Cognitive load
Cognitive load is a measure of mental demand rather than time spent. Two people can each work eight hours and experience very different loads, depending on how fragmented their day was, how much context-switching it required, and how much of it involved decisions under pressure.
In a work setting, cognitive load tends to rise with meeting density, back-to-back scheduling, late-night or early-morning messages, and a high rate of switching between unrelated topics. It tends to fall with protected blocks of uninterrupted time and a predictable structure to the day.
Cognitive load cannot be observed directly. Systems that discuss it, including Sloane, infer it from proxies such as calendar structure and communication metadata, then check that inference against physiological signals like heart rate variability and sleep, where a wearable is connected.
It is worth being precise about the limits here. No tool can read what someone is thinking or how content of a message affected them, because that would require reading the content itself. Sloane deliberately avoids this and works from metadata and physiology, not from what people say to each other.
Related terms
- Working capacity, A person's current ability to take on demanding work, assessed against their own recent baseline rather than a fixed standard.
- Calendar load, A measure of how demanding a person's schedule is, based on meeting density, back-to-back bookings and time actually left free, rather than headcount of meetings alone.
- Context switching, The mental cost of moving between unrelated tasks or topics, which accumulates over a day and reduces the depth and quality of thinking available for any one of them.
- Telemetry friction, Sloane's metadata-only score of how fragmented and compressed a person's working day is, built from calendar and team-tool metadata such as meeting density, after-hours activity and message timing, never message content.