Reclaiming focus in the AI era

What 120 senior leaders told me at Asana's Executive Forums in Sydney and Melbourne, and what the neuroscience says we can do about it.

Ambitious teams, overloaded brains

I've just spent two mornings with around 120 senior leaders at Asana's Executive Forums in Sydney and Melbourne. And the same thing came through in both rooms. Teams are highly ambitious and are adopting AI fast. But the greatest challenge I'm seeing as a neuroscientist is that their attention is getting pulled in a million directions, they're lacking time to think clearly and creatively, and they're experiencing severe brain fatigue.

At my lab, we are focused on how humanity is going through a rapid acceleration of demands on our brains. Speed on its own isn't the problem. If you're standing on a train cruising at a steady pace, you can balance pretty easily. But on a train that keeps getting faster and faster, you're going to struggle to stay on your feet. That's what's happening to work right now. Each year moves faster than the one before it, and AI is the fastest jump yet.

What could your team benefit most from improving? (Live audience votes, Sydney and Melbourne combined.)

• Stress resilience: 59

• Motivation levels: 56

• Navigating anxiety: 45

• Attention span: 40

Then I asked which human ability they would most like to upgrade. In both cities, strategic intelligence came out on top: the ability to think clearly and make smart decisions. And when I asked which human ability will matter most in the AI future, the answers that kept appearing were critical thinking, empathy and judgement.

So here's what I want to explore. Why leaders are losing their focus and access to clear thinking. How the way we work is making it worse. And how AI, used the right way, can actually give it back.

Why are attention and decision fatigue increasing?

Because in the modern workday, your body can be well rested but your brain can be exhausted.

You'll know the feeling. It's 5pm and there's a kind of tech-ache running across your forehead. You can't think clearly. Even deciding what to cook for dinner feels like too much. And yet, after ten hours on a screen, all you want to do is pick up your phone and scroll.

The science behind this centres on a neurotransmitter you've probably never heard of called glutamate. Glutamate is your decision-making molecule. It's released in your brain every time you make a decision, and our brains evolved to handle a fairly modest number of decisions a day. Today we're making thousands. Which message to reply to. Which app to open. Which model to use. Which email to answer first.

Researchers at the Paris Brain Institute (Wiehler et al., Current Biology, 2022) showed this happening in the lab. After a long day of cognitively demanding mental work, glutamate built up in the lateral prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that handles planning, problem solving and self-control. Your brain, being the clever system that it is, starts turning that region down to protect it. And in that moment, you lose access to long-term, thoughtful decision making and intentional use of your attentional muscles. You drift towards quick, easy, short-term choices instead.

Your body can be well rested, but your brain can be exhausted.

The leaders I met resonated with this big time. To bring it to life, I introduced them to Henry, a hunter-gatherer who suddenly wakes up in a modern office job. Within the first hour of his day he's facing a flood of WhatsApps, emails on the way to the bathroom, a bad sleep score from his wearable and an insane amount of admin. By 7:30am his prefrontal cortex is absolutely cooked. I asked the room which parts of Henry's day they related to: (Live audience votes, Sydney and Melbourne combined.)

• No proper breaks: 60

• Admin overload: 56

• Social media addiction: 53

And it's breaking our attention too. Every time we jump from an email to a chat to a meeting, part of our attention stays stuck on the last task. Researchers call this attention residue (Leroy, 2009), and the more we switch, the less of our brain is fully present for the task in front of us. Add a glutamate-overloaded prefrontal cortex and the quick dopamine hits our phones offer, and it's no surprise attention span was one of the top things leaders said their teams need to improve.

This isn't a personal failing of us all. It's the predictable result of a working day that never lets the strategic part of your brain switch off.

How do fragmentation and coordination overload make it worse?

Here's something that changed how I understand our relationship with technology. When we check our emails, Slack or WhatsApp over and over again, it often isn't for pleasure. It's for safety.

Your nervous system's number one job is keeping you safe through predictability. For our ancestors, that meant checking the land around them for threats. Today, our inboxes have become our new safety map. Every refresh is a micro check: is my boss okay, is the client okay, has something gone wrong? I'd finish work, try to relax on the sofa, and still feel this uncontrollable pull to check my emails, even though there was nothing I could practically do until the morning.

Now think about what fragmented work does to that system. When priorities are spread across emails, chats, documents and meetings, and nobody is quite sure who owns what, the brain never gets the all-clear. So it keeps checking, and every check pulls our focus away from the work that matters most. Every unclear owner, every update you have to chase, every decision left hanging, is another open loop your prefrontal cortex is holding. And every one of those small decisions is drawing on the same resource leaders need for the big ones.

Every unclear owner, every update you have to chase, is another open loop your brain is holding.

This isn't just individual. Asana's Australian AI Execution Index 2026 found that while 94% of Australian organisations are already experimenting with AI, only 22% qualify as AI Executors seeing measurable improvements across multiple outcomes. Executives rate their organisation's AI execution at 75.2 out of 100. Their knowledge workers rate it at 58.2. To me that gap says the people closest to the work are still carrying much of the coordination load in their heads.

And the leaders in the room are carrying a lot right now. When I asked the Melbourne audience what change they're personally adapting to, the top answers were restructuring or new leadership (27), AI transforming work (26) and elevated levels of overwhelm (23).

How can AI and better work orchestration help leaders reclaim focus?

This is the part that excites me most. AI can either accelerate the overload or relieve it. It all comes down to what we hand over.

The team chats. The messages. The status updates. The huge quantities of information we're currently expected to keep up with. AI is increasingly able to take that and turn it into something far less fatiguing. This is where work orchestration comes in. When work, owners and priorities are orchestrated in one shared system that both people and AI can see, the coordination load moves off people's brains and into the system. The brain no longer has to keep scanning for problems. It can finally get the all-clear.

In practice, that means:

• Longer stretches of focus: fewer pings, chases and handoffs mean fewer switches, so attention can stay on one task long enough to do deep, strategic work.

• Fewer open loops: clear owners and visible progress mean people stop carrying unresolved tasks around in their heads.

• Fewer status meetings: when AI keeps everyone up to date, meetings can be about solving problems and connecting, not reporting.

• Faster groundwork: AI can gather research, summarise long threads and draft first versions, so your freshest thinking goes on judgement and original ideas.

But there's one line I'm really careful about. Offload the admin, never the critical thinking, and specifically never your unique human judgement skills. In an MIT study, people who wrote essays with an AI assistant showed weaker brain connectivity than people who used their own brains, and most couldn't recall a single line of what they'd just written. The aim isn't to think less. It's to clear space so you can think better.

Offload the admin, never the critical thinking.

And I think we should open our minds to something bigger here. There may be a future where AI actually liberates us from our screens. Where you can step away from your desk, go for a walk, have meetings on the move, and still have your ideas captured and your work moving with advanced AI notetakers, like the amazing one Asana have built. That's how AI can make us more human.

Three brain experiments leaders can start this week

At both forums, I gave leaders three Team Brain Experiments, one for each human ability. Each one is simple, takes less than 15 minutes, and is made easier by letting AI carry part of the load.

The science behind them:

• Movement meetings. In Stanford studies (Oppezzo and Schwartz, 2014), walking boosted creative ideas by around 60%. Walks were also the number one place leaders said they have their best ideas (66 votes).

• Analogue brainstorms. Handwriting creates far more widespread brain connectivity than typing. Your prefrontal cortex needs the chance to wrestle with a problem until the answer is born.

• Significant conversations. A phone on the table lowers empathy (Misra et al., 2014), and the more questions people ask, the more they're liked (Huang et al., 2017). Be interested, not interesting.

One more thing for the high achievers who think rest is lazy. Athletes rest their bodies from the field. Computer workers must rest their brains from the screens. A 10 minute movement meeting, a significant conversation, an analogue brainstorm, gives the prefrontal cortex a chance to reset from the digital overwhelm.

The one action to take today: Pick one challenge this week, put the screens to the side, let AI capture the notes, and solve it with your intelligent brains, and nothing else.

About Tj Power and DOSE Lab

Tj Power is a neuroscientist and the founder of DOSE Lab, a neuroscience research lab helping people understand how their brain works so they can build a brain that will succeed in the future. He is the Sunday Times No.1 bestselling author of The DOSE Effect and has delivered more than 650 keynotes to organisations including Amazon, Salesforce, Accenture and the NHS.

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