What is executive function conservation?

Executive function conservation is a concept in personal epistemology: When an agent handles a recurring decision you preserve energy for novel decisions.

Example: You check your email first thing every morning and spend twenty minutes deciding which messages need immediate responses, which can wait, and which are irrelevant. By 9:30 a.m. you have already made forty to fifty micro-decisions before your real work begins. Now imagine you build an agent: 'When an email arrives, if it is from a direct report and contains a question, flag it for response within two hours. If it is a newsletter, archive it to a weekend reading folder. If it is a calendar invitation, accept if the slot is open and decline if it conflicts.' That agent eliminates those fifty morning decisions. Your first real cognitive effort of the day goes toward the novel problem you were hired to solve — not toward inbox sorting you have done identically a thousand times before.

This concept is part of Phase 21 (Agent Fundamentals) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for agent fundamentals.