The Waiting Trap: Why There's No Perfect Week to Fix Your Cognitive Load

You're waiting for the renovation to finish. For referrals to ease up. For a week that finally feels calm enough to sit down and sort it all out. Sound familiar?

In this episode, Imogen names the waiting trap for what it is — and why that perfect week isn't coming. The paradox of cognitive load is that getting on top of it requires adding to your plate before you can reduce it. And that's exactly where most therapists get stuck.

Imogen draws on the framework you already use in clinical practice — assessment before intervention — to reframe why downloading the latest app isn't action, it's procrastination in disguise. Just like scripting a wheelchair without a mat eval, jumping from problem to solution skips the most important step.

In this episode:

• Why your cognitive load won't reduce if you don't take action now, not when things settle
• The marketing trap that keeps you downloading, setting up, and abandoning tools on repeat
• What productive action actually looks like (hint: it starts with assessment, not an app store)
• Small, specific starting points you can action this week

Link to coaching: www.imogenot.com.au/cognitivecapacitycoaching

Sign up to my newsletter.

Follow me on Instagram.
Connect on LinkedIn.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Cognitive Capacity Chat. This is the podcast for the therapist ready to think beyond the therapy room. I talk about our cognition as our foundation, not just for our clients, but for ourselves. Because the way we think, organise and live directly shapes our clinical work, our capacity, and longevity in this profession. I'm Imogen, an OT, here to bring you practical conversations that fit into real life. This podcast is for the therapist who wants more depth, more clarity, and more life. Welcome. Hello, hello. Welcome back to the Cognitive Capacity Chat. I have been deep in renovations, deep in clinical work, going through our NDIS audit, and I have just not been consistent with getting these podcast episodes out. And I think it's really important to say that that's completely okay. Because when we think about capacity, we also need to think about when we rest, when we set boundaries, when we have more reasonable expectations of ourselves and of what actually happens. So rather than stepping into burnout, I decided to step back from one thing that was taking too much of my capacity last week. And I know that I can enhance my capacity and I can do so much more with the right systems and processes, but also knowing at the other end of the spectrum when to pull back, when to protect your load, and when to say, not right now, is also really important. A lot of my work actually is speaking with clinicians around well, what is your true capacity and how do we actually set up some boundaries or some systems that enable you to have more capacity? What I want to talk about today is a really tricky thing that comes up almost every time I start working with someone or when someone starts thinking about wanting to make a change towards how they operate in a cognitive capacity lens. It's challenging because you're usually looking at me and feeling like I want to have the capacity, but I don't want to do the in-between bits. I want to just be at the end result. And that is what a lot of marketing does as well, particularly around apps and other systems. When you are looking at what I do, I anticipate your plate is already full. If you're a community therapist, I know that there are already so many cars on your highway. There's also consistent potholes, particularly if you work in private practice and you're having NDIS knockbacks, or you are having tricky clients or difficulty with funding, particularly those scheduled supports. I don't know anybody else, and managing that is really tricky, even though I can do it and I have a system in how to manage it, it's still a lot of cognitive load. I think that a lot of people have capacity to change how they operate for more, but there's this waiting trap. We're all guilty of it one way or another. We're all waiting for the perfect moment to facilitate the change that we know will be beneficial for us. We're waiting for our renovation to finish, for our clinical work to settle down, to settle into our new role, to wait for referrals to ease up, waiting for the kids to get through a hard season, waiting for a perfect week that finally feels like you have enough breathing room to sit down and do it properly. I was actually laughing the other day and thinking about setting a good boundary of I'm going to tell all my clients I'm on leave for a week of annual leave and I'm just going to get everything I need to get done. But that is not how it works, and those weeks never seem to come. And that's the paradox I want to talk to today. Unfortunately, you already have a really full plate, but to get to the outcome you want to achieve, we need to add more to your plate and action things while it's already full, so that eventually we can start reducing the amount that is on it. And I know how it sounds, I know how it feels, and you might be saying to yourself, cool, but I can barely manage what I've got on right now. How on earth are you going to come in and help me fix it? And I think that's a really fair question. But I want you to understand that you are already climbing a mountain. You are already climbing the mountain of clinical work, personal life, managing a to-do list in your head, managing emails that are out of hand, trying to get to a level of thinking that allows you to be the clinician that you are, and you're climbing that every single day. And the mountain doesn't get any less steep. You just endure it and you just keep climbing it. We have another option. We can climb a steeper mountain with me helping you or you taking action for your cognitive capacity for three months or six months, whatever it takes. But the benefit of option two is eventually you get to go downhill. And yes, option two is harder, particularly at the start, but the discipline to make that change, to implement the things you actually were for you, that is what you need to do to come out the other side by going downhill. Because you will have so much more capacity than you started with if you implement systems that you need to. Now there's I want to also talk to this really clever trap that marketing does, and that we all do at one point, is we say, I'm overwhelmed, I'm overloaded, I'm going to get organized right this second. And because we're living in a time where the tools are so accessible, all of a sudden we're just downloading a new app because it popped up in our feed because I just thought about the fact that I want to get organized. That all of a sudden Asana is popping up in my Instagram, and I'm gonna pay for it because that's what I've Googled. Or perhaps you've Googled how am I gonna manage my to-dos, and then all of a sudden motion comes up. And so let's say you have downloaded motion, which is an AI-generated calendar where you can put your task in as different projects and your appointments and all of these amazing things, and then it automatically moves your appointments around if you don't do them at the time, which all sounds amazing in theory, and I think they market it really well. But what happens is you download it, you sign up for the pro version, you forget to cancel it, you spend half a day trying to set it up, and by Thursday, it's out the window. The same thing is happening with AI. A lot of people just plugging basic questions rather than building their thinking skills or creating space that actually enables them to have more capacity to work on that business development or work on that report that you're writing for that complex client. And they are doing that because they're not implementing a system with critical analysis first. And so the cycle just continues. You download the next app, you implement another app, half a day goes by, and all of a sudden we're unproductive with our time. And this is because you're forgetting about our therapy process, you are jumping straight from the problem to the solution, and you are missing a really important step in the middle. Can anyone guess what it is? Assessment. Right? As therapists, we know this step. We call it assessment. Let's think about a wheelchair script. When you are scripting a wheelchair, we do a matte evaluation, a seating assessment, we find out what they like, what they dislike, what they want in their new chair. We go to equipment supply, we do trials, and then we recommend the product that we believe to be best for our client. But then let's compare that to a client who maybe impulsively bought a wheelchair off the shelf because it was a long wait time to see a therapist, or maybe they were just impulsive, and they just went straight to the supplier, bought a wheelchair off the shelf, and then six months later they are back wanting an OT appointment. They've spent money, they're needing to re-spend the money, they've gone through frustration of the wheelchair not working for them, and basically they're having the piece of equipment sit in the corner that was never going to work for them, and we're back at square one. That is what going straight from the problem to intervention looks like, and that is what a lot of community therapists are doing in their own systems. They're going straight from problem to solution without critically analysing the middle bit. What do I actually need? What is actually causing this overload? Where are some potholes that I can fix? Where are simple things where I can set better boundaries? And what would actually resolve the problem that I have? And I see this constantly in the private practice community. Someone experiences overload, they recognize the problem, they jump straight into a solution, and do you know what? It's probably technology not really helping us out here. They're marketing or they're promoting that their products can do everything. So they try the next thing that doesn't stick either, and then they come to me and they say, Imogen, I just want your endpoint, but I don't know how to get there. And that's exactly what I walk you through. I walk how to critically analyze your own systems. I would love to just recommend you an app, but that is not how it works to be good. I need to analyze what you want, how you want it implemented, what the actual problems are, so that we can find the best solution. We need to try and make something for you rather than trying you to mold to the app. And it's these tiny little things that actually let you then use that app or then let you create a system that works for you. And those little things add up to increasing your capacity. So here is what I actually want you to take away. I'm not asking you to overhaul everything. I'm not telling you to download an app and set it up all over the weekend. What I'm asking you to do is analyze your problem. Something that's small enough that you can actually tackle right now. And you can change right now. Maybe it's changing your email signature to reflect your actual worked hours. Maybe you're dropping off an hour so you're not contactable the last hour of your workday. Maybe it's setting aside report writing time and deep focus blocks in your calendar so you can actually work on that report rather than getting distracted by your emails. Maybe it's turning off your email notification. Maybe it's sending all your emails to email archive rather than having them in your visual clutter of your digital world. Maybe it's brain dumping your whole entire to-do list. And I I suppose this comes to the situation of a lot of people like pen to paper. And I know it sounds like I talk about technology all the time, but that pen to and paper can be the solution for you. The idea is that we need a system for you and you need to know what you need to assess what your problem is first. Because your problem is still going to exist where you're whether you're overloaded or you have the perfect week, it's time to take action now. When we think about this, and I I've said to assess your problem first before providing the intervention, we want to be productive with this. So productive is doing the mat evaluation before the wheelchair script. Because although it takes a little bit longer, it creates less friction later. It leads somewhere. We're gonna actually have a solution. But procrastination is downloading the app, going straight to the store, and setting up everything and purchasing it and then getting frustrated again. Both feel like action, but being productive is actually doing the assessment part. So if you are in a season that feels like a lot right now and you know that you need the work, I want you to know that this is exactly the right time to start. Not in spite of chaos, but because of it. You are not going to reduce your capa your cognitive load if you don't take action now. You are just gonna keep climbing up that hill. And I have three seats left. If you're listening to this live, I have three seats left of five for the 9th of June start date to do this with me, one-to-one for three months. If you're interested in something like that, search Imogenot.com.au slash cognitive capacity coaching. And I'll also link it in the show notes. Otherwise, my DMs are always open, and I love to hear from you. If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. Bye.