8 published lessons with this tag.
Place capture tools where you will see and use them without having to remember. The best capture system is one your environment triggers automatically — not one that depends on willpower or recall.
Cognitive offloading works only when it is habitual. Externalization practiced daily compounds into an extended mind. Externalization practiced occasionally produces scattered artifacts that never cohere into infrastructure.
An unwritten commitment is an invitation for your future self to renegotiate. Externalized commitments become binding infrastructure — visible, trackable, and resistant to the drift that lives between intention and action.
When everything important is externalized — every decision, reasoning chain, emotion, goal, assumption, commitment, priority, mental model, blocker, energy pattern, learning, feedback signal, failure, progress marker, thinking condition, and system design — you gain complete cognitive freedom. The mind that holds nothing becomes the mind that can do anything.
Cognitive agents are repeatable processes you design to handle recurring decisions.
A tool is a delegated capability — it does something you could do, but faster, more reliably, or at greater scale.
Your environment can enforce behaviors that willpower alone cannot sustain.
Delegating too much creates disconnection from the work that matters and atrophies critical skills.