Some people pour years of patience and attention into a practice: yoga, tai chi, meditation, the exquisite art of trimming a bonsai into exactly the right shape.

I have been working really hard at developing my a-game in intentional incompetence. It has taken practice, dedication, and serious leaps of faith. But I’m getting there, despite the fact that yes, it really goes against the grain.

‘Have you seen my…’ insert charger, glasses, bag, passport, favourite T-shirt, school shoes.

‘What time does…’ insert the show, the appointment, the school holiday start?

‘Do you remember what…’ insert birthday, favourite colour, sauce, whatever this person likes?

I feel a disproportionate amount of my time seems to have been spent acting as a side brain for my nearest and dearest. For the longest time, I actually loved it. It made me feel special, important, needed, valued, clever. It was deeply satisfying being the one who knew, the one who could answer, the one who could locate the missing thing or retrieve the bit of information everybody else had somehow mislaid. Good dog! Roll over!

But then it dawned on me how much of my own capacity was being used up in the process. So many of these questions were not really questions only I could answer, they were things someone else could answer for themselves with a bit of looking, remembering, checking, googling, whatever. I wasn’t really needed. I had just become the easy port to dock at.

And of course each individual question is tiny. That is part of the problem. If you object to being asked where the charger is, or what time something starts, you can sound ridiculously grumpy because… jeez Louise, what’s the big deal? Chill! Just answer the question, right?

But it is rarely just the question.

It is all the information sitting behind it, the remembering and noticing and anticipating, the endless tiny bits of knowledge that is endlessly memed about as mental load. We are so much better at recognising it, that it is not light work, that it should be shared rather than simply ending up with the person who happens to be best at carrying it. Yet the answer seems to always be to expect the other to recognise it, and to amend their ways. But as we know full well, we can’t control what other people do, so how do we, the questionee, get to redress the load imbalance? It’s so simple, it’s ridiculous.

‘Dunno.’

‘Have you seen my earrings?’ – ‘Dunno.’

‘Do you know where I left my book?’ – ‘Dunno.’

‘Do you know if I can pay by card there?’ – ‘Dunno.’

Truth is, quite often I do know. Or I could make an excellent guess. Or I could find out extremely quickly, because this is precisely the kind of thing I have spent years becoming rather good at. But I choose not to.

That is where the practice comes in, because every instinct I have tells me to answer, solve, retrieve, locate, help. Being useful feels good. It has always made me feel bright and capable and needed, and I don’t want to pretend there isn’t a genuine pleasure in that. I like helping people. I like knowing things. I like being the person who can connect the dots.

What I don’t like is when that competence stops being mine to offer and starts being assumed.

This is where I have started to think we might need to reclaim incompetence a little.

We hear a lot about weaponised incompetence, the familiar business of being so spectacularly hopeless at something that eventually somebody else gives up and does it instead. Incompetence used as a weapon.

I am much more interested in whether we can deweaponise it and reclaim it deliberately, not to get out of our own responsibilities, no. But use it to stop automatically collecting everybody else’s.

There is something wonderfully simple about becoming less useful in a role you never consciously agreed to take on.

If I always know where the thing is, remember the date, check the opening hours, work out the route, then of course people are going to keep asking me. I have trained them very effectively.

So I have had to train myself the other way.

And, rather inconveniently for my sense of importance, people manage. They look. They remember. They work it out. Sometimes they ask someone else. Sometimes they use Google, which has apparently been available to them this whole time. And over time they get better at it.

This matters to me because executive function is finite. I often describe it as a pie, partly because it works as an image and partly because pie. There is only so much capacity available for all the remembering, planning, regulating, anticipating, starting and organising that life requires.

Prospective memory, which is basically all the stuff we are holding in our heads because we might need it later, is a big part of that. When does school go back? What time is the appointment? What colour does she like? What do we need to buy? Where did somebody leave the thing?

None of it looks enormous, but there can be a hell of a lot of it.

And if I am using a significant chunk of my executive function to remember things for everybody else, there is simply less pie left for me. That becomes particularly interesting for those of us who are very responsive to other people’s needs, because somebody else asking for something can be highly activating. Their need has immediacy. Our own paperwork can apparently rot in a corner until the end of time.

So no, I don’t want to stop being helpful. I don’t want to become someone who sits there smugly knowing the answer and refuses to give it on principle. That sounds exhausting in a completely different way.

I just want the helping to be mine again.

Sometimes I will know where the thing is and tell you. Sometimes I will help you work something out. Sometimes it will give me genuine pleasure to make something easier for you.

And sometimes…

‘Dunno.’

Because every now and then, giving myself the gift of incompetence gives somebody else the chance to use their competence instead.

I think that is a pretty good practice for everyone involved, don’t you think? This, my friend, is the gift of incompetence.