One of the things I’ve paid more attention to in the past several years is cognitive load.
Cognitive refers to the brain.
Load refers to workload.
Cognitive load is how much work your brain has to keep track of and think about at any given time.
The reality is that your brain has limits. You can only pay attention to so many things at the same time.
When I work with CEO clients on strategic planning, they often face prioritization decisions.
In addition to not having enough personnel or capital to pursue all opportunities available, there is an attention-span limit.
Even if the senior executives have enough time in their schedule to work on additional projects, they sometimes don’t have the attention span to focus on so many things at once.
It’s better to focus on three major initiatives this quarter and get them 100% done than to work on 30 initiatives and get 10% of each done.
Recognizing you have a cognitive load has several implications.
You realize it is something you must manage.
For example, I pay 90% of my bills on automatic payment. This creates a smaller mental load for me to keep track of the dozen different bill payment deadlines. Most of my bills — like electricity, water, trash, and internet — are fairly predictable.
Instead of manually paying each bill, I simply look at the autopay notification email I receive. I glance at the amount. If it looks right, I delete the email and move on. Very easy.
When I work with CEOs, I will often have them create a CEO dashboard. This is typically a color-coded spreadsheet with one to two dozen key performance metrics. Each metric is reported each month. Each metric has a goal for the month.
When a goal is met, the metric is color-coded in green.
When a goal is missed by less than 10%, the metric is color-coded in yellow.
When a goal is missed by more than 10%, the metric is color-coded in red.
Every week, the CEO glances at the dashboard. If everything is green, all is good for the week, and they move on to other work.
If the entire dashboard is bloody red, the CEO knows there’s a major problem and must investigate why.
It is rare that everything on a dashboard is all green or all red.
The far more common situation is that some metrics (hopefully, most metrics) are green, but there are a few that are yellow or red.
(There is no shortage of problems in a business.)
It makes sense for a CEO to devote more time to the parts of the business that are having problems. It’s too much work to do a “deep dive” analysis into every part of the business every single week. There are too many details to keep track of.
It’s far more effective to identify the “hot spots” or problem areas of a business. This allows one to dive more deeply into those areas — while simply monitoring the other areas via the dashboard.
The same applies to you.
It’s hard to do everything in your life and career at the same time. New things typically require a lot more effort to get started. Other areas of your life that are well-established don’t require much energy.
I recommend delineating your life into two parts: Active vs. Passive. What parts of your life require active energy and attention from you? What parts require only passive energy?
You want to shift as many of the necessary-but-nonstrategic parts of your life into the “passive” category of your life.
For example, with a few of my closest friends, we set a recurring Google meeting for when we talk by phone. My friends are strategically important to me.
Emailing back and forth four times to find a single time to talk this week (and then repeating the process next week) isn’t important to me. One email exchange to set up 200 phone calls reduces my and their cognitive load.
An acquaintance of mine is the author of several New York Times bestselling books. He’s often on deadline for his writing projects and finds it hard to meet with friends. He hosts a weekly dinner on Friday nights at the exact same time at the exact same restaurant with the exact same number of seats reserved.
When people ask to socialize with him, he simply invites them to his weekly Friday dinner to catch up with everyone as a group. It’s a way to meet his strategic goals of meeting writing deadlines and staying in touch with people but with minimum cognitive load.
Fellow Stanford alum Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You How to Be Rich, has applied this idea of minimizing cognitive load to managing personal finance.
From a purely financial perspective, his ideas around finance management are sound, largely empirically based, but not new. What is new is how much he appreciates human psychology and the use of automation to reduce the cognitive load of executing a good finance-management strategy.
He is a strong proponent of using numerous automated transfers where, once set up, if you’re lazy and do nothing, by default, you will automatically hit your financial goals. After the initial setup, there is no cognitive load. I’ve been using this approach for the last several years, and it has worked out really well for me.
Figure out what’s important to you. Keep that as your priority. Ruthlessly attack your cognitive load wherever you can — especially in the unimportant or administrative sides of the important areas of your life.
In what areas do you feel you need to reduce your cognitive load? Comment below to let me know.
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8 thoughts on “Cognitive Load”
Brandon – Glad the article was thought provoking. You might take a look at time “batching” via author Tim Ferriss. It’s the idea of grouping certain tasks together and doing it all tasks of a certain type all at once. For example, I have software that routes all my non urgent emails into a single separate email folder. I go through all of those once a week (instead of 5 minutes, 8 times per days, 7 days per week). Not sure if it will be applicable to you, but thought I’d mention the concept.
Thanks Victor for the another great article on reducing the cognitive load. I recently read an article on how to reduce a noise in your life and achieve more, I think it resonates well with your topic on the cognitive load. I started using concept such as don’t spent energy on things which doesn’t add value to your life. For example, I stopped listening to a radio program if I’m not interested in the topic and it helps lot. thanks!!
Misba – that’s a great example of being thoughtful about where your time and attention goes.
I need to reduce my cognitive load with stuff outside of work.
Living in a metropolitan area (NYC) and about an hour from city itself, I attempt balancing work I need to do after hours (commuting 2-3 days a week) with both socializing with friends in NYC on weeknights/weekends and other personal responsibilities either recurring (taking care of a younger brother with Autism) or ad-hoc (e.g., setting up a will). I feel that I’m almost always at my threshold of my cognitive load as a result.
I try my best with planning these responsibilities as if they’re projects with their own swimlanes, milestones, etc. Even with adding in contingency for each ‘project’ (because I want to add buffer time since some tasks wind up taking longer than anticipated), I still feel I’m not able to accomplish all that I want. Perhaps I’m being too ambitious, but nevertheless this article is great for me to reflect on my current situation.
Very Appropriate & great article Victor.
I want to reduce my cog load while buying groceries which i do mostly through amazon.
Your thoughts will help…..Thx
Vivek – That’s great. I love amazon subscribe and save. I truly spend 0% of my time in my life on replenishing toilet paper. Yes, I need it. But, no I do not feel the need to think about how, when and where to get it.
Love this article. i’ve also setup bi-weekly zooms with friends or for other important check-in tasks. This is very helpful to frame.
That’s great. It’s a no thinking way of staying in touch or contact.