Do the heavy lifting
How to stand out and get your message across by reducing the cognitive load for your audience
We don’t like to admit it, but we often try to avoid hard problems.
Instead of working on the difficult task we’re supposed to focus on, we clean up the apartment or fold laundry; anything mindless will do, really.
We often fall into the same pattern at work. Many outputs we produce are lazy; we don’t do the heavy lifting and leave that work to our audience.
For example, we put together a presentation with dozens of tables and charts and instead of generating insights and making it clear why anyone should care, we basically tell our audience: “Here you go, now you figure out what is relevant to you".
Think about highlighting passages in a book: Some people highlight nothing, some highlight the entire page; neither helps you make sense of the information more quickly. Very few people put in the work to parse the content and highlight the handful of truly relevant passages.
Be one of the few.
In this article, I will cover:
What doing the heavy lifting means
How to reduce the cognitive load on your audience
Why this matters
Real-life examples with actionable tips
Let’s dive in.
What does “doing the heavy lifting” mean?
Gathering information is easy, making sense of it is hard.
In Cognitive Psychology, there is a concept called “cognitive load” that is defined as “the amount of working memory resources used”. When we try to understand or learn something, our brain needs to work hard to do that, especially when information is not presented in a way that makes it easy to digest.
At work, we share information all the time: Emails, Slack messages, documents, slides, presentations etc. Maybe you want to inform people about your product strategy, an upcoming system change, a new policy or a concerning performance trend you saw in the data.
We do this so that others draw the right conclusions and take the right actions (if required).
Unfortunately, key information is often buried in a mountain of irrelevant data and the message is not tailored to specific stakeholders, making it difficult to understand which parts are relevant for whom.
In other words, the cognitive load required to understand our message is high.
Our goal with workplace communication should be to keep the cognitive load required of our audience as low as possible.
Putting in the work so that your audience can easily understand the implications of your message is what doing the heavy lifting is all about.
Let’s dig into how to do that.
Reducing the cognitive load on your audience
Getting your message across to your audience involves a few steps:
The first step (researching and collecting information) is simple grunt work; doing this saves other people time, but it’s not a particularly high-value exercise given that AI is in the process of becoming very good at this.
The critical interface is between steps 2 and 3; how you present the information determines the cognitive load required by the audience to absorb and interpret it.
If you are lucky, people will arrive at the right conclusions, but it will cost them a lot of effort to do so. Worst case, people arrive at the wrong takeaways or important issues fall through the cracks.
Here is what you can do instead:
The “So what?” includes: What is happening, how it affects each specific stakeholder, why they should care and, if applicable, what they should be doing as a result.
Deriving the “So what?” means doing the heavy lifting on behalf of your audience. Let’s be clear, doing this is hard; so how can you push yourself to not take the easy route like everyone else?
Here is what helped me:
Assume you are on the hook for every consequence.
If you prepare a metrics review and an important trend got missed because you didn’t highlight it, assume that it’s your fault if the wrong actions are taken
If you announce a change to the organization and a downstream team doesn’t take the right actions because you didn’t make it clear how it affects them, assume that it’s your fault if something breaks
Why does this matter?
So if this is hard, and it feels like doing other people’s jobs, why should you do it?
Because being able to do this well is a key differentiator of the top performers in roles like BizOps, Product, Data Analytics & BI, RevOps, etc. In all of these functions, you are supporting other organizations and are trying to affect change.
If you don’t take control of the “So what?”, you are leaving it up to chance whether people draw the right conclusions and do the right things.
This “last mile” of your work is arguably the most important if you want to generate impact.
Here are the specific consequences of not doing this:
🤖 You are much more likely to be replaced. If you don’t generate a “So what?” for your stakeholders, they can likely get the same information from a dashboard or an AI agent.
🗑️ You are wasting people’s time. Doing the heavy lifting for your audience has leverage: You synthesize the key insights and takeaways once and multiple stakeholders benefit from your work. If you don’t, multiple teams have to do the work to generate the “So what?” independently.
👨👨👦👦 Live meetings are not productive. Instead of making decisions, people will spend time trying to make sense of the information you’re sharing and debating it. Even worse, they might not pay attention because it’s unclear how the information is relevant to them.
💬 You are not driving the narrative. When you share information, you have a goal; if you don’t do the heavy lifting, you risk important things getting lost in the sea of non-important stuff and you put your goal at risk.
What does this look like in practice?
Let’s put all the theory we discussed above into practice. I’m going to go through a few hands-on examples picked from real life to illustrate what doing the heavy lifting looks like.
1. Metrics & Business Reviews
What people do:
We all know metrics reviews that consist of dozens of slides with standardized charts and metrics and commentary that is only restating facts (e.g. “leads fell by 5% week-over-week”) instead of providing context or interpretation. This is basically a dashboard in slide form.
Why this sucks:
As the audience, it’s unclear what matters and you spend a lot of time looking for insights. After seeing a dozen slides that don’t seem to show anything noteworthy, you stop paying attention
For the team preparing the deck it’s a mindless exercise; you are essentially copy-pasting information from other data sources and don’t learn anything in the process
What to do instead:
Create an executive summary upfront:
Tell the story of what’s going on and highlight the key numbers and trends
Establish context by 1) comparing against goals and highlighting deviations and 2) benchmarking against prior periods (e.g. same time last year) and longer-term averages
Derive “So what?” for the data. If we are missing the plan, what should we look into? What areas are contributing to the miss and where could we fix things? How can we make up the miss?
Important: This summary section should be customized rather than following a standard template
Put the “metrics dump” of standardized tables and charts in the appendix. It’s valuable to have the same set of slides every time so that people can get used to them, but they shouldn’t distract from the core message
2. Model or document changes
What people do:
Somebody edits a Google Sheet or Excel model but it’s unclear what exactly they changed; you have to go through each tab and compare versions to figure it out
After people review your Google doc there are a million edits, suggestions and comments; at first glance it’s unclear which ones are important and need to be discussed and which ones are simple spelling or formatting changes
Why this sucks:
You end up spending hours trying to track and understand changes; doing this is highly inefficient and adds zero value for the business
You’ll likely miss something important among the noise of all the small, random edits
What to do instead:
When you share the updated version, send a Slack message with a summary of the key changes and things that need review or discussion. Don’t make others guess what you changed
For Excel / GSheet Models:
Create a tab that tracks versions and summarizes key changes; add a timestamped entry every time you update the model.
If you work in GSheets: Give descriptive names to versions that represent important milestones so they are easier to find. For any version that represents a submission (e.g. a Marketing plan that went to Finance), create a locked copy.
For Documents:
Establish a standard operating procedure. E.g. make smaller edits directly without Suggestion Mode and focus your suggestions and comments on the big items that need discussion. Alternatively, you can create a section in the document that lists out they key items for review or discussion.
3. Announcement of changes
What people do:
Here’s an example of a message I got in one of my last jobs (not the actual message for confidentiality reasons, but the gist is the same):
The person sending the message is in the weeds of the topic; they have worked on this change for the last few weeks and in their mind, the technical details are what matters.
When I read this message, however, I was left wondering:
How does this affect my team? Will this break anything we’re doing?
What are the alternatives? What’s the best way to deal with this going forward?
Why this sucks:
It’s not just that the message is lackluster because it lacks critical information. The team hadn’t done the work of figuring out who would be affected and developing a mitigation plan.
Affected teams have to quickly become experts at the area where the change is happening to understand how it affects them; this is inefficient since the team making the change already has the subject matter knowledge
There’s a high likelihood some teams won’t act in time and something will break, resulting in an inevitable blame game
What to do instead:
Here’s what would have been more helpful:
Figure out who the key affected teams are (e.g. if you change a field in a data table, look up who queried it the most)
Talk to these teams to understand their current workflows
Figure out how you can mitigate the impact of the change (e.g. suggest alternative tables / fields to use)
Craft your message focusing on the user rather than the technical changes; i.e. tell people how this change affects them and what they should be doing by what date
Give an opportunity to weigh in with feedback and ask questions before the change goes live
4. Interviews
Even (or especially) in interviews it’s important to do the heavy lifting for your audience (the interviewer in this case).
What people do:
Most candidates give a detailed, chronological walk-through of what they did in their previous jobs and leave it to the interviewer to figure out what to do with that information
Why this sucks:
Interviewers only care a limited amount about what you did in other roles. Instead they want to know how you would make an impact in the role they’re hiring for if you were to join the company
If you don’t make it easy for them, the interviewer has to do the work of figuring out if and how your prior experience transfers to this new role. Worst case, they don’t see the connection and think what you’re saying is irrelevant
What to do instead:
Connect everything you’re saying to the job requirements and the company’s priorities in some way:
If you give a recap of a project you worked on, make it clear what you learned (and can now do better going forward)
Especially if you are applying for a different role or industry, highlight transferable skills and explain how you’d apply your experience to problems the company is facing. If you don’t know what those problems are, ask! (most people don’t take enough advantage of the Q&A during interviews)
In conclusion
Most people are lazy at work. They ask their audience to put in a lot of effort to understand them, and they leave it up to chance whether their audience will draw the right conclusions and take the right actions.
To stand out and maximize your impact, do the heavy lifting yourself. Make it clear why your audience should care about what you have to say and what it means for them.
It’s a win-win: You make sure you achieve your goal, and your audience gets to use their brain power on other things than making sense of you.