Declutter your brain: get more done with less thinking

Essential concept: clearing your mental load

Welcome, new readers — I’m thrilled you’re here!

This week’s post is the continuation of a series on essential systems concepts. The first was about leverage (Why cleaning before the cleaners come is a great use of time), and this week we’ll talk about lifting the mental load.

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These days a lot of the discussion around “mental load” relates to (generally women’s) overwhelm in parenting and domestic matters. That is something very real and worth diving into, but for now I’m just going to talk about the mental load in a general sense—the “my brain feels overloaded and I keep forgetting things” sense.

I’ll start by saying: I’m not diagnosed with anything cognitively, but I really struggle with working memory. I cannot keep new information inside my brain for any measurable amount of time, I don’t make inferences easily (filling in gaps around incomplete info…