Are you actively practicing cognitive unloading?

It seems anything beyond the simplest cognitive activities appear to overwhelm our working memory. Our constant access to smart devices is taking its toll on our selective attention and dopamine stores.

We are apparently processing more information in one day (scientists estimate the equivalent of 74GB of data) than our pre-modern ancestors did in an entire lifetime! It’s causing us to become detached from our bodies and overwhelmed in our minds. What can you do? Here’s a personal tool. 

The implications of these limitations on instructional design can hardly be overestimated, rendering products or services that don’t take this into account, deficient. Those that go beyond and become others’ cognitive support will thrive. 

Take a 5 minute break….

INSIGHT
(what we need)

You can not only leverage more space to think, but more energy to act. 

Not only do we fill our minds with cluttered thoughts, we also burn a lot of calories being anxious about all the tasks ahead. By developing habits that switch on an automatic ‘lean in’ instinct, can we then save time, brain space, and energy! So not only are you doing more in a day than you had all week, you’ll have more fuel in the tank to produce more or go deeper on those days. Instead of pushing to superficially getting through rote tasks, you can develop a razor-sharp clarity that allows you the space to think more deeply on the task itself (like writing these words instead of knocking them out). This is a qualitative difference that shifts productivity to creativity. With compound interest. 

We know the detriments of cognitive load: 

• Decreased working memory capacity 

• Impaired learning and retention of information

• Decreased attention and focus

• Increased Anxiety and Stress

• Reduced Decision-Making Quality

• Diluted Creativity

• Impaired health like fatigue, negativity and muscle tension

• Impaired social interactions

• Burnout

It’s not about relaxing more. Managing cognitive load is crucial for maintaining mental and physical well-being. The fallacy of the common remedy to “switch off” or “relax” is that you end up oscillating between high stress mode and collapse mode. (Or what we commonly know as ‘working to the bone’ and ‘binging Netflix’). Getting into this binary cycle of struggle and collapse doesn’t allow our biology to process other states of consciousness where creativity, intuition, and big picture thinking arise. 

We can beat cognitive load with cognitive leverage: using strategies and tools to enhance our capacity to make it easier to process ideas, retain information, and make novel connections. And there are both top down and bottom up approaches to this whole brain experience: 

These are not natural practices for most people to adopt. Not to mention everyone has different ways of thinking and falls on a spectrum from neurotypical to neurodiverse. We’re prone to heuristics and reactive thinking as human beings trying to protect ourselves. So to create cognitive leverage in life, we must adopt practices or tools — just as we would go to the gym. And just as there are countless ways to do fitness programming, there are better ways to program cognitive leverage. 

INSPIRATION
(what we want)

Kortex: an idea-to-impact writing system to capture, curate, connect and create works while outsourcing a digital note-taking system.

Kortex is the brain child (see what I did there?) of creator Dan Koe – one of the most successful one-person venture influencers out there earning upwards of 8-figures through his various digital courses: most of which center around writing. He now has a development team working on Kortex (currently in it’s beta version).

• Structured note-taking for maximum attention, impact, and authenticity.

• Solve writer’s block by nudging an ai writing assistant who helps you synthesize ideas into unique projects. 

• Create content, emails and campaigns with ease by referencing KoreNotes when writing “live.”

• Learn to write faster and distill ideas more quickly with all your reference materials at your fingertips.

• Turn your best ideas, insights and inspirations into original ideas that help you stand out from the crowd.

• Leverage your thinking into writing into income: ideas are the new attention economy oil. 

INNOVATION
(what we wish for)

Tag Team: build your one-person venture with three collaborative ai bots to handle content, marketing & sales — all built around your personal brand. Wake up to “work done” on your computer, ready to publish/ship!

As content becomes synonymous with marketing, the creator economy will need to find a way to leverage personal brands with the support of ai-bots to handle specific roles.

• Input anchoring content about your personal brand, your value proposition, positioning, values, vision and mission. 

• Input information about your audience: their thoughts, feelings, fears, desires, dreams, frustrations, limitations, values and beliefs. Input the same information for yourself.

• Tag Team is programmed to help you curate, connect, distill and even write future content — making you supreme editor-in-chief of anything that goes out: from blogs, newsletters, landing pages, video scripts, sales scripts, etc.

• Designate the content, marketing and sales bots to work together with this information to provide the best options for a themed weekly pipeline.

• Bots work while you sleep so you can focus on managing your day, attention, and energy rather than information load.