What is monitoring fatigue?

Monitoring fatigue is a concept in personal epistemology: Too much monitoring data overwhelms attention and leads to ignoring signals that matter. The solution is not more data — it is fewer, sharper signals routed to the right layer of attention.

Example: You built a personal productivity system with twelve dashboards: one for habits, one for sleep, one for deep work hours, one for email response time, one for reading pace, one for exercise, one for journaling streaks, one for weekly reviews, one for project velocity, one for financial tracking, one for social engagement, one for learning goals. For the first two weeks, you checked them all. By week three, you were checking three. By week six, you were checking none. A genuine downward trend in deep work hours — the metric that mattered most — went unnoticed for two months because it was buried in a wall of dashboards you had trained yourself to ignore.

This concept is part of Phase 28 (Agent Monitoring) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent monitoring.