You wonder why everything feels slow, why you can’t focus, why brilliant ideas slip away the moment they arrive. You think you’re multitasking. You’re not. You’re hemorrhaging cognitive power. Let me show you the open tabs draining you right now: What to text that friend back
That revenue idea you’ve been “thinking about” for three weeks
What to wear to the wedding
The newsletter you need to write
Whether you’re saving enough money
If you should quit your job
That conversation you’re avoiding What to text that friend back That revenue idea you’ve been “thinking about” for three weeks What to wear to the wedding The newsletter you need to write Whether you’re saving enough money If you should quit your job That conversation you’re avoiding Each one is a background process. A silent program eating your RAM. And every single one is making you dumber, slower, and easier to replace. This is why you’re overwhelmed. This is why you’re overwhelmed. It’s why you risk falling behind unless you master what AI can’t. You Cannot Multitask Multitasking is a lie productivity gurus tell you. You cannot—biologically cannot—do two things at once. What you call multitasking is rapid context switching. rapid context switching You think you’re washing dishes and listening to music simultaneously? You’re not. Your brain is flipping between passively washing while actively listening, then actively washing while passively hearing. passively washing while actively listening actively washing while passively hearing Flip. Flip. Flip. Flip. Flip. Flip. Each flip costs you. Think of focus like compound interest. Every minute you stay locked in, the previous minutes multiply in value. Ideas connect. Neural pathways warm up. You enter flow. But the second you switch—from writing to Slack, from strategy to checking your phone—you withdraw everything. withdraw everything You reset to zero. Sometimes the cost is cheap. (Checking a timer while cooking: negligible.) Sometimes it’s devastating. (Interrupting deep work to answer a text; you just burned 23 minutes of cognitive warm-up.) The busiest people are often the least productive. The busiest people are often the least productive. Why? Because they’re paying the highest Cognitive Switching Tax. Cognitive Switching Tax They’re not productive. They’re just visibly busy—which society mistakes for valuable. visibly busy It’s a behavioural bug we’ve been tricked into thinking is a feature. Your Brain is Dying Here’s what’s actually happening in your head right now. You have open cognitive loops. open cognitive loops That text you haven’t responded to? Open loop. Your brain’s Reticular Activating System is unconsciously pinging it, running background searches for “what should I say?” That business idea? Open loop. Running simulations, consuming RAM. That awkward thing your boss said? Open loop. Analyzing, re-analyzing, draining power. You think you’re being “prepared” for when opportunity strikes. Chance favors the prepared mind, right? Chance favors the prepared mind Wrong. Chance favors the FOCUSED mind. Chance favors the FOCUSED mind. A prepared mind with 47 tabs open can’t hear the signal through the static. You’re not creative, you’re cluttered. Not strategic, scattered. Your brain isn’t a hard drive storing useful information. It’s a 2009 laptop trying to run Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk 2077. Everything. Is. Lagging. Everything. Is. Lagging. And the cruel irony? You’ve been taught this is what “high performance” looks like. It’s not. It’s just expensive self-sabotage with a productivity aesthetic. The Smart Person’s Guide to Mental Tax Evasion The solution is stupidly simple. Free up your 1MB of RAM so you can do the deep work that compounds. Brain Dump Right now—not later, RIGHT NOW—grab paper or open a doc. Write every single open tab in your brain. The text. The project. The worry. The decision. The idea. The conversation you’re avoiding. All of it. All of it. This single act transfers cognitive load from RAM to external storage. You’ll feel 10% lighter immediately. The 4 D’s (Mental Tax Evasion) Ignore, outsource, automate or escape anything that doesn’t feel like play to you. The future of work is play. Ignore, outsource, automate or escape anything that doesn’t feel like play to you. The future of work is play. For each tab, run this filter: DELETE/IGNORE: Will this matter in a week? A month? A year? If not, close it. Some problems solve themselves through benign neglect. Let them. DELETE/IGNORE: DELEGATE: Can AI draft that email? Can you set a reminder? Can someone else handle this? Offload it. Your 1MB is too valuable for low-stakes work. DELEGATE: DECIDE & ACT (The 2-Minute Rule): Takes less than two minutes? Do it NOW. Respond to the text. Book the thing. Make the call. Close the loop. DECIDE & ACT (The 2-Minute Rule): DEFER (With Intent): Needs deep work? Schedule it. “Thursday 2-4 PM: Revenue strategy.” Your brain trusts scheduled commitments. The tab closes because it knows it’ll be handled. DEFER (With Intent): Single Tab Mode (Where Magic Happens) Once the clutter’s cleared, you enter the rarest state left in modern work Operate in Single Tab Mode as much as humanly possible. It’s how athletes, artists, and inventors enter immortality. Operate in Single Tab Mode as much as humanly possible. This is where you solve complex problems. Where you create value AI can’t replicate. Where your context window expands. Learn technical and creative skills that require complex context windows (that are actually necessary), Because as you juggle variables, functions, dependencies, you’re training your brain to manage multivariate complexity without breaking. Just make sure the complexity feels like play, is necessary, and cannot be outsourced or automated. Make sure it presents you with new knowledge and new products. How to Process The World Without Overheating You’ve cleared your mental RAM. Now what? The world’s screaming at you: ads, gurus, X posts, “10 steps to success.” A focused mind isn’t enough. You’ve got to filter the chaos. Every decision sits at the messy intersection of your inner priorities and the outer world’s demands. Process it wrong, and you’re back to 47 tabs. Ask: Does this move me forward, given my goals, my constraints? Does this move me forward, given my goals, my constraints? Not what the algorithm pushes. Not what your mentor swears by. You’re not going to win the lottery by playing someone else’s numbers. Generic Advice Is Useless Sometimes being agreeable builds powerful relationships. Sometimes it makes you a doormat people walk over. Sometimes independence is your greatest strength. Sometimes it’s just lonely arrogance. Sometimes saving money is wise financial planning. Sometimes it’s fear masquerading as prudence. Sometimes speed gives you a competitive edge. Sometimes it just compounds your mistakes faster. The world isn’t black and white. It’s context-dependent. The world isn’t black and white. It’s context-dependent. And here’s the thing nobody wants to admit: No one else has your context. No one else has your context. That content creator with 100,000 followers? They’re optimizing for the average. Not you. That mentor you admire? They don’t know your constraints, your history, your specific blend of strengths and traumas. Even if you had one-on-one time with the smartest person alive, they couldn’t hold your full context window. Why? Because explaining your life completely—every decision, every invisible variable, every pattern you don’t even see—would take longer than your life itself. longer than your life itself There are forces shaping your outcomes you’re not even aware of. Inputs you’re not tracking. Background processes you can’t name. If you tried to outsource all your thinking, you’d spend your entire existence explaining yourself to someone who has their own life to manage. So here’s the hard truth: Nobody is coming to save you. So here’s the hard truth: Nobody is coming to save you. You can’t outsource this. You have to think for yourself. The most valuable skill in the 21st century isn’t coding, or marketing, or networking. It’s the ability to think from first principles and make decisions optimized for YOUR unique context. think from first principles and make decisions optimized for YOUR unique context. Not what worked for someone else. Not what the algorithm recommends. Not what your parents did. What’s actually true for you, right now, given everything only you know. Why AI Makes This Your Only Remaining Advantage Let’s talk about the machine. AI has a massive context window. Hundreds of thousands of tokens. Entire libraries. Conversations. Codebases. But here’s what it doesn’t have: a reason to care. a reason to care. AI is probability + iteration. probability + iteration. It predicts the next token. It solves for your prompt. It fulfills external wants. external wants It has no fear. No ambition. No “I wonder what would happen if...” You have internal wants. You have internal wants. You solve problems born from curiosity, ambition, love, terror. You build explanations. You ask “why” and actually give a damn about the answer. Your intelligence is iteration + explanation + purpose. iteration + explanation + purpose. That’s the human engine. And you’re wasting it by mimicking the machine’s “always-on” context window. And you’re wasting it by mimicking the machine’s “always-on” context window. I hope you’re already doing this: Use AI as your external hard drive. Your co-processor. Your tireless executive assistant. external hard drive “AI, draft three newsletter ideas from these themes.”
“AI, summarize this research.”
“AI, generate ten variations of this headline.” “AI, draft three newsletter ideas from these themes.” “AI, summarize this research.” “AI, generate ten variations of this headline.” AI handles the probabilistic iteration—the grunt work. You provide: Direction (your internal wants)
Judgment (your context)
Synthesis (the explanation, the “why”) Direction (your internal wants) Direction Judgment (your context) Judgment Synthesis (the explanation, the “why”) Synthesis You’re the CEO. AI is your intern who never sleeps. The future doesn’t belong to people who can hold more information. It belongs to people who can generate more meaning and solve more human problems. generate more meaning solve more human problems And that requires protecting your 1MB mental RAM like it’s the most valuable real estate on earth. If you’d like to learn and apply more of these insights on intelligence, creativity and the future of work; you can get them early and access the archive by subscribing to my free newsletter: https://crive.substack.com https://crive.substack.com Or you can hit the subscribe button here on Hackernoon.

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