# Cognitive offloading Cognitive offloading is the use of physical action or the outside world to reduce the mental demands of a task. Risko and Gilbert define it as "the use of physical action to alter the information processing requirements of a task so as to reduce cognitive demand". Writing a shopping list, setting a phone reminder, sketching a problem on paper, or even tilting your head to read rotated text are all forms of it. We do it all the time, often without thinking about it, and it works: a reminder trades a small setup cost for a much higher chance of remembering. But we are not perfect judges of when to do it. In Gilbert and colleagues' 2020 experiments, people *over*-used reminders, even when relying on memory would have paid more, partly because they underestimated their own memory. Giving them feedback about their real performance removed the bias. Why it matters: offloading is the foundation of every trusted system, from a GTD inbox to a [[Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)]] vault. Getting commitments out of your head reduces [[Cognitive load]] and the background noise of [[Open loops]]. The nuance is to offload on purpose: externalize what you would otherwise have to hold in mind (dates, commitments, next actions), not everything by reflex. ## References - Risko, E. F., & Gilbert, S. J. (2016). Cognitive offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 676-688. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.002 - Gilbert, S. J., Bird, A., Carpenter, J. M., Fleming, S. M., Sachdeva, C., & Tsai, P.-C. (2020). Optimal use of reminders: Metacognition, effort, and cognitive offloading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(3), 501-517. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000652 (accepted manuscript: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10080846/) - https://concepts.dsebastien.net/concept/cognitive-offloading/ ## Related - [[Cognitive load]] - [[Open loops]] - [[Strategies for closing open loops]] - [[Getting Things Done (GTD)]] - [[Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)]] - [[Implementation intentions]] - [[Mental Leakage]]