Field Notes

At 47 participants, the distribution looked normal. At 901, the tail behavior is clear: high decision load is not an edge case — it is a structural feature of knowledge work. High-load outliers are 3× more common than low-load. Retest stability holds at ~80%.

Remote workers report 22% higher unresolved-input burden vs. in-office peers. Location doesn’t change decision difficulty — it removes ambient resolution mechanisms that close open loops automatically.

Manual AI oversight is itself a decision load problem. BCG data shows 33% decision fatigue from AI oversight. When governance is constitutional — hard constraints and gate architecture — the human decision surface shrinks to escalations only.

Managers don’t make harder decisions than ICs. They make more of them. DLI data shows the gap concentrates in context switching and delegation — not in decision difficulty.

BCG surveyed 1,500 workers and found a 33% increase in decision fatigue from AI oversight. The variable is not AI itself — it is whether AI use adds decisions or removes them. That is a governance question.

Executive function research suggests people with ADHD face significantly higher decision load than neurotypical peers doing comparable work. The gap isn't effort — it's the number of unresolved decisions in working memory at any moment.

A dissertation isn't one task. It's thousands of unresolved decisions about scope, argument, advisor dynamics, and field positioning — all held simultaneously. Here's what the data shows about why ABD syndrome makes sense through a decision-load lens.

We re-tested 47 participants one week after their initial DLI. 81% of scores were stable — suggesting the measure captures something structural, not just mood. The 19% who improved shared three behaviors. The ADHD subgroup finding was unexpected.