The Overhead Tax and Pull-Based Workload
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Newport's mechanism for why a full plate destroys output even when you are disciplined about single-tasking. Every project you have committed to generates an overhead tax: emails you must send, planning and standing meetings you must attend, and the cognitive load of knowing it is there. Fifteen projects means fifteen taxes, and before long most of your time and mental energy goes to maintaining ongoing projects while almost nothing gets finished — which puts you further behind and adds more projects, the overhead spiral. The fix is borrowed from software teams: keep two or three projects genuinely active, park everything else in a holding tank where it levies no tax at all, and pull the next item in only when something finishes. Within a single working stretch, the count is one, because the brain's planning and motivation loop cannot hold more.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Count everything you have committed to
List every project currently living on your plate, including the ones you are not touching this week. The count itself is the diagnostic.
- 2
Price the overhead tax on each
For every project, name the recurring administrative cost it generates whether or not you work on it: the emails, the planning meetings, the standing meetings, the background awareness that it exists.
Pro tip The tax is invisible in a calendar audit because it looks like ordinary meetings and inbox time.
Watch out Ignore this and you enter the overhead spiral, where maintenance consumes the time that would have finished the work.
- 3
Cap active projects at around three
Newport's own answer is that roughly three active projects at a time is best. Everything beyond that cap is not started, it is queued.
- 4
Put the rest in a holding tank
Everything not active sits in an explicit holding tank. While it is in there it is not in your view and you pay no overhead tax on it — the tank is what makes the cap real rather than cosmetic.
Pro tip Revisit the tank on a fixed cadence, such as a six-week reassessment, rather than continuously.
- 5
Work on exactly one thing at a time
Within a working stretch, work one thing until done, then move on. The planning and motivation system that builds an internal model from episodic memory cannot hold more than one thing, which is why bouncing to the inbox is so costly and why seeing fifteen open tasks causes task freeze.
Pro tip Batch email into a block after deep work rather than interspersing it.
- 6
Pull, don't push
When something finishes, pull the next item out of the tank. Nothing is assigned into a plate that is already full.
- 7
Make it a team system, not a personal habit
Organisations should stop distributing all work informally onto individual plates and instead track where work comes from, what is waiting, and how many things each person is holding. Software teams already run this way; Newport argues the rest of knowledge work should too.
Pro tip Add structured rituals — docket-clearing meetings, office hours — instead of all-day email and Slack.
Watch out Leaving each person to figure out their own load privately is what generates resentment.
In the wild
Ali's team had been in the mode of listing everything they could possibly do and distributing it. The wish list included book summaries of every book he had read on the website, a Patreon, their own keyboard, even their own band. Last week they switched to the software model: those ideas go on a bucket list that is explicitly not now, and for the next six weeks the team works only on a small named set. At the six-week mark they reassess the bucket list and decide what gets pulled in.
→ Within half an hour the change freed up a lot of cognitive overload, because people stopped carrying items they had no intention of starting.
When knowledge workers went remote, the shift added roughly 20% more tasks — figuring out how to run everything remotely — and destroyed the efficiencies of in-person work. A three-minute hallway exchange about tomorrow's client became a meeting, and since the smallest interval on a calendar is thirty minutes, five minutes became thirty. Newport's readers wrote to say they did not know when to go to the bathroom because it was back-to-back for seven hours. His reading: the tax had already been running just below the ceiling for years, and a 20% bump made it unavoidably visible.
→ All time available for actual work disappeared, exposing how close to the limit the pre-pandemic overhead already was.
Common mistakes
Time-slicing instead of cutting
Carefully assigning mornings to one project, afternoons to another and Tuesdays to a third does not help past a certain count, because the overhead tax is levied by commitment, not by attention.
Keeping the queue on people's plates
If unstarted work sits with the individual rather than in a holding tank, it keeps generating emails, meetings and cognitive load — you have the cap without any of its benefit.
Treating workload as a personal failing
When productivity is left to the individual, an overloaded plate becomes a private battle against yourself over working Saturday, rather than a system parameter a team can debate and change.
From the transcript
“there's something called an overhead tax that every project that you have committed to generates”
“So I honestly think like three active projects at a time is best and obviously when you're working on something, you're only working on that…”
“So we cannot be thinking about making decisions on or making progress on more than one thing at a time.”
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