Hidden Cognitive Loads

Elaine Chao
Sep 4, 2018 · 5 min read

9:30pm Monday night. I stood in my near-empty living room, looking at the footprints of the sofa set that had just been taken away, amazed at the sense of elated freedom that I felt in that moment. Over the weeks before, I’d tried to donate the couches to an organization, only to have them rejected; then, after returning from a vacation, I listed them on a neighborhood board to offer them for free to a good home.

The process of getting these couches out of my home and into another’s took about four days of back and forth, and included a missed delivery. After all was said and done, I stared at the hole in my living room and celebrated the weight that had been lifted off my shoulders.

I didn’t realize until that moment how much stress I had been carrying. After all, this was the quintessential first world problem; living in an urban area, I had four or five different options to get rid of the sofas. I didn’t have to give them away, but I really wanted to ensure that nothing went to waste.

The next morning, I woke up earlier than expected, had a longer workout than usual, and hit the day running with a smile on my face and a lighter heart than I’d had the day before. Even though the work day was difficult, I soared through as if I had just returned from a vacation.

Why did such a little thing make such a big difference? After thinking about this for a while, the only answer that made sense was that getting that task done decreased my cognitive load, which in turn allowed me to spend more of my mental capacity on the things that really mattered.


This is what I imagine cognitive load to look like: a burden you carry on a daily basis. A woman from the Maldives carries yams in a basket on her head.

Classically, cognitive load describes the amount of effort required to achieve a learning task. This has been more broadly applied to business to describe the information overload and sheer number of distractions endemic in the modern workplace.

I try to manage the load in a number of different ways, from narrowing my input streams to ruthless prioritization of tasks, optimizing for periods of deep thought.

What I didn’t account for, however, were the sheer number of low grade stressors that I carried around with me on a regular basis. These things, left undone, would not make or break my daily life, but still irritated me — just like a single grain of coarse sand in a shoe. With enough of these things, I ended up carrying a large load of stress, because none of the tasks individually carried the level of urgency that required immediate attention.

But I couldn’t ignore the outcome: the feeling of freedom when I completed one of these tasks was disproportionately large compared to the relatively minor importance each of the mundane tasks I ticked off my list. These stressors were impacting my capacity in a way that I hadn’t even noticed, and getting them off my to-do list only underscored how heavily they had weighed me down in the first place.

Over these past six months, I’ve developed a few strategies to help reclaim my productivity and decrease the level of low-level stress in my life. Each of these is an investment in my overall mental health, my productivity at work, and my own capacity for my own creative pursuits.

#1: Outsource

I learned this lesson last year, but it’s worth reiterating: when possible or when it’s comfortable, outsource. I spent years doing hours-long battles with the blackberry brambles in my backyard, and on my mom’s insistence, ended up hiring a gardener to do a monthly cleanup of my yard. As I look back on my budget and my time this past year, it’s easily one of the best investments I’ve made for my creative career.

#2: Regularly Invest Time in the Little Things

I have a tendency to let things pile up, so I started a little game with myself to regularly invest in activities that would improve my life on the weekends. Instead of putting things off until the weekend, I end up taking care of the normal chores during the work week, giving me a larger chunk of time on the weekends to invest in my own well-being, whether getting together with friends or spending a large chunk of time on a creative pursuit.

#3: Make a Backlog of Big Ticket Items and Prioritize Them

This past summer, I spent three out of five weeks of my sabbatical handling tasks that had simply piled up over the years. These were things I couldn’t handle in 15 or 20 minutes, but things that either required me to reach out or spend some significant time on. Calling painters. Breaking down and recycling boxes. Taking expired paint (and I’m talking about really expired paint) and burnt out fluorescent bulbs to the local recycling center. Finding a good home for two well-loved couches. Taking care of some banking things.

Some of these were medium size items, and the payoff on these was surprisingly huge. My quality of life is better because I made time to do the things that seemed too large to accomplish. I had deprioritized some of these items for years, and getting them off my plate and out of my mental to-do list gave me a greater capacity to think about other things.

But this came at a cost; I stopped blogging and reading as many design articles to share on social media. By prioritizing my life, I made space for these things to happen in the future. This is a season, but I wonder if it’s possible to sustain this pace of life with additional investments in the right place.


In some ways, this article serves as a challenge to myself: what are the things I’m putting off right now? Are there enough of them to take over my life and suck my attention away from where I really want to spend it? What can I do today to make space for myself tomorrow? Where can I simplify so that I can really focus on the things that matter to me?

I wrote this brutally honest statement in a social media post to my personal network last year, and I go back to it every once in a while to reflect on what it means to live a maintainable life.

This weekend, I had a couple of college students ask me what it was like to be an adult. I’m starting to think it’s like 80% just being proud of taking care of something that you should have done months ago. (Feb 2017)

The chore? Replacing light bulbs in my garage. Time? 30 minutes. Effect? Lightening the cognitive load.

Perhaps this, the ongoing practice of getting things done now, is the ultimate mark of next-level adulting. And perhaps recognizing that this low-level stress affects my daily cognition is enough to move me to regular action. But regardless of these things, I invested my time during my long holiday taking care of the things I had put off, and I am lighter as a result.


What things have you been putting off that are just low-level stressors in your life? What can you do today, this weekend, or this month to help move that off your plate? Let me know in a comment or shoot me a message on Twitter!

Lady in Red, Passing By” by Nattu. Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution Generic.

Elaine Chao

Written by

I work for Adobe on Adobe XD. Also a martial arts instructor, musician, writer, volunteerism advocate. Opinions mine.

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