What is Herbert Simon information overload attention?

Herbert Simon information overload attention is a concept in personal epistemology: Adjust other parts of your system to support the bottleneck rather than running at their own pace.

Example: You identified deep work as your bottleneck in L-0945 and exploited it in L-0946 by eliminating distractions during your two-hour morning block. Throughput improved, but not as much as you expected. The reason: your non-bottleneck processes are still running at their own pace. Your research assistant sends you twelve articles every morning, but you can only process three during deep work. Your team schedules update meetings at 10:30 a.m., right when your deep-work block hits its stride. Your own email habit generates a backlog of half-formed commitments that crowd your attention before you sit down. Every upstream process is producing more than your constraint can consume, and the excess piles up as mental inventory — open loops, unread documents, unanswered obligations. So you subordinate. You tell your assistant to send exactly three articles, pre-filtered to your current project. You move the team meeting to 1 p.m., after deep work ends. You batch email to a single 4 p.m. session so no new inputs arrive before the constraint has finished processing. The deep-work block does not change. Everything around it changes to serve it.

This concept is part of Phase 48 (Bottleneck Analysis) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for bottleneck analysis.