SPACES

Choose which kind of carrier each work packet should live in, from your own body to tools to environments.

Your household's medication routine for your aging mother lives entirely in your head: which pill, which mealtime, which refill date, which symptom means call the doctor. You are the single point of failure, and one distracted week proves it when a refill lapses. The question is not whether to get help. It is what kind of thing should hold each piece of this.

SPACES is a checklist of six carrier types any piece of cognitive work can live in: SELF, your own body and judgment; PERSISTENT artifacts like a written medication list; AGENTS, humans or AI, like the pharmacist; COMPUTATION, like automatic reminders; VIEW, external displays like a dose schedule on the fridge; and SITUATED environment, like a labeled weekly pill organizer. The cue to run it is any moment you are deciding where work should live, especially when everything currently defaults to your memory. The operation: take one packet of the work, walk the six spaces asking "could this live here, and what is each suited for," and pick deliberately rather than by habit. What changes is that the system stops depending on one overloaded brain. The caution is the reverse error: not everything should leave SELF, because judgment calls, consent, and presence often belong in the person even when a tool could technically hold them.