What does it mean that monitoring overhead?

Monitoring itself costs attention and energy — the overhead must be justified by the value it provides.

Example: You decide to track your daily habits with meticulous precision: sleep quality on a 1-10 scale, time in bed, time asleep, number of awakenings, morning energy on a 1-10 scale, mood at four checkpoints, water intake by the glass, steps, exercise minutes, calories, macros, screen time by app, deep work hours, shallow work hours, reading pages, meditation minutes, journaling words, and social interaction quality. The tracking itself takes forty minutes a day — twenty in the morning filling in yesterday's data, twenty at night logging the day. After three weeks you notice something: you are stressed about whether you tracked accurately, anxious when your numbers dip, and spending your deep work hours analyzing your deep work metrics instead of doing deep work. The monitoring has consumed the resource it was supposed to protect. You are not living a more examined life. You are living a more measured life, and the measurement is the main activity.

Try this: Pick three things you currently monitor about yourself — habits, metrics, dashboards, journal prompts, app notifications, anything that requires your attention to observe your own performance. For each one, estimate: (a) how many minutes per day or week the monitoring consumes, (b) the last time the monitoring data actually changed a decision or behavior, and (c) what would happen if you stopped monitoring it for thirty days. If the answer to (b) is 'I cannot remember' or the answer to (c) is 'probably nothing,' that monitoring activity is overhead without corresponding value. Drop it for thirty days and see whether anything meaningful degrades.