One of my clients – a senior leader in people and culture at a large law firm – said something recently that stopped me in my tracks. We were talking about the culture of law firms and she looked at me and said:
“When you think about it, everything we sell – our advice, our knowledge, our problem-solving – it’s all brain power. We are literally selling the output of our people’s brains.”
“And yet the way people are expected to work is actually sabotaging that.”
She’s right on both counts. And yet… most law firms – and most professional services businesses for that matter – are unknowingly running environments that are fundamentally sabotaging the very thing they’re selling.
The irony is staggering when you think about it. You invest significantly in hiring the brightest people. You pay them well for their expertise, their judgment, their ideas. And then you create a culture and environment that makes it genuinely hard for them to do their best thinking.
Now, I’m not suggesting this is intentional. Of course it isn’t. Most leaders who haven’t studied neuroscience have no reason to connect the dots between common workplace habits and cognitive performance. That’s completely understandable – neuroscience isn’t your day job.
But it is mine. So let’s talk about what’s actually happening.
The Productivity Paradox: How Modern Work Is Quietly Sabotaging Your Knowledge Workers
Here are some of the most common ways of working that are undermining cognitive performance – and they’re probably happening in your organisation right now.
The Always-On Culture
The brain needs stillness to do its best creative and strategic thinking. Not just at night – during the day too. And ideally away from a desk. There’s solid neuroscience behind why great ideas come in the shower, on a walk, or out for a run. I personally run with my phone purely because my best thinking happens then – and I like to record a quick voice memo before the thought disappears.
One of my clients got a whiteboard for his shower wall. Not because he’s quirky (well maybe a little), but because he recognised that was when his brain was actually getting the best thought bubbles.
But here’s the thing. We’re not even giving people those micro moments of stillness during the workday. People are checking their phones while waiting for their lunch order. While riding the elevator. While, let’s be honest, in the bathroom. The brain needs those tiny pockets of quiet throughout the day to recharge. Instead, we’re filling every spare second with stimulus. And we wonder why people feel mentally exhausted.
The Expectation of Instant Responses
When you create a culture where people are expected to respond to everything immediately, you are – whether you mean to or not – creating a culture where deep focus is impossible.
The research on this is pretty confronting. Operating in a state of continuous partial attention – where you’re perpetually monitoring messages while trying to do other work – reduces productivity by around 20%, increases error rates by approximately 300%, and at least doubles cognitive energy drain over just a two-hour period – let alone a whole day of doing this.
But here’s where it gets even more interesting – and frankly, more concerning. Research supports that the constant state of alert created by notification culture is actually changing the way we breathe. Literally. When we’re perpetually braced for the next ping, we tend to breathe more shallowly and from the chest rather than the diaphragm. And that matters far more than most people realise.
Chest breathing – especially when it’s shallow and frequent – signals stress to the brain. Not because anything is necessarily wrong, but because that’s how the brain interprets that breathing pattern. The result is an overactive stress response that means your people are spending a disproportionate amount of their cognitive energy just managing a low-grade state of stress – rather than actually doing the work. On top of all the productivity losses we’ve already talked about, that’s a significant double whammy.
Deep focus – the ability to concentrate fully on one thing at a time – is what gets more done in less time with less effort. Everything else is just noise that costs you and your people dearly.
Confusing Multitasking with Productivity
This one comes in so many forms. Doing emails after the kids are in bed while half-watching Netflix. Being in a meeting that’s not really relevant to you and trying to get other work done at the same time. Walking between meetings while listening to a detailed podcast.
None of this is multitasking in any meaningful sense. The brain doesn’t actually do two things at once – it rapidly switches between them, and every switch costs cognitive energy. The net result is that people are draining their most valuable resource while feeling like they’re being efficient. They’re not. They’re just getting tired faster.
And before you say it – yes, this includes listening to complex podcasts while working. If it’s genuinely engaging your brain, your brain is not fully on what’s in front of you. You’re using the term “working” very loosely in that scenario.
AI Might Be Helping Less Than You Think
This is a newer one, but I’m already seeing it. People are typing a prompt into an AI tool and then – because they genuinely cannot sit still for 15 seconds – half-pivoting to something else while they wait for the response. It sounds minor. It’s not. Every unnecessary switch is another small withdrawal from the cognitive energy bank.
AI has the potential to be an extraordinary productivity tool. But if we’re using it in a way that feeds our fragmented attention habits rather than helping us focus, we’re not really unlocking its potential.
Scrolling Is Not a Brain Break
I hear this one a lot. “I just have a quick scroll to switch off.” But scrolling is one of the most cognitively demanding things you can do in a passive-looking way. Your brain is processing a rapid, constant stream of new information – images, text, video, emotion, opinion – all in quick succession. That’s not rest. That’s a high-speed cognitive workout disguised as downtime.
If people are coming back from lunch and feeling more tired than when they left, this is likely a significant contributor.
Why should this be a priority?
The pressure to do more with less is not going away. If anything, it’s intensifying. The businesses that are going to outperform in this environment are the ones whose people can think better, focus deeper, and sustain that performance without burning out.
The challenge is that burnout doesn’t always look like someone collapsing. More often it looks like a slow, gradual decline in the quality of thinking, decision-making and creativity across your team. By the time it’s obvious, the cost is already significant.
And here’s the part that many senior leaders miss – this isn’t just a wellbeing issue. This is a performance and profitability issue. When your people can’t focus, can’t think clearly, and are operating on depleted cognitive energy, the quality of their work – and therefore your business outcomes – suffers. It’s that direct.
What Can You Actually Do About It?
I’m not going to suggest you overhaul your entire culture overnight, because that’s not realistic. But progress doesn’t require perfection. Small, deliberate changes at a leadership level can make a meaningful difference. Here’s where to start:
- Get educated on the neuroscience first. You can’t lead change you don’t understand. When leaders genuinely understand why these habits are undermining performance, the motivation to change them shifts from “we should probably do something about wellbeing” to “this is a business imperative”. That’s a very different conversation.
- Rethink your meetings. If someone feels the urge to check their emails during a meeting, there is something fundamentally wrong with that meeting. Are the right people in the room? Is there a clear purpose? Could it be an email? Fewer, better meetings free up cognitive space for actual deep work.
- Give people protected focus time. Even one hour a day where notifications are off and people aren’t expected to respond immediately is a genuinely powerful shift. That doesn’t mean urgent things can’t get through – it means you have a clear channel for genuine urgency, and everything else can wait.
- Separate urgent from important. Consider having one person monitoring time-sensitive communications at a time, then rotating. That way someone is always across what’s truly urgent, while others can genuinely focus. It’s a small structural change with a disproportionately positive impact.
- Model the behaviour yourself. If you’re checking your phone every 30 seconds in meetings, or responding to Slack at midnight, you are setting the cultural norm whether you mean to or not. Small things matter – encourage people to put their phones more than arm’s length away during meetings. Model what it looks like to catch an elevator without staring at a screen.
- Start where you can with time zones. I had a client managing a global team who was running late-night calls four nights a week. We got that down to three nights – and removed Friday evenings entirely. That single change made a significant difference to his energy and ability to focus when he needed to. You can’t fix everything at once, but you can always do something.
The Bottom Line
If your business model depends on the quality of your people’s thinking – and if you’re reading this, it almost certainly does – then protecting your people’s cognitive capacity is not a nice-to-have. It’s one of the most important things you can do as a leader.
The good news is that you don’t need to overhaul everything at once. You just need to start. Understand the neuroscience, make one or two small changes, and watch what happens to energy, focus and output.
The businesses winning right now aren’t necessarily the ones with the most people or the biggest budgets. They’re the ones where people can actually think.
Join us to get some more insights on our next 20:20 session Clearer views on the neuroscience of high performance, a free webinar we run monthly, and sign up on our website today.