Jessica uses a personal strategy of moving objects from one place to another to where she knows she will look in the morning to reduce forgetfulness (e.g., moving her kids' vitamins to the dining table), which does not save execution time but is a comfort to her ADHD brain; she also uses a bobby pin placed on her nightstand as a visual cue to remind her to schedule a haircut appointment tomorrow, allowing her to stop holding the thought and fall asleep.

Jessica does not write out to-do lists for herself (and notes this is probably not great for the mental load) but instead focuses on three things: if she gets those three things done, she will consider the day a success, and everything else is a bonus; this approach came from Dr. Patrick Latham and is 'game-changing' because it defines success by a doable measure.

A major source of unnecessary mental load is thinking about future tasks that cannot yet be acted upon (e.g., 'next year I need to remember to schedule this appointment for my child'), which takes up mental space even though it is not actionable right now; setting a calendar reminder in the future (e.g., Google Calendar invitation for January 31, 2028) to discuss or act on that item allows the brain to stop constantly reminding itself about it.

Jessica and her partner have recently started using a system called 'Fair Play,' which includes a card deck representing different areas of household responsibility (dishes, laundry, tidying, organizing, pet care, etc.); partners divide up the cards so each person has an equitable workload, and each person is responsible for Conception, Planning, and Execution (CPE) of their assigned domain, not just execution; this prevents the situation where one partner conceives and plans while the other only executes, which leaves the mental load on the first person.

There is a term called 'after-school restraint collapse' which describes the phenomenon where children hold themselves together at school and then fall apart when they get home, and the concept should be extended to adults as 'after-work restraint collapse.'

A parenting breakthrough came from realizing 'they're not supposed to be well-behaved, they're kids,' which totally flipped the script and made the parent magically a little bit more patient; this same realization applied to oneself—you are not supposed to regulate your emotions perfectly, you have ADHD—can reduce the pressure and internal shame that drives emotional collapse.

During nap times when children are very small, Jessica experienced analysis paralysis and exhaustion; she could not figure out how long the nap would be (20 minutes, 40 minutes, 2 hours), could not relax, and became stuck in a mental loop of deciding whether to do laundry, dishes, or organize things rather than actually resting.