FawzoozHow much the work is asking of a head: eight statements over three sections, and the index that reads them against how often the hour is interrupted.
Each one is rated from 1 to 5. One is worded the other way round, and the page handles that.
How often an average hour is interrupted — the second half of the index.
A load score from 1 to 5, an index from 1 to 25, and the section that is carrying most of it.
The tool
Each statement is rated from 1 to 5. Honesty is more use here than hope, and the answers stay in this browser.
1 = strongly disagree · 5 = strongly agree
What this is, and what it is not.
This is a pilot screening tool, not a clinical instrument, and it has not been statistically validated yet: validation on samples across sectors is in preparation. It tells you where to look and what to talk about; it diagnoses nobody. If the answers worry you, that is a conversation to have with a person, not with a page.
Take part in the validationThe pressure
Firewalls, zero trust, intrusion detection: we spend on all of it, and leave the human mind open to a flood of information and worry that never stops arriving. Three pressures do most of the damage.
The routine tasks are gone, and with them the quiet minutes a mind used to rest in. What is left is decision after decision, each one high-stakes. The day is shorter on work and longer on strain.
An unfinished task stays active in the head. With continuous deployment, a phone that never sleeps and a backlog without a bottom, the loop stays open long after the laptop is shut, and it feeds on the hours meant for rest.
Fatigue does not stay in the person. It shows up as the click on the phishing link, as the defect that reaches production, and as the resignation that takes years of institutional memory with it.
What it costs
It arrives as breaches, as defects, and as people who leave. Three numbers from outside this page, for an internal audit to be read against.
of breaches involve a non-malicious human element
Verizon DBIR, 2024
of employees say AI tools added to their workload
Upwork Research Institute, 2024
annual salary to replace one employee who leaves
Gallup, 2019
The controls
Each one answers a named risk, and each one is written so a manager can put it in place on Monday rather than agree with it on Friday.
A right to disconnect that the tooling enforces, and fifteen minutes before logout to write down what is still open. What is written down, the brain can sleep on.
Answers: Cognitive overload · the open loop
The hierarchy written down: the human is the architect and the reviewer, the model is the drafter. Juniors try the problem by hand before they ask, so the skill survives the help.
Answers: Displacement anxiety · impostor feeling
Breaks away from the screen, and sessions where the senior people tell the room what the model got wrong and what they got wrong. Safety is built by whoever admits first.
Answers: Digital isolation
Where the authority comes from
Wellbeing sits with human resources, the models sit with technology, and the gap between the two departments is where the harm collects. The protocol closes it by reading three international frameworks as one.
Guidance inside ISO 45001 for managing psychosocial risk at work.
Application: It is what lets you say that human capacity sets the pace of the work, not the speed of the model.
The management system for artificial intelligence inside an organisation.
Application: Psychological harm is written into the risk assessment, and human oversight is written into the job.
A recommended practice for measuring what intelligent systems do to human wellbeing.
Application: It is the move from feeling to measuring: agency, competence, and the index this page calculates.
About the assessment
From my white paper The Cognitive Firewall (v1.1, 2026), Appendix A, which sets the eight statements and the thresholds used here.
Elgendi, M. F. (2026). The Cognitive Firewall (White Paper, Version 1.1), Appendix A: Digital Workforce Cognitive Load Assessment. www.fawzooz.ai
