Clear Your Mind: Make Room for Names

Quick Win

Write down your to-do list before heading to a social event. It’ll help create brain space for remembering new faces and names.

Try This Today

• Complete a to-do list before an event where you know you’ll meet new people, whether it’s a business meeting or a book club.
• About 15 to 30 minutes before the event starts (or before you leave home or the office), find a quiet place to focus on your responsibilities for the rest of the day or the week. 
• Write your list of to-dos on paper or enter them into your phone. It might be helpful to write them in the order they need to be done. 
• Once you’re finished, put aside all thoughts of this list to focus on the event.

Why

When you have more work than you can handle, it helps to outsource some tasks. Maybe you hire a cleaning person to help at home. Or you order healthy takeout, rather than cook on a busy day. You can ease your brain’s workload, too. We do that when we store numbers in our phone instead of memorizing them. Scientists call an action that lightens your mental load cognitive offloading. In one study, 94 participants — 62 young adults and 32 older adults —  were tested on a short-term audiovisual memory task. When permitted to do cognitive offloading (for example, making a list), both groups performed better than when offloading was skipped, as reported in 2023 in Memory & Cognition.