By Edwin Simonds, Founder of Offload
· Updated · 8 min read
Quick answer
Offload supports therapist-client work by letting you assign short, interactive, evidence-based tools that clients complete in a companion app, with their responses appearing in your dashboard before each session. The library covers CBT, ACT, DBT, EMDR, assessments, journals, and videos and mini courses. You select a tool and a client, with no printing or attachments, so less time goes on admin and catch-up and more on clinical work.
Most therapists have a version of the same between-session problem. You assign a thought record. The client means to complete it. Life gets in the way, or the worksheet gets lost, or it just felt too much like homework. They arrive at the next session without it, you piece together the week from memory, and the first fifteen minutes go on catch-up rather than clinical work.
It's not a failure of effort on anyone's part. It's a design problem - and one that affects the quality of therapy in ways that are easy to normalise because they're so consistent.
Offload is built around solving it. This guide covers how it works in practice, what the tool library contains, and what therapists working with it say about the difference it makes.
Before getting into what Offload offers, it's worth being clear about why between-session work so often doesn't get done. Reviews of CBT homework compliance list barriers such as the effort and time a task takes, unclear instructions, and clients not seeing the purpose or relevance of the task (Tang & Kreindler, 2017).
A printed worksheet that takes twenty minutes and lives at the bottom of a bag is unlikely to get done. A brief, clearly worded exercise on a phone, with a visible connection to the work you've been doing together, removes several of the usual barriers.
This shapes everything about how Offload's tools are designed. They're short, interactive, and deliberately approachable in tone - not because brevity is a gimmick, but because a tool a client doesn't complete generates no clinical value at all.
The free companion app means everything is in one place and always accessible. Each tool opens with a short explanation of its purpose, and you can add your own context in a message, so clients understand the purpose of what they're being asked to do, which matters because not understanding the purpose of homework is a recognised barrier to completing it.
Karen Lobo, NHS Mental Health Practitioner, describes what this looks like from a clinical perspective:
"My favourite part is the Tools page - it's friendly and the exercises are very good. The wording helps to orientate the client to the sessions and what to expect."
When clients understand why an exercise matters, and completing it doesn't feel like additional burden on top of an already difficult week, they are more likely to engage with it. The relationship matters too: a meta-analysis of 295 studies covering more than 30,000 patients found a consistent link between the strength of the therapeutic alliance and treatment outcome, across different treatment approaches (Flückiger et al., 2018).
Offload's library covers the range of evidence-based approaches used in private practice - not just CBT. Whether you work primarily in one modality or draw across several, the library is broad enough to assign tools that fit both your clinical approach and your individual clients.
🧠 CBT - thought records, cognitive restructuring, behavioural experiments, and psychoeducation on automatic thoughts, cognitive distortions, and the CBT model. The tools are interactive and guided, built to work independently without requiring you to talk the client through each step beforehand - see all CBT tools.
What Is a Thought Record in CBT? - share with clients new to the technique.
🌿 ACT - values clarification, defusion exercises, committed action planning, and psychological flexibility practices - see all ACT tools.
💙 DBT - distress tolerance skills, emotion regulation, mindfulness, and interpersonal effectiveness exercises - see all DBT tools.
👁️ EMDR - psychoeducation and preparatory resources to support clients between trauma processing sessions - see all EMDR tools.
📋 Assessments - scored self-assessments clients can repeat, with each result saved by date so you can compare them over time - see all assessments.
🎥 Videos and Mini Courses - short psychoeducation content clients can watch and return to independently between sessions - see all videos and mini courses.
📓 Journals - guided reflective prompts across mood, relationships, self-esteem, grief, goals, and more - see all journals.
The breadth matters practically. Being able to assign a values exercise to one client, a distress tolerance tool to another, and a thought record to a third - without leaving the dashboard - is what makes Offload workable across a full caseload rather than useful for a narrow slice of it.
One feature therapists consistently highlight is the psychoeducation content. Dr Megan McEwan, NHS Counselling Psychologist (BABCP), explains why:
"I love it and especially like the psychoeducation - I often find clients forget, so it's useful they can access it at any time."
Psychoeducation delivered in session competes with everything else happening in the room. When clients can return to a clear explanation of the CBT triangle, or what a cognitive distortion is, or why behavioural activation works - in their own time - concepts tend to land differently. They come to the next session having processed the material rather than half-remembered it, and the conversation can move forward rather than revisiting ground you've already covered.
You can browse the tools page and assign tools from the therapist dashboard: select the tool, select the client, done. There's no printing, no formatting, no email attachment, no follow-up to check whether the client received it.
For therapists managing a full caseload, the cumulative time saving across a week is real. Admin that currently sits between sessions - writing out homework instructions, preparing worksheets, chasing completion - largely disappears.
Dr Harriet Mellotte, Clinical Psychologist and CBT Therapist (BABCP), captures what this means for practice:
"The world of CBT has been lacking an app which enables the sharing of CBT worksheets and homework tasks between clients and therapists, but Offload completely does this, making the service we offer more professional and the benefits to clients greater."
When between-session work arrives through a structured, polished platform rather than a printed sheet, it communicates something to clients about how their therapy is being held between appointments.
That perception isn't incidental - it shapes how seriously clients take the between-session work, and how connected they feel to the process week to week.
When clients complete their assigned tools, responses appear directly in your dashboard before the session begins: a feed of mood check-ins, thought records and other completed exercises. The care plan also shows how many entries each assigned tool has, so you can see what hasn't been done, which is itself clinically useful. You already know where your client is before they walk in. The session starts mid-conversation rather than from a standing start, and the time that would otherwise go on catch-up goes on the clinical work instead.
A research summary published by the Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy explains why this matters: clinicians often miss signs that a client is getting worse, and a meta-analysis of 24 studies found that regular progress feedback reduced deterioration rates, with the clearest benefit for clients who were not on track (societyforpsychotherapy.org).
The structure of Offload's tools is what makes that feedback actionable - responses follow a consistent format that can be reviewed quickly and connected directly to what you're planning to focus on.
Blog: How Therapists Can Know What's Really Going On Before Every Session.
Offload is fully HIPAA and GDPR compliant. Data is encrypted in transit using TLS 1.2+ and at rest with AES-256. Client information is stored with unique identifiers, and role-based access control limits access to authorised users only.
For therapists in private practice - where data responsibility sits directly with you - those standards matter, and they're worth communicating to clients who may be cautious about using an app for mental health reflection.
Offload is particularly well suited to private practice therapists and clinics working with CBT, ACT, DBT, or integrative approaches. It fits most naturally into practices where between-session tasks are already part of the clinical model - and where the current method of managing them (PDFs, printed sheets, verbal instructions) isn't working as well as it could.
It works less well as an occasional resource and better as a consistent part of how sessions are structured - assigning tools routinely, reviewing responses as standard preparation, and treating the dashboard as part of the clinical picture rather than an optional add-on.
The therapists who get the most from it are the ones who integrate it into every client's programme from the start, rather than reaching for it selectively.
For teams and organisations, get in touch about a Teams plan.
Offload offers a 30-day free trial, which is enough time to assign tools to a handful of clients, review their responses before a session, and form a clear sense of whether it fits your workflow.
Donna Maria Bottomley, CBT and EMDR Therapist (BABCP), reflects on her experience with the platform:
"Really like the way that the resources are just the right size. They're informative without being dry and dull. I'm happy to direct my clients here and think this website is offering a helpful service for therapists and clients. They genuinely want to offer helpful tools and resources."
The 30-day trial is the most direct way to answer the question of whether it changes how your sessions feel.
Offload connects therapists with clients between sessions through a library of over 170 evidence-based tools - designed to be completed, not abandoned - with responses fed back to the therapist dashboard before every session.
It reduces the admin involved in assigning and tracking between-session work, increases the likelihood that clients actually engage with it, and gives therapists a structured picture of where each client is before the session begins.
For practices where between-session work is already part of the clinical model, it makes that work more consistent, more visible, and more useful.
When clients complete their assigned tools, their responses appear in your dashboard before the session, including mood check-ins, thought records and other completed exercises, each with the date. Responses follow a consistent format, so you can review them quickly and connect them to what you're planning to focus on.
From your Offload dashboard: select the tool, select the client, and you're done. There's no printing, formatting or email attachment, and no follow-up to check whether the client received it.
No. Alongside CBT tools such as thought records, cognitive restructuring and behavioural experiments, the library includes ACT, DBT and EMDR resources, assessments, journals, and short videos and mini courses. That breadth lets you assign a values exercise to one client, a distress tolerance tool to another and a thought record to a third, without leaving the dashboard.
The tools are deliberately short, interactive and approachable in tone, and clients complete them in the companion app, so everything is in one place and always accessible. Explaining in session why you're assigning a tool helps clients understand its purpose, which makes them more likely to do it.
How therapists can know what's really going on with clients before every session
Research shows therapists often overestimate client progress and miss signs that a client is getting worse. Structured pre-session insight helps you see where each client is.
Therapy Homework: How to Boost Engagement Between Sessions
Therapy homework helps clients apply insights to real life, building confidence and habits. With the right digital therapy tools, it's easier than ever to assign, track, and discuss progress together.