Cognitive load—the amount of information your brain can track at once—is a real limiting factor in how much you can actually accomplish. When that load gets too high, you're not just tired; you're stuck. The Missing Manual walks you through how AI agents (systems built to handle specific tasks on your behalf) can reduce that load by doing the indexing work most people do manually.

Julia and Jenny share three concrete examples from their own work. The first came from RecFest: Jamie Leonard posted a thread with 41 comments about conference fringe events, and a Claude agent pulled all that scattered information into one clean list organized by day. The second example is Julia's work launching Your Network Read, a LinkedIn analysis tool that produces 38-page reports—which she then optimized with AI to reduce duplication and improve readability for her users. The third is how agents can audit your existing presentations and documents to ensure they meet accessibility standards (contrast ratios, cognitive load, compliance) before you publish them.

The key insight: these are exactly the right uses of AI. Not to replace thinking. Not to write your ideas for you. But to handle the cognitive work of indexing, organizing, and quality-checking so you can focus your actual brain on decisions only you can make.

Find The Missing Manual wherever you listen to podcasts.