One of the biggest challenges I ran into coaching busy professional clients is exactly that – they are busy and professionals. Between work, family life, other hobbies and interests, they are usually completely overloaded with tasks and things to remember to do already.
These people do genuinely still want to make a change, or else they wouldn’t be coming into the gym and talking to a trainer. I’ve tried ways in the past to get a sense of how stressed out these clients are when I first meet them by asking the exceedingly simple question “On a scale of 1-10 what is your current stress level?” The problem is that most of the time I would get a relatively low answer, only to find out weeks later that they are moving to a new job within their company, just closed on their new house, and their child is having trouble at school and they are considering holding him back. That’s a lot of stress on a person that the “1-10 stress” question failed to capture
We’re encouraged to brush off this kind of stress and not treat it as an excuse for not “doing the hard work” of getting healthy and fit. The truth is, we have to find habits and strategies that fit into your current life situation, things that will plug in seamlessly and most importantly not add excessive stress to a person.
What are CBUs
CBUs are a unit for quantifying the cognitive bandwidth of a task, project, or activity in your daily life. CBUs stand for Cognitive Bandwidth Unit and they are self-reported and subjective in how each task is assigned value. Each task you have on your plate will receive a corresponding CBU unit evaluation, which is then summed up to be your total cognitive load. Tracking your CBUs can be a tool to identify all your life obligations and objectively find out what you need to take off your plate, and whether it’s a good idea to take on that new project, hobby, or even diet plan.
Tracking CBUs and Total Cognitive Load
When looking to get a read on your current CBU load we can generally pick out a few different areas of life where most people’s cognitive bandwidth goes. While it might be different for you for most people this looks like work, family and relationships, chores, personal hobbies, and then other and major life events. To start, try listing out everything that you have to remember to do, are responsible for, or is generally on your mind in a given week to month span. To help, I have listed some common categories and tasks most people have to attend to. Take some time to really think about this list. Odds are, you will start to remember other things as you sit with the list that you automatically have on your mind on a regular basis.
- Work
- Projects
- Commute
- Meeting load (weekly hours spent in meetings = your weekly CBU load from meetings)
- Relationships & Social Life
- Partner/Dating
- Kids
- Extended Family
- Social Commitments
- Household chores
- Cooking
- Cleaning
- Shopping
- Paying bills
- Personal Hobbies
- Social Media
- Add up your average weekly screen time on social media, this is your CBU from social media. (e.g. 4 hrs and 28 mins would be 4 CBU)
- Any current health and fitness strategies or protocols you follow
- Tracking nutrition
- Tracking steps, activity, sleep, or movement
- Remembering to take supplements
- Following a training plan
- Going to the gym and workouts
- Life events
- Dishwasher breaks
- Divorce
- Health issues
- Moving homes
- Moving jobs
- Dating
- Car troubles
- This list is endless!
Next, you will be grading each of these tasks based on their CBU Task Load. Tasks are graded on a scale of 1-8 depending on their requirement of attention. See the chart below for how to score your responsibilities and tasks:
| CBU Task Load | Category | ||
| 1 | Automatic chores, hobbies you enjoy, things you just keep an eye on | ||
| 2 | simple, infrequent, or passive tasks | ||
| 3-5 | Moderate effort, require regular input or moderate thought | ||
| 6-8 | require constant attention, complex calculations, or emotional investment | ||
Again, CBUs are highly subjective. For some people cooking meals will be a low CBU task at 1 because it’s actually a hobby of theirs that they enjoy. Others might be just getting by trying to feed a family of 5 after working and that task is more of a 3-5. Rate all of your hobbies and activities and add up your total. This is referred to as your Total CBU Load.
With your Total CBU Load in hand we can now see where we score on the reference ranges, see below.
| CBU Total Load Range | Category |
| 50 – 60 | Manageable load. Good balance between commitments and recovery. |
| 61 – 75 | High load. Requires intentional recovery and prioritization to avoid burnout. Can stay here temporarily. |
| 76+ | Overload. Likely to experience diminishing returns in areas of life without adjustment. |
Reducing your CBU Load
Looking at your CBU Total Load you may now be realizing that you are in the 76+ Overload range. This is exceedingly common. Most of us are spread too thin to do quality work in our professional life, pay as much attention to our families as we would like, and also spend time on our own personal health and fitness (I promise, this will come back to getting healthy and strong soon).
If this is the case for you, do a pass at your current tasks and their CBU load. Is there anything you can reduce down in your current responsibilities that would lighten the load on you to make room for other things? Writing everything out in this way is a reminder that everything you are doing in your life is taking time and energy away from other things. Many tasks and responsibilities we take on just aren’t worth our time and are eating away at your daily bandwidth. Here are some common ways to free up trapped CBUs and take time back:
- Setting bills to auto pay
- Subscribe to delivery of common household supplies or food
- Subscribe to delivery for medications through an online pharmacy
- Declining unnecessary meetings at work
- Saying no or removing yourself from new work projects
- Reducing screen time
- Turn off notifications for unnecessary apps
- Table things to a “Not now” list to remove them from your CBU load
It will look differently for everyone. But by doing a pass and reducing your used bandwidth you can take tasks that currently fall in the 3-5 bandwidth range and reduce them down to just 1. This will free you up for more productive and exciting projects in your professional life and important self-care and family time in your personal life.
It’s worth noting here that you can’t free up CBUs or add to your capacity by doing “recovery” type exercises or protocols. Despite their popularity in the health and fitness space now, meditation, cold plunge, sauna, mobility, yoga, grounding, and the list goes on, are all other things that you have to do that adds a task to your plate. They all certainly have their benefits, meditation can make you calmer, mobility can improve your movement, and hot/cold therapy can certainly improve your mood. But in the end they are all still another to do list item.
The only way to free up your CBUs and focus on what matters is by doing less. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a busy client decide they are too stressed out and need to start attending a yoga class 3x/week. While that time can be beneficial for them, they now have less time in their week, and have to attend what amounts on their schedule to three more one-hour appointments.
Making Healthy Lifestyle Changes
As we have seen, any new habit or change you make in your life takes up a certain amount of cognitive bandwidth. The most obvious of this would be if you decide to start weighing and tracking your food on an app. This would be a CBU process due to the many times you have to open the app, search the food, pull out the food scale, and enter in each thing you eat. This process also involves looking at many different interwoven targets; protein, fat, carbs, fiber, sodium, added sugar, vitamins and minerals, the list goes on.
Even things that are admittedly easier to track still take up cognitive bandwidth. For instance, tracking your steps using a step tracker is still something that you will have to check throughout the day and be sure you are hitting your targets for. This would fall into a 1-2 CBU task as it is essentially automatic, but it is still something to keep your eye on.
It’s important to gather each and every one of these small tracking and planning tasks that surround health and fitness. When I was single and in college I would track and measure just about everything relating to my nutrition, sleep, and exercise. Just off the top of my head, here are all the things I’ve tracked and tried to effect at one point in my journey.
- Steps per day
- Minutes of cardio per week
- Sleep duration
- Sleep quality (REM, Deep sleep, light sleep, etc.)
- Sleep schedule (waking up and going to bed at the same time)
- Resting heart rate
- Heart rate variability
- Weight training sets and reps during the workout
- Sets of weight training per week, per muscle group
- Bodyweight
- Body circumference measurements (arm, thigh, chest, etc.)
- Ounces of water per day
- Fiber per day
- Protein, fat, and carbs
- Calories
- Added sugar
- Saturated fat as a percentage of calories
- Servings of vegetables, carbs, fats, proteins
- Running mileage and pace per week
- Meditation sessions
- Time spent doing mobility work
Some of these metrics have a greater pay off for tracking. A health habits ROI is your return on the time and cognitive bandwidth spent on implementing that behavior compared to how much of a change it provides.
For example, tracking and paying attention to your sleep quality has a much lower ROI than just looking at your sleep duration. This is because when trying to affect our sleep quality we now introduce three more metrics to look at, deep sleep, light sleep, and REM sleep. This all consumes CBU in the form of checking your sleep tracker in the morning, researching how to improve them, and so on. In this case, you would probably have a larger ROI by just trying to get more sleep, rather than targeting out and trying to enhance your REM sleep.
Conclusion
Moving forward, quantifying your CBUs can be something you do as a spotcheck to see how you are doing. If you are feeling overwhelmed, it can be helpful to write everything and see what needs to go to help lighten the load. It can also help when you’re feeling motivated and want to add more to your plate to check in using the CBU system before doing so.
This should be something done exceedingly infrequently, to avoid it becoming another task on your list “Track my CBUs for the day”. That would be unhelpful.
There are plenty of tools and tactics to simplify your life and put certain tasks on auto pilot. This method will help you to focus on what really matters and free up space to help you reach your health and fitness goals while avoiding burnout and overload.
If you have any questions relating to CBUs or how to implement health habits that will stick around, you can send me an email at brandon@brandonsemones.com