AI as a Tool for the Mental Load

Earlier this year I wanted to plan a family vacation.

For anyone who has ever planned a trip for young kids, you know that that is actually a lot of work. Planning meant researching, booking, and preparation. It meant hunting for places to stay, remembering to buy the plane tickets at the right time, building a packing list. It meant prepping my kids in advance to get them excited about the trip and assuage their fears about doing something new, so they could actually enjoy the journey. It meant finding someone to take out the trash while we were gone. It meant getting my dog boarded, and getting my dog's vaccines updated so he could be boarded. It meant remembering to take time off and prepping everyone at work for the time I'd be gone.

Every one of those things is yet another task that lives in my head in anticipation of the trip, on top of everything else happening in my life, working full-time and raising three young kids. This time, though, all of it got easier, because I could brain-dump everything that needed to get done in a single session with Claude and got back checklists, packing lists, calendar entries for when each thing needed to happen, research on which car company to book with and where to rent a stroller and how to prep the kids for the trip.

The result was that I found myself actually looking forward to the trip, instead of seeing it as yet another burden of being a parent trying to build these core memories for my kids.

The thing that made the difference was AI. And what it did for me had basically nothing to do with productivity.

The mental load is the tracking

If the phrase "mental load" rings a bell, it's probably because of Emma's 2017 comic "You Should've Asked", which put a name to something a lot of us (particularly women and default parents) had been living without a term for for many years. The comic shows that the exhausting part of running a household was never the chores themselves... It's the noticing, the anticipating, and being the one who remembers what needs to be done and when. The load isn't the actual doing of the work. It's all the mental effort that comes with knowing the work that needs to be done and making sure it happens.

You can hand someone a task. Handing someone the knowledge about which tasks need to be done and when is much harder.

The feminist answer to the mental load has always been redistribution: partners should carry the tracking too, not wait to be assigned tasks. I agree with that, but also that in itself is a lot of work!

I've been in a lot of community spaces where we share our frustration with the mental load of existing during this particularly difficult time, and here's what I've watched happen: folks patiently trying to get these points across to their partners, repeatedly, for a VERY long time, and either nothing happens, or they end up having to do more work to educate their partners, which is itself adding to their own mental load.

I'm not against redistribution. I'm saying the people carrying the mental load are tired of waiting for it to be redistributed and being the educator of that redistribution. A tool showed up that actually helps with the tracking and knowledge-keeping now, today, without needing to be convinced, reminded, or managed. A tool that can help with creating tasks for multiple people, with whatever reminders need to be built-in for each person, and to alleviate that burden from the individual traditionally holding it. And people should use it!

What this looks like on an ordinary week

The vacation planning was a big one for me, but the place I feel this most is the most ordinary thing imaginable: meal planning. Good god is it exhausting. Constantly remembering which foods my kids like, which ones they don't like right now, remembering to introduce new things, making sure we have a grocery order scheduled (yes I order my groceries to either be delivered or for pick-up and rarely go in the store and yes I realize that comes with an awful lot of privilege), actually ordering the groceries, and adding all the other things we need to the list throughout the week.

Now I have a tool that does that for me: Claude creates a meal plan for me each week of meals that my kids actually like, while also introducing new things occasionally and remembering which days of the week we have events going on (like gymnastics class) and need a quicker option. Google Assistant allows me to quickly say out loud "Hey Google, add hand soap to the grocery list" from anywhere in my house. A tool I made by describing what I wanted to Claude, often called vibe-coding, adds all of the things to a grocery list each week, including any items that were added to my Google list for the week, for Instacart shopping on Sunday and sends me a reminder to actually look over the plan and make the order, so I don't have to remember that weekly chore. The remembering happens somewhere that isn't just in my head, and this network of tools makes it happen.

One of the objections I hear often about AI is that I'm losing something by handing the thinking over to a robot, that ceding your thought processes to AI means you'll get worse at thinking over time. Two thoughts on that:

First, I don't think the skill actually disappears. I've had a calculator available for my entire adult life and have been out of school for over a decade, and I'm confident I could still bang out some calculus if I absolutely had to. Would it take me longer than it would have if I had been doing math regularly? Absolutely. But I know I could still figure it out.

Second: I actually don't mind losing some of these skills. Taking up my brain space with "which of three children currently accepts bell peppers" is not a skill I would miss if I lost it. Not every capacity your brain gets conscripted into is one worth defending. Yeah, my brain may physically change if I no longer need to remember each of these things, but actually that doesn't sound too bad at all.

Where the capacity went

Even better than filling my brain with the worry and stress of everyday life, when the tracking moved out of my head, the space it left behind didn't stay empty.

I started writing blog posts again early last year (you can see the uptick right on this blog). I started my podcast, Overcommitted, around the same time. That timing wasn't a coincidence: it happened when I realized I had more creative energy because I wasn't spending it on the menial tasks of just surviving. I have this boundless creative energy that would otherwise get squandered on the day-to-day logistics of existing, and for the first time in my adult life, a meaningful amount of it is going somewhere I chose for it to go.

And it's not just about output or productivity like the AI industry would have you believe from their poor attempts at marketing. My mom is a heavy Claude user now. I've watched her relationship with food and exercise change over the years, and lately I've watched her use Claude to learn about the importance of protein and building muscle mass as you age, about balance control and aging healthily. I've watched her shift from thinking about food and exercise in relation to body image toward becoming healthier and aging gracefully without losing her physical self in the process. She chats with Claude about what she's eating, gets advice on better choices, organizes her workouts. She's told me herself how much of a difference it has made in her life to have that as a tool and how she really appreciates the positivity that the tool brings to her day-to-day, and how it's super accepting when things don't work out as planned, which is actually incredibly cool.

That's a person using a tool to organize the human thoughts and feelings and messiness that go with living, not becoming some 10x productivity expert. AI tools have so much more potential for good in the world than I think that they are given credit for.

Multiple things can be true

I want to be clear about what I'm not saying. The way this technology was developed is problematic in ways that are genuinely hard to wrap my head around, and the questions about its footprint are real. I'm not asking anyone to stop caring about those things. I care about them. We should continue to care about them and attempt to mitigate those impacts in whatever ways we can.

But discounting the tool entirely because of them oversimplifies it. Two things can be true at once. Technological advancement often comes with a very steep and ugly price. But I think that the people most burdened by the mental load are being told that the first tool that actually meaningfully helps with it is morally off-limits. I think that's a loss for those people, and for humans as a whole as their energy stays squandered on survival instead of whatever they're passionate about. That's not some win against the technology industry, it's a loss for everyone.

Folks trying to survive today, the ones sandwiched between raising kids and caring for aging parents, working full time in an increasingly expensive world, holding entire households in their heads, deserve to know that a tool exists that actually helps with the mental load of it all. This isn't just a productivity tool, it's a life tool, one that can help you organize the messiness of being a human in a way that hasn't ever been possible before.

You're allowed to use the things that help you, and now you don't need technical skills to create a system that can alleviate your own mental load. You just need a bit of creativity and patience to explore this new toolset, and discover how it can help you organize all of the things that are currently living only in your head.