy” Myth

◼    “Busy” usually signals unclear priorities, not a shortage of time. Everyone has the same twenty-four hours. When a leader says they are too busy, what they are often really saying is: this has not yet been connected to an outcome I value.

◼    Visibility work becomes a genuine priority only when it is tied to a specific outcome – keynote opportunities, a book, positioning for a board role, being found by the right people at the right time. Without that link, LinkedIn feels like noise rather than strategy.

◼    Batching content creation removes the daily friction. A couple of hours a month, scheduled in advance using a tool such as Plannable, is enough to maintain a consistent LinkedIn presence without it bleeding into every working day.

Visibility, LinkedIn and the Long Game

◼    Liane has been on LinkedIn for twenty years. A client she worked with eleven years ago, who she had not heard from since, found her through the platform and hired her this year. Visibility is not always immediately attributable – but it compounds.

◼    Around ninety-five per cent of potential clients, collaborators or employers are not in a buying or hiring cycle at any given moment. Consistent, visible presence means that when they do need what you offer, your name comes to mind first.

◼    Commenting on others’ content is as valuable as publishing your own. It signals that you are a thoughtful participant in a conversation, not just someone broadcasting at an audience.

◼    Authority is rarely built in a single moment. Liane compared it to a comedy special on Netflix – what looks like a polished hour is the result of years of two-minute ideas tried, refined, tested, and iterated in public. The same is true of a professional reputation.

Flow, Focus and the Right Conditions for Deep Work

◼    Flow – the state described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – is highly creative and productive, but it does not arrive quickly. The average person’s work is interrupted every eleven minutes, which is never long enough to reach it.

◼    Reaching flow requires at least forty-five to ninety minutes of uninterrupted time, no notifications, phone out of sight, and everything prepared in advance. Liane calls this mise en place – like a chef setting up ingredients before cooking.

◼    No-input time and flow time are different things, and both matter. No-input time allows ideas to settle and the brain to recover. Flow time turns those ideas into output. Without the first, the second is very difficult to achieve.

◼    Protecting thinking time can feel illegitimate in organisations that equate visibility with busyness. Normalising it – at every level, not just at the top – is one of the highest-return cultural investments a leader can make.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

One Thing to Do This Week

Lynnaire closed the session by asking Liane for one practical action a senior leader could take immediately.

Liane Davey:

“Go and figure out the single most important outcome – for your business or your career – that you need to make headway on. Once you step back from the frenetic activity list and name the one thing that would actually move the needle, two things happen. You can suddenly see everything in your week that is not advancing that outcome – and you can start to clear it out. And you can see the opportunities for visibility that are directly connected to it. The outcome comes first. Everything else follows.”

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Session Transcript

Introduction

Lynnaire Johnston

Hello everyone, and a very warm welcome to today’s Link·Ability [IN]sights livestream. I’m your host, Lynnaire Johnston. Thank you so much for joining us.

We are today going to be talking to someone I have only recently met but am in awe of, because she has been focusing on exactly the kind of topics that I am interested in right now. If you have been following my work this year, you will know that I have been very interested in talking to leaders and business owners about how they can be visible to AI – a brand new subject for everyone, because AI is making huge inroads into all of our businesses.

I have recently been reading Liane’s excellent book, ThoughtLoad. Before we get into the conversation, a quick note: please put your questions into the comments as we go, because we are very keen to hear from you.

So let me set the scene. I hear from senior leaders all the time that they are too busy – too much going on, too much work – to bother about their external profile or their LinkedIn presence. I do not see LinkedIn as social media; I see it as a business tool. But many of the people I work with still treat it as optional. Even as LinkedIn is now the second most cited source of answers to business questions asked of AI – which means if you are not there, you will not be found.

How do we persuade those busy leaders that this matters? That is what our conversation today with Liane Davey, joining us from Toronto, Canada, is going to be about. Liane, hello and a very warm welcome.

Liane Davey

It is really nice to be with you, Lynnaire.

Lynnaire Johnston

Thank you for joining us. You are a New York Times bestselling author, an adviser to executives at organisations including Amazon and Walmart, and the author of three books: You First, The Good Fight, and now ThoughtLoad. Each has approached leadership from a different angle – how leaders think, work, and relate.

So let us start with ThoughtLoad. For anyone who has not yet read it, what is the concept, and why is it different from workload?

What ThoughtLoad Is – and Why It Matters

Liane Davey

I started noticing, as an organisation scientist, probably just as we came out of the pandemic, that work simply was not working. My clients were not accomplishing the things in their businesses they wanted to. Strategic projects were not getting finished, or were not creating return on investment. And yet everyone was burned out and stressed.

The line I kept hearing – “my workload is too heavy” – did not ring true for me, because I could not actually see people getting much work done at all. I could relate to that myself. I would feel very overwhelmed at the end of the day, exhausted, but I did not think it was because I had done too much work. That was when I started to realise it was not the workload that was killing us. It was the ThoughtLoad.

ThoughtLoad is the invisible tax on our performance. The load itself is two things: rising cognitive demands – decision fatigue, everything we are expected to pay attention to – and increasing emotional burdens, because our world is becoming increasingly dysregulated and there is a great deal triggering us all day. Now imagine that load carried by a body, mind and spirit that is, on many days, incredibly depleted. That is the denominator: your energy reserves. And the neuroscience is clear that each of those three elements amplifies and exacerbates the other.

A lot of people want to talk about how heavy their workload is. Leaders and employees are almost in an argument about it at the moment – employees say it is too high, leaders say they do not see it. When we shift the conversation to ThoughtLoad, both sides start to understand each other. When ThoughtLoad is high, it is very hard to produce work, but very easy to get burned out. And that combination is what most leaders are living with right now.

Lynnaire Johnston

That resonated immediately for me – so many interactions, so many distractions, so many calls on my time that some days I am like a deer in the headlights, just staring at the screen. You identify three different drivers: attention, emotions, and energy. Are they all equally important, or does one tend to dominate?

Liane Davey

On thoughtload.com there is a short assessment people can take to identify which of the three is largest for them. We now have around a thousand respondents, and we are seeing all three. For some people it is diluted attention that is really dragging them down; for others it is emotional weight; for others it is energy.

If I think like a psychologist, I would say that as soon as the emotional piece is significant, it tends to supersede the others – a strong emotional component will usually trump attention and energy. But energy sits in the denominator of the equation for a reason: if your energy is low, a load you could carry easily on a good day feels impossibly heavy. All three matter, and it is worth taking the audit to find out which is yours.

How Leaders React to ThoughtLoad

Lynnaire Johnston

You make the case that the real problem is not too much work, but too much cognitive and emotional demand. How do most leaders react when you put it to them that way?

Liane Davey

Mostly, people say yes. I have had feedback from people who say they have known they had a problem for a while but did not have a word for it. At a recent book launch in Ottawa, someone told me they did not know whether to laugh or cry, because it felt extraordinary to know this was a real thing and that they were not the only one feeling it.

The only resistance I encounter is usually from a more productivity-focused audience, who want to reframe it purely as cognitive load. I understand that. Cognitive load feels safe in a corporate context – it is measurable, it is rational. But if we downplay how much of our ThoughtLoad comes from emotional burdens – the anxiety about what AI is going to do to our world, the volatility in the business environment – we are missing something important. Humans have emotions in our operating system. Acknowledging that is not weakness; it is accuracy.

Distracted Attention: What It Looks Like in Senior Leaders

Lynnaire Johnston

Reading the book, I felt at times as though you had a camera in the corner of my office. You talk about attention as the first driver. What does distracted attention actually look like in a senior leader, and what are the signs?

Liane Davey

One sign is that they are not clear about what matters most. They have a list of eleven priorities and treat them all as equally urgent. The word priority comes from the Latin prioris, meaning first – and it existed in our language for five hundred years before anyone thought to make it plural, because you cannot have more than one first. The biggest mistake leaders make is believing that everything can be equally important at the same time.

The other issue is letting teams focus on activity without clarifying the outcome. There is a progression here: focus on activity, and all you become is busy. Focus on outputs, and you become productive. Only when you focus on outcomes do you become effective. Leaders right now are falling into the trap of enamoured productivity – especially now that AI makes it easy to produce volume. But producing a lot of things that do not move the needle is not helpful, and it is burning everyone out.

Lynnaire Johnston

And are people actually reading the reports they produce, or handing them to AI for a summary? I find that a real trap – you lose the actual knowledge of what is in the report.

Liane Davey

Exactly. And alongside distracted attention, we are losing depth of processing. As a psychologist, I know this is critical, not only for remembering things, but for being able to glean genuine insight from them. Digital retention after forty-eight hours is around twenty per cent. When we are distracted and diluted, scrolling through things rather than really reading them, we are not retaining information or generating insight from it. That is the full cost of fractured attention.

Why the Emotional Dimension Cannot Be Ignored

Lynnaire Johnston

Let us move to the emotional piece – less obvious than attention. Why does it matter so much for someone trying to do deep, focused work?

Liane Davey

Because we are emotional creatures – emotions are the base of our operating system. If something triggers us and tells us we are unsafe, everything else goes on hold. Fight, flight, freeze or fawn: the brain goes into a very primal mode. So if we are not noticing our emotions, processing them, and turning them into useful data, they move into feelings – and most people do not realise those are two different things.

Emotions are complex physiological responses: preconscious, non-negotiable. Feelings are the cognitive stories and narratives we layer on top to explain what we are experiencing. We need to become skilled at recognising an emotional response, extracting the data from it, and not letting it turn into a grand fiction that derails our work. As a leader, you also need to recognise emotional contagion spreading through your team – and get good at interrupting it before it takes out your group’s collective productivity.

Energy: The Overlooked Multiplier

Lynnaire Johnston

And the final piece – energy. You say that low energy is not a signal to do more; it is a signal to do less. That is counterintuitive for high achievers.

Liane Davey

Counterintuitive at most levels – but the truest high achievers are very good at this. Think about it: so much of our day is filled with input. Reading, podcasts, news on in the car, the television. There is almost never a time with no input. But the brain has a default mode network that activates when nothing else is coming in – that is the part of the brain that makes connections, generates insight, energises us, and processes and consolidates what we have learned. If you constantly have input, you are never accessing that network, and ThoughtLoad builds without any release.

Microsoft research, using EEG caps in meetings, showed that beta waves build continuously through back-to-back sessions, and it only takes ten minutes of genuine rest to return to baseline. Most of us never take that break.

One of the best investments you can make is what I call a two-week cleanse: five or six periods of an hour with zero input, spread over a fortnight. Yesterday I was in Ottawa for two presentations. Between them, I sat on a patio and had lunch with no input at all. It was remarkable how many ideas consolidated and how much more energised I felt going into the afternoon.

Lynnaire Johnston

I find that genuinely difficult. If I am walking, I am listening to a podcast. The only time I now have no input is in the garden – I have stopped listening to anything there, and I just hear the birds and my own thoughts.

Liane Davey

Even music is input. I have been recording a series of ideas for this, and one of my favourites is simply leaving out a jigsaw puzzle. Working on it for a while after dinner with no other input – it is extraordinary how many creative thoughts surface. Gardening is very high on the list too. Anything that gives your brain the chance to draw on all the raw material already in there that has not yet been exposed to the air.

Lynnaire Johnston

Why is it that our best ideas come in the shower?

Liane Davey

Exactly for that reason. For most of us, the shower is one of the only places left in our day with no input at all. The brain finally gets a moment to breathe. Hence the occasional second lather.

Debunking the “Too Busy” Myth

Lynnaire Johnston

Let us come to the heart of what I wanted to explore today. I work with senior leaders on their visibility – their LinkedIn presence, their thought leadership, their profile outside the organisation. They are often very well known inside their companies, but outside, nobody has heard of them, and AI has certainly not heard of them. I am constantly asking how we build that visibility, and they say they are too busy.

My argument is that this is the priority – one priority – if you want to advance your career, attract keynote invitations, network at the highest level, or be found by the right people. What is going on from a ThoughtLoad perspective when a leader says they do not have time for this, and how do we help them reframe it?

Liane Davey

I love it when someone tells me they do not have time, because I always think: who has more time than you? We all have exactly the same twenty-four hours. Busy just tells me that someone’s priorities are not clear – they have not yet figured out what matters and what does not. People use busy as a badge of honour, but to me it is really an admission of defeat. It means: I have not yet decided what is most important, so everything is fighting for the same space.

What I hear underneath it is that the person has not connected their visibility to an outcome they actually care about. For me, one outcome I am driving toward is more international keynote speaking. The time I spent on LinkedIn that led to Lynnaire finding my work and inviting me here to an international audience – time very well spent, because I was clear about the outcome. For someone else, it might be a book, or being seen as a thought leader with a specific audience. Once that link is made, everything changes.

I would also say: batching is far more efficient than trying to think about LinkedIn every day. I use a scheduling tool to plan content in advance – when I read an interesting article, I drop it into the scheduler and move on. Then once a month or so I take a couple of hours and turn that material into something useful and schedule it out. Is your career and credibility worth a couple of hours a month? Absolutely. But only if you have first been clear about why.

Lynnaire Johnston

That feels like the real answer. People like Warren Buffett or Simon Sinek, who are well known for their ideas, clearly take the time to develop those ideas. They cannot be producing on instinct alone.

Liane Davey

I think about it like a Netflix comedy special. The finished hour looks effortless – but those comedians have tried a two-minute bit at open mic nights over and over, tested it at home, refined it through a hundred performances. Three years of that becomes a one-hour special.

The same is true of a professional reputation. Simon Sinek did not start out charging large fees for a keynote. He started by noticing that people were asking the wrong question, and helped one person reframe it. That has grown over years into what it is today. What I love about LinkedIn is that it gives you exactly that kind of iteration at low cost. Post a small idea. See if it resonates. Let the comments shape it. Use it in a consulting engagement. Work it into a talk. That compounding is how authority actually gets built – not in a single moment, but over years of showing up consistently and genuinely.

I have been on LinkedIn for twenty years. My following has grown slowly, because every time I try to add something that is genuinely useful, high quality, and gives people a reason to stop scrolling. I have posted thousands of times and I pay attention to what works. That is the work.

Flow: What It Is and How to Create the Conditions for It

Lynnaire Johnston

Can you tell me about flow – what it is and how it works?

Liane Davey

Flow – the concept comes from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – is the state where you engage with work so fully that you lose all sense of time. It feels as though the ideas are coming through you rather than from you, your fingers cannot type fast enough to keep up. Highly creative, highly productive – and genuinely wonderful when it arrives.

But it does not arrive in eleven minutes. The average person’s work is interrupted every eleven minutes – and flow requires at least forty-five, ideally ninety, minutes of uninterrupted time. You also need notifications off, your phone out of sight, and what I call mise en place – like a chef setting up all their ingredients before they start to cook. Because if you go to start deep work and then have to open your email to find a document, I promise you, you will spend the next twenty minutes reading five unrelated messages and lose the thread entirely.

Most people would tell me they do not get a single period of flow in an average working week. That is a very significant waste. Not just of productivity, but of the kind of creative thinking that is increasingly the differentiator for senior leaders.

Lynnaire Johnston

Part of the challenge is that thinking time does not look like work to others. If you close your door for ninety minutes and someone asks what you are doing, “thinking” is not always an acceptable answer. As a society, we have moved away from valuing the time it takes to actually think things through.

Liane Davey

Absolutely – and the research is starting to bear out the cost of that. I am currently reading The Brain Never Sleeps, which looks at the value of dreaming. So much of the processing we are not doing during the day is being pushed into our dream life, because there is no space for it while we are awake.

It is worth distinguishing between no-input time and flow state. In flow, you are in output mode – things come out quickly, fingers fly. But without adequate no-input thinking time beforehand, it is very difficult to get into flow at all. The two need to be paired: soak time for ideas to settle, and then a protected block to turn those ideas into something that moves the needle. Both have to be present. Neither is optional.

On LinkedIn, Trust, and the Long Game

Lynnaire Johnston

Tell me about your own LinkedIn journey. You mentioned you have been on the platform for twenty years.

Liane Davey

I was a very early adopter – LinkedIn actually sent me one of those anniversary notifications. The colleague I engage with most on the platform is Ron Tite – if anyone does not follow him, his LinkedIn is genuinely best in class.

My journey started in consulting, where I would connect with the teams I worked with as a way of staying in touch. Recently, someone who was part of a team I worked with eleven years ago reached out. She had felt positively about the work we did together, but I had not spoken to her since. For ten years, every so often, she would just see something from me – a post, a new book announcement – and I would stay gently in her consciousness. This year, she hired me to work with her team. That is LinkedIn working exactly as it should.

Around ninety-five per cent of potential clients are not in a buying cycle at any given moment. Only five per cent are. But if, during the ninety-five per cent, they see something interesting from you, your name is already in mind when the five per cent moment arrives. That is the case for consistent, genuine presence – not for broadcasting constantly, but for showing up regularly with something worth reading.

One more thing I would add: commenting on other people’s work is just as valuable as posting your own. It signals that you are a participant in a real conversation, not just someone projecting into the void. Spend time finding content outside your immediate network – search a term, find someone doing interesting work, and engage with it meaningfully. That opens your algorithm and builds genuine relationships.

One Practical Step: What to Do This Week

Lynnaire Johnston

If a senior leader is watching this and recognising themselves in what we have discussed – high ThoughtLoad, not as visible as they should be – what is the one thing you would ask them to do this week?

Liane Davey

Figure out the single most important outcome for your business or career that you need to make headway on this week. Just that one thing. Once you step back from the frenetic, long to-do list and name the one outcome that actually matters, two things follow. You can suddenly see everything filling your week that is not advancing that outcome – and you can start to clear it out to make space. And you can see the opportunities – the comments to write, the posts to share, the conversations to have – that are directly connected to it. The outcome comes first. Once you are clear on that, everything else falls into place.

Resources and Where to Find Liane

Lynnaire Johnston

Before we close – remind us about the book, and where people can find you.

Liane Davey

The book is ThoughtLoad: Manage the Madness and Free Your Team to Do Great Work, available everywhere in print, Kindle and audiobook – and yes, I narrated it myself. Please connect with me here on LinkedIn – I would love to continue the conversation.

And do visit thoughtload.com. There are assessments to measure your own ThoughtLoad, including my favourite: identifying your own brand of overwhelm and pointing you to resources specifically for your type. There is also a link to ThoughtWorld, the community we are building – forty-five resources available now, with more on the way, and community functionality opening soon so people can share and learn from one another.

Lynnaire Johnston

ThoughtLoad the book, and thoughtload.com. Liane, I love your writing style – you are not afraid to talk about having made mistakes yourself, which I think is the mark of a genuine leader. Thank you so much for joining us from Toronto today. It has been an absolute joy. And thank you to everyone who watched and joined the conversation. We will see you again very soon.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability. Recorded as part of the Link·Ability [IN]sights livestream series.