What is working memory?

Working memory is a concept in personal epistemology: Moving information out of your head frees working memory for higher-order processing. Cognitive offloading is not laziness — it is how minds were designed to operate when paired with tools.

Example: You're an engineering lead reviewing a pull request while simultaneously holding three unresolved architecture decisions, a staffing concern, and a deadline you haven't communicated. You read the same function four times without absorbing it — not because the code is complex, but because your working memory is full. You're trying to run a six-slot program on a four-slot processor. The moment you write the three architecture decisions on a sticky note and put the staffing concern in a to-do, the code review becomes trivially easy. Nothing about the code changed. You freed the registers.

This concept is part of Phase 1 (Perception and Externalization) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for perception and externalization.