When people talk about metacognition, they often call it “thinking about thinking.” That sounds sophisticated, but it is just a literal breakdown of the word and does not explain what metacognition actually is.
Even though the term itself centers on thoughts, a more accurate description of metacognition is: a strategy-based approach to learning and problem solving. It’s practical and actionable, helps you make better decisions, learn faster, and improve results over time. And it’s something anyone can build.
Metacognitively Adjacent
Most people are already metacognitively adjacent, meaning they’re close to practicing metacognition, but they just need clearer insight into how they learn and which strategies work best for them to truly practice it.
Think of a time you broke a project into smaller steps, took breaks when you were tired, or double-checked your work. You may think these things are simple productivity tricks, and they are, but when you ask yourself why these strategies help and when to use them, you transition from productive habits into metacognition.
If you were practicing metacognition, you wouldn’t just take a break because you were told to or you know you should. You’d consciously consider why you need the break, when to take it, and how it supports your long-term performance.
Say you know that people typically work better in shorter, focused intervals to avoid burnout. When you combine that knowledge with how you personally learn, you can decide to study for one hour, rotate between two topics, and take a twenty-minute break in between.
If you notice that active breaks like walking help you retain more information or study longer, you can add that in too. If you add a third topic and realize it’s making it harder to learn, you can adjust back to two.
For instance, when I worked in a high-stress tech role, I would take walks around the building during mission-critical periods. No one questioned it because the results were clear. Walking helped me stay calm under pressure, focus, and prepare for long contract reviews and negotiations needed to effectively close the quarter.
Metacognitive Awareness and Regulation
Metacognition is commonly described as having two parts. The first, awareness, is noticing what’s happening in your mind while you’re learning or working and recognizing how it affects your ability to reach a goal.
Say you’re reading a complex chapter or detailed report and keep getting stuck on the same section. No matter how many times you read it, you can’t seem to figure out what it’s saying. Without metacognition, you might assume you just need to force yourself to understand, push harder, or give up and think the material is too difficult.
With metacognition, you would notice the frustration and recognize it as part of a pattern—when working on something challenging, you sometimes shut down. Then you’d focus on why you’re getting stuck and how to move forward, which brings us to the second part of metacognition.
Regulation is using awareness to make deliberate adjustments to how you’re interacting with the material you’re trying to learn or the thing you’re trying to accomplish in the most strategic way.
In this case, you might realize the wording is unclear, the structure is confusing, or the section needs to be broken into smaller parts. Then you might decide to look up an example, find additional context, or explain the concept out loud to test your understanding.
Learning and Productivity Strategies
Noticing patterns and understanding how they affect your goals is awareness. Acting deliberately based on that noticing is regulation. Practicing both strengthens your ability to learn efficiently, solve problems effectively, and improve results over time.
The key isn’t just recognizing confusion. It’s understanding how that confusion affects your goal and identifying what you can do about it. This leads to another important element of metacognition, knowing what strategies exist, when they tend to work, when you may need to create your own, and how to approach different types of tasks.
Ideally, this would be taught early, but most people don’t get this guidance. Instead, these ideas are scattered across business schools, MBA programs, corporate training, and academic research.
Since there isn’t a single resource that outlines them all, a practical strategy is to look up popular strategies like:
- SMART Goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound goal-setting)
- Pomodoro Technique (25-minute focused work sessions with short breaks)
- Spaced Repetition (reviewing material at increasing intervals to improve retention)
- Active Recall (testing yourself instead of re-reading)
You can also do general searches on productivity techniques, and sometimes the most effective techniques come from your friends, colleagues, or teachers.
A friend told me she writes an email to herself every Friday listing her wins for the week. When her quarterly review comes around she has a record for easy reference. She stores her emails in a folder for easy reference, but I took a slightly different approach and created a Gmail template with the subject “Friday Wins — You Go Glen Coco!”
Now I can easily search for the email and a bonus is that the subject also makes me, and sometimes my team if I’m screensharing, laugh. The email also serves as a marker. If it’s only Tuesday and my CoCo email is already several scrolls down in my inbox, I know it’s already been a busy week…or I need to review the emails I’m copied on.
You’re Closer Than You Think
When you first learn about metacognition and new strategies, there may be a temptation to think you need to “always be optimizing,” and that every moment needs to be productive, strategic, and perfectly implemented. But that kind of all-or-nothing thinking is counterproductive and gets in the way of progress. Breaks and downtime are important. And sometimes the best strategic approaches and solutions come from when you’re relaxed rather than tightly focused.
So meet yourself where you’re at and know that the best approach for someone else isn’t the best approach for you. You might try things that don’t work, create SMART goals you end up abandoning, and, if you’re like me, have several Google Sheets that look aesthetically beautiful and you’re happy you made, but don’t really give enough return for all the effort you used making them. It’s all part of the process and you’re closer than you think.