I’m trying to walk more at the moment, and walking means alone time, pondering, and ideas… and more writing. The concept of cognitive load has been on my mind, which I think was triggered by a small, unremarkable moment.

I was trying to find a file. I couldn’t remember if it was in Teams, SharePoint, my email, or someone’s OneDrive link from three weeks ago. I checked four places, found it in the fifth, and by the time I opened it I’d completely lost the thread of what I was actually trying to do with it.

That’s not a productivity problem. I see that as an Executive Function problem.

What’s actually happening when you switch between tools

Most organisations I have worked with are running somewhere between eight and fifteen different tools on any given day.
Email. Teams. A project tracker. A document library. Maybe Slack or Google docs. Probably something for approvals. A CRM. And now, layered on top of all of that, one or more AI tools.

Each of those tools has its own logic, and also its own notification style. There are also unspoken norms about response times and formality. And every time you move between them, your brain doesn’t just change tabs, it changes mode.

That mode-switching has a name in cognitive science: task-set reconfiguration. And it costs something. Not a huge amount each time, but it’s not free. When you’re doing it dozens of times a day, those costs stack up quietly in the background.

The result isn’t always visible. It looks like mild distraction. A sense of never quite finishing anything. Arriving at the end of the day feeling exhausted without being able to point to why.

When frustration is actually your brain telling you something

There’s a moment a lot of people will recognise.

You’re in the middle of something. A Teams notification pops up. You glance at it – it’s a reply to a thread you were in two days ago, on a topic you’ve mentally filed away. You spend thirty seconds reading back through the context to remember where that conversation was at. You type a quick response. You go back to what you were doing.

And then you sit there for a moment, not quite sure where you were.

That flicker of frustration? It’s not impatience. It’s your prefrontal cortex telling you it just had to drop something to pick up something else, and it’s not entirely sure it got everything back.

Here’s what’s actually happening in that moment. Your working memory (the part of your Executive Function system that holds the “current task” in mind while you work on it) has a limited capacity. When an interruption arrives, your brain has to make a decision: hold what you had, or process the new thing. Most of the time, it tries to do both. And the cost of that is the slightly foggy, slightly irritable feeling of coming back to a task and having to rebuild your train of thought from scratch.

It’s not a focus problem. It’s a cognitive load problem.

And it’s not just notifications. People describe it in a lot of different ways:

“I feel like I’m constantly behind, even when I’m busy all day.”
That’s often the EF cost of context-switching, your brain is working hard, but across so many different modes that nothing feels finished or settled.

“I get anxious opening my email in the morning.”
That anticipatory anxiety is your brain pre-loading the uncertainty of not knowing what demands are waiting, and how many different systems and mental modes you’ll need to navigate before lunch.

“I lose my train of thought constantly and I don’t know why.”
Working memory interruptions. Every switch, between tools, between conversations, between tasks, asks working memory to release what it was holding. Sometimes it doesn’t fully reload.

“By 3pm I can’t make decisions properly.”
Cognitive fatigue from inhibitory control, the part of EF that filters distractions, suppresses irrelevant information, and keeps you on task, depletes across the day. By mid-afternoon, it has less to give.

The feelings are real signals. Frustration, confusion, that particular kind of tired-but-wired end-of-day feeling – they’re not personality traits or signs of poor time management. They’re your brain reporting back on the load it’s been asked to carry.

Understanding that doesn’t fix tool sprawl. But it does change how you interpret your own experience of it – and that matters, especially if you’ve spent time wondering why a full day of work leaves you feeling like you’ve run out of something you can’t quite name.

The “where does this live?” tax

One of the subtler EF costs of tool sprawl isn’t the switching itself, it’s the ambient uncertainty that comes with it.

When you don’t have a reliable mental map of where things live, your brain stays in a low-level search mode almost constantly. It’s a bit like having too many browser tabs open, except the tabs are running in the background of your working memory whether you notice them or not.

For people with ADHD or AuDHD, this isn’t just annoying. The working memory load of tracking multiple parallel systems, while also trying to do actual work, can be genuinely disabling. Not because of capability, but because the cognitive overhead leaves very little left over for the thing you were actually trying to think about.

AI: another tool, or a different kind of tool?

I’ve written before about how AI can support Executive Function – helping with initiation, working through fog, getting a half-formed thought onto a page. And I still think that’s true.

But I also think we’re not being honest enough about the other side of it.

Using AI well requires EF load too. You need to know what you want clearly enough to ask for it. You need to evaluate what comes back. You need to decide whether to trust it, iterate on it, or start again. And you’re doing all of that inside yet another interface, with its own logic and its own expectations.

If AI is introduced without reducing tool sprawl elsewhere, the net EF cost for many people doesn’t decrease, it shifts, and possibly increases.

A few things that actually help

This isn’t really a personal productivity problem, which means the solutions aren’t really personal either. But there are things worth trying at both levels.

At the team level:
Agreeing on what goes where is underrated. A simple decision, such as Teams for project conversation, email for external, SharePoint for documents, removes a whole category of ambient uncertainty. It sounds obvious. Most teams haven’t done it.

At the tool level:
Notification architecture matters more than people realise. Every notification is a forced attention redirect. Tools are largely designed to maximise engagement, not cognitive sustainability. Turning off non-essential notifications isn’t laziness, it’s protecting your working memory for the things that actually need it.

At the AI level:
The most useful thing AI can do for tool sprawl isn’t adding a new capability, it’s reducing the search burden. Using AI to surface information across systems, summarise threads, and triage what needs a response means fewer tab-switches, not more.

The part organisations need to own

Here’s what I keep coming back to. Tool sprawl is almost never an individual problem. It’s a governance and culture problem that shows up in individuals.

When organisations add tools without a clear rationale for what replaces what, they create cognitive debt across their workforce. That debt isn’t visible in any dashboard. It shows up as fatigue, errors, and a slow erosion of the focused thinking that most roles actually require.

The goal isn’t fewer tools for the sake of it. It’s tools with clear purpose, clear homes for information, and design that works with how humans actually think – not against it.

Because right now, a lot of modern work is structured in a way that asks every individual to carry the cognitive cost of organisational tool decisions. And that cost is real, even when it’s invisible.