What does it mean when the budget is exceeded?#
An exceeded attention budget means the system feeding that person is badly designed. Industries that run on human vigilance learned this the hard way. The ISA-18.2 alarm management standard treats about one alarm per ten minutes per operator as very likely to be acceptable and two as the manageable maximum. Google's SRE teams cap on-call load at two incidents per twelve-hour shift. Agent platforms rarely set any limit, so review queues grow until approvals become alert fatigue with a signature.
How do you bring a decision queue back within budget?#
Reduce the incoming work. Improve the evidence, so each decision takes less time. Move the decision to someone with the context to make it faster. Or automate a check that has proved reliable: automation follows trust in practice.
Re-tiering is legitimate when the consequence really is lower. Lowering a tier only to empty the queue hides the work without removing it.