Breaking Down the Cognitive Load

What it is and how to distribute it

“Are you gonna take care of the home insurance?” I called out to my husband from the top of the stairs last week, as I was trying to coax our daughter to come down to have breakfast before going to Montessori.

“I can do it on a day I’m not trying to rush home from work,” my husband called up while trying to funnel oatmeal in our son’s mouth.

I found myself in that familiar place of thinking of a task, anticipating that its deadline was coming up, wondering when my husband might have some free time, and then delegating it to him for completion.

Domestic labor isn’t only about the execution of routine tasks–loading the dishwasher, doing the laundry, bathing the kids, etc. So much of it is the cognitive load, a “mostly invisible combination of anxiety and planning.” Recognizing that we’re running out of rinse aid or laundry detergent. Knowing that the kids' sizes are about to change and we need to pull out the winter clothes in the next size up. Having a mental timer for renewing the car or home insurance.

Even when men take on the actual physical labor of domestic tasks, much of the cognitive load continues to fall on moms.

Dr. Allison Daminger, a professor of sociology whose area of research is how gender shapes home life, has a forthcoming book, Thinking Gender that delves deeply into cognitive labor, and she was interviewed for a parenting article in The New York Times some years ago, “Why Women Do the Household Worrying.” (Gift linked here)

What I loved about the article and Dr. Daminger’s work was that she broke down the components of cognitive labor into very discrete components, which helps us better understand not just that women are doing more of it, but how women are doing more of it.

She described the four components of cognitive labor as:

• Anticipate

• Identify

• Decide

• Monitor

Here are a couple examples of these components in action:

• I’m anticipating that the daal I made on Sunday will be finished by Tuesday.

• I’ll identify a few dishes from our rotation that I have time to make, and I’ll decide on one option for Tuesday.

• I’ll cook (this is not cognitive labor–this is physical labor), and then I’ll monitor that we’re almost out of onions so I’ll add it to the grocery list.

My husband, on the other hand, might anticipate that my car is running out of gas, and identify that he could go to Kroger or Sam’s, and decide to take my car to the mosque so he can go to Sam’s on the way back, and then continue to monitor my gas range whenever he’s in the car.

What Daminger found in her research is that the “identify” and “decide” components of a task are largely collaborative, but that the “anticipating” and “monitoring”–the front end and the back end of the tasks–are often falling on the women.

Anticipating is mom recognizing the family needs to book airline tickets for Thanksgiving, or making the packing list, or setting up tours for daycare or schools, or remembering that dentist appointments need to be made before year-end. In my case, this looked like me anticipating that our home insurance policy was about to lapse, and our current carrier was not going to renew it, so one of us–or both of us–needed to identify other options, compare rates, and decide on one, and then make sure we provided all the information they need and sign the documents.

The thing is, the anticipating piece often looks like anxiety. Of course, anticipation is by definition future-oriented (similar to anxiety), and it can be a source of anxiety in itself to have to do so much of it—especially when it’s disproportionate. So when Dad asks, “Why are you worrying so much?” the answer from Mom may just be, “Because you aren’t.”

Shared domestic labor isn’t just about who is doing the physical tasks; it needs to include shared cognitive labor, too. I’m personally still working on it, but one attempt I’ve made has been that question I asked about the home insurance: “Who owns this task?”

If I envision our house as an organization, who is the end-to-end owner for specific tasks like cars having gas (my husband), having food on the table (me except on my husband’s off week), collecting the mail (which means sorting and responding), taking out the trash (which means keeping track of when the bags are running out and when a day is skipped for a holiday), etc.

Dr. Daminger’s work has given me a framework for how I can think about the cognitive labor of the domestic load, and how my husband and I can agree on distributing it–and ongoing negotiation and redistribution continues.

As for the home insurance, I put it out of my mind until today, when my husband told me the quote he got and said he was deciding to go with it. I didn’t ask more—it wasn’t my task to own—and I have to say, it was nice to get an email from the carrier with the subject, “Your tasks are finished.”