If your IT team is juggling too many tasks, cognitive overload can quickly creep in. As a result, productivity drops, motivation wanes, and eventually some team members start to drop out, increasing the pressure on everyone else. Naturally, you want to avoid this. But how can you spot the warning signs before things go too far?
Imagine you’re an IT professional building an e-commerce application, and you’re responsible for the invoicing flow. You know exactly what the process should look like and how to structure it, and you’re able to focus deeply on the task. This is known as germane cognitive load: the mental effort directly related to your task. This load remains manageable because you’re comfortable with the work environment and your tools, and your objectives are clear.
But then comes the extraneous cognitive load: mental effort caused by external factors that don’t contribute to the execution of the task at hand. For example, before deploying the application to production, you might need to create a ticket with the infrastructure department, coordinate with another module owner, and so on. Suddenly, you’re busy with everything except creating value. When that external burden is so heavy that you can no longer concentrate on your actual task, things start to go wrong. Then the mental load becomes unsustainable.
Recognizing the signs
You can’t simply ask your team members how mentally overloaded they feel and expect an accurate answer. However, the signs are usually visible in behavior. For instance, you’ve probably sat through meetings where developers are present but distracted — replying to messages or fixing unrelated issues rather than focusing on the meeting. This is a clear sign of a heavy external cognitive burden.
Another telltale sign is employees who complain about being busy all day but achieve little progress toward their actual goals. What they’re actually doing is constantly putting out fires while their real work is neglected. We often see this with infrastructure engineers as their role gradually expands beyond what’s manageable.
Even job ads can reveal the issue. If they contain a long list of skills and responsibilities, you know what’s going on — they likely want to replace someone who has burned out under too much pressure. The reflex is to find someone who can “handle it all” — but that only perpetuates the vicious cycle.
Time to act
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s worth pausing to reassess. Too much pressure is unsustainable in the long run. You lose talented, experienced people because they realize they can thrive elsewhere or simply because they burn out. This is particularly true of the younger generation professionals, who place a high value on their mental health and work-life balance.
So how do you ease the strain? You could, for example, reorganize your IT department into smaller, domain-focused teams that still communicate closely. This structure encourages focus while reducing the external cognitive burden. Team members deliver more work that adds real value, and you’ll attract more new young team members, who are the talent of tomorrow.