Being the person everyone loops in early feels like status. Research on cognitive load suggests it is often just a burden with better packaging.
What the research says
Cognitive load theory, the finding that working memory has hard limits and gets overwhelmed past a certain point, is well established, and workplace-specific research on information overload keeps landing on the same pattern, more input without a clear framework for weighing it produces decision paralysis, not better decisions. Knowing about a conflict, a pending call, or a stakeholder's private position before you have any standing to act on it does not give you power. It gives you a thing to carry, with nowhere to put it down.
Why this gets mistaken for access
Being briefed early feels like trust, and sometimes it is. But information without the standing to act on it is just weight. The person who knows about six unresolved tensions across the org and can act on none of them is not more powerful than the person who knows about the two that are actually theirs to handle. They are just more burdened.
Where to start
Before accepting an early, informal heads up on something outside your actual scope, ask what you would specifically do with it.
If the honest answer is nothing, being looped in is not doing you a favor, it is handing you something to hold with no way to set it down. It is fine to say, plainly, that you would rather hear about something once it is closer to being yours to act on.
Reading which early briefings are actually worth accepting, versus which ones just add weight, is a judgment worth making before you say yes, not after you are already carrying it. What this gives you is the one question worth asking first.
There is a specific way to decline an early briefing that reads as protecting your focus rather than as disinterest, and it is worth having ready before the next one comes your way.