There are a lot of things I don’t think we should expect our brains to hold on to.
Things we need to remember. Things we’re planning. Decisions we’ve made. Things we intend to do. Thoughts we haven’t quite worked through yet.
All of that contributes to our mental load.
And there is a limit to how much information our working memory can hold and process at once. When the cognitive load placed on it exceeds that capacity, our performance can suffer. There is plenty of research into cognitive load and the limits of working memory.
So if all of that stays in your head, your brain has to keep doing something with it.
I’m a big fan of externalising things.
Essentially, taking something that exists only in your head and putting it somewhere else.
That might mean writing it down, putting it in a calendar, saying it out loud, telling another person or creating something that holds the information for you.
It sounds simple. It is simple.
But I think we underestimate how useful it can be.
Your Brain Doesn’t Need to Hold Everything 🧠
Imagine you’ve remembered something you need to do next Thursday.
You could keep it in your head. But now some part of your brain has to keep hold of it until Thursday. You need to remember the thing, remember when it needs doing and, crucially, remember to remember it at the right time.
Or you could put it in your calendar.
The thing hasn’t disappeared. You’ve just moved responsibility for remembering it somewhere more useful.
That’s externalising.
🗓️ Things to remember can go into calendars, reminders or task lists.
📝 Thoughts and ideas can go onto paper or into notes.
📋 Processes can go into checklists and templates.
💬 Thinking can be worked through out loud with another person.
🎯 Intentions can be made visible to create accountability.
📌 Decisions can be recorded so you don’t have to keep making them.
The tool itself isn’t really the point.
The question is: does this need to live in my head?
Externalising Isn’t Just About Remembering
We tend to associate writing things down with memory. I must make a note of that so I don’t forget.
But externalising can do much more than act as a memory aid.
Sometimes I need to externalise my thinking.
Something can feel incredibly complicated when it’s bouncing around inside my head. Put it on paper, draw it out or explain it to somebody else, even the dog, and suddenly I can see it differently.
I’ve written another blog specifically about why an external perspective can improve the quality of your thinking, because sometimes the act of getting thoughts out of your head is part of what creates clarity.
The other person doesn’t necessarily need to give you the answer. Externalising the thinking can help you find your own.
You Can Externalise Accountability Too 🎯
This is a big one for me.
You can decide privately that you’re going to do something.
“I’ll get that proposal finished this afternoon.”
And then rely on yourself to be disciplined enough to do it.
Except “I just need to be more disciplined” isn’t always particularly helpful. If there’s friction getting in the way of doing something, simply expecting yourself to overcome it through discipline doesn’t remove that friction.
You can externalise the intention instead.
Tell someone you’re going to do it. Write it somewhere visible. Put time in your calendar. Agree that you’ll report back when it’s finished.
The task hasn’t changed.
But your relationship with the intention has.
You aren’t relying entirely on an internal promise to yourself any more. Someone else knowing about it can be enough to create a useful level of accountability.
Not pressure. Not somebody standing over you. Not somebody assuming you aren’t capable of doing it without them.
You’ve simply moved the commitment from something that exists privately in your head to something that exists outside it too.
That’s one of the reasons body doubling can be so useful for some people.
At the beginning of a body doubling session, you say what you’re going to work on. Someone else now knows what you intended to do. You get on with it, and they may check in later.
You’ve externalised the intention and the accountability.
Externalising Can Make Things Visible 👀
There’s another benefit.
Things inside your head can be difficult to look at objectively. Once they’re outside, you can see them.
If you’re carrying ten priorities in your head, they can all feel equally important. Write all ten down and you might immediately realise that three aren’t actually priorities at all.
A process can feel complicated until you turn it into five steps. A decision can feel enormous until you write down what you’re really deciding between, just like a good old pros/cons list.
And sometimes what something feels like and what is actually happening aren’t quite the same thing.
You can feel as though the whole week is ridiculously busy.
Put the week into your calendar and you might discover that two of the next five days are packed, but the other three really aren’t.
That doesn’t mean the feeling wasn’t real. It means you’ve given yourself something external against which you can sense-check it.
The feeling is internal. The reality is now visible.
Externalising doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.
It gives you something you can work with.
But the Tool Has to Work for You
This isn’t an argument for downloading another app.
You can externalise something into a beautifully designed system and create even more Business Friction because you forget to look at it.
A reminder you never see isn’t helping. A task management system you hate using isn’t helping. A complicated morning routine that requires more thinking than it removes definitely isn’t helping.
The purpose of externalising isn’t to build a perfect system. It’s to reduce how much your brain unnecessarily has to carry, remember, monitor or revisit.
For one person that might be a sophisticated digital system. For somebody else, it might be a Post-it note stuck to the front door. Both are perfectly valid if they do the job.
What Could You Stop Carrying?
I don’t think the goal is to externalise everything.
There are plenty of things I’m quite happy to keep in my head.
But when something keeps resurfacing, gets forgotten, feels harder to work through than it should, or simply takes up more mental space than it deserves, I think there’s a useful question to ask:
Does this actually need to stay in my head?
- Could you write it down?
- Put it somewhere you’ll see it?
- Set a reminder?
- Say it out loud?
- Tell somebody what you’re going to do?
- Create a checklist so you never have to reconstruct the process again?
Sometimes reducing mental load isn’t about doing less.
It’s about giving your brain less to hold.