Generally speaking, people call the maximum workload value of an individual who works continuously for 8 hours in normal environment without excessive fatigue as the maximum acceptable workload level. When determining the maximum acceptable workload level, individual differences and the nature of work should be considered. Generally speaking, the amount of physical labor is evaluated by subjective experiences such as fatigue, muscle aches and heaviness. The workload of mental workers takes emotional state, sleep quality and temper as the most direct indicators.

If a person's work makes him feel overwhelmed and depressed, or his work performance declines, the incidence of mistakes or accidents increases, and his personal satisfaction declines, it is necessary to consider whether the work is overloaded.

A reasonable workload does not mean that fewer tasks are better. If people's job requirements are far lower than their own work ability, they will not only get much work results, but also reduce work efficiency, increase discomfort and reduce personal accomplishment. This phenomenon is called "low workload".

In real life, for people with low workload, there are often inexplicable emptiness and melancholy, and they often feel incompetent and that life is worthless. They don't understand that the symptoms appear because their abilities are not fully exerted. Such people can consider changing to a more challenging job, or seek some part-time jobs to give full play to their energy.

For those who are overworked, their working state is often beyond their control, because they can't give up easily because of life or other reasons, which requires them to adjust their mentality and working style. Generally speaking, planned and step-by-step work can make you orderly and emotionally stable, while alternating physical and mental work will greatly improve your work efficiency.

Whether it is overwork or low efficiency, it is not conducive to maintaining people's high efficiency. Take people engaged in information work as an example. If the speed of information presentation exceeds people's processing ability, there will be information omission or signal distortion, slow response and so on. If the probability of information presentation is low, then a stimulus will appear for a long time, and then the time of signal perception or the possibility of signal omission will greatly increase.

It should be pointed out that when manual labor is overloaded, in addition to poor operational performance, it is more serious to cause personal injuries and other accidents; When the psychological load is out of balance for a long time, it is easy to suffer from various occupational diseases or induce physiological system dysfunction.