Metacognition guides intention offloading and fulfilment of real-world plans

Reminders such as calendar entries and digital alerts are highly effective at helping people remember what they need to do. Recent work has explored the triggers of reminder setting, also known as intention offloading, finding that low confidence is associated with more offloading in laboratory tasks. This supports a metacognitive model of cognitive offloading. Here we investigated whether this model generalises to real-world intentions. We asked 112 participants about their upcoming plans, and subsequent fulfilment of those plans, in two online surveys. Participants were more likely to fulfil intentions they judged to be more important. This was partially mediated via increased offloading of important intentions. Metacognitive judgements of confidence also (inversely) predicted reminder setting. Ironically, having lower confidence in unaided memory ability predicted greater likelihood of actually fulfilling the intention to return to the second survey. This was mediated via increased reminder-setting. These findings show that intention offloading predicts fulfilment of real-world intentions. They also point towards metacognition as a target for interventions to facilitate this.