Today we explore Cognitive Load Theory. This concept can profoundly influence how you structure your workday, manage teams, and approach learning in your career. The episode highlights that much of professional work, particularly in knowledge-based roles like software engineering, is fundamentally about learning.

This episode focuses again on the fundamental principle that your systems are perfectly designed for the outcomes you are experiencing, regardless of whether those systems were intentionally or accidentally created.

This episode discusses why perfection is a dangerous and fragile goal, explaining how striving for 100% leads to unsustainable outlier states. It highlights how setting perfection as a bar can cause commitments to break and plans to fail due to a lack of slack, and offers strategies like building redundancy and planning with slack to achieve goals more effectively without relying on perfection.

This episode introduces the potentially controversial principle that your system is perfectly designed for its current outcomes. Embrace greater responsibility for systemic issues. We explore how to redefine system boundaries to holistically integrate all influencing factors, like talent and organisational processes, ensuring that interventions are effective and targeted.

This episode explores the fundamental mindset of building your vocabulary, extending beyond literal words to conceptual understanding and mental models, and how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be a powerful tool for expanding and refining this crucial skill for career growth, clarity, and navigating disruptions.

This episode delves into the use of substitute questions—simpler queries we use to answer more complex ones—and the crucial concept of cohesion between these substitutes and our true objectives. You'll learn how to leverage counterfactual thinking to scrutinize your assumptions and enhance the effectiveness of your decisions. Discover two powerful counterfactual techniques: asking "what else could be true?" to reveal alternative explanations, and employing thought experiments to precisely define your desires and career aspirations. The discussion offers practical applications, from refining hiring processes by identifying high-cohesion interview criteria to avoiding confirmation bias in debugging. By adopting counterfactual thinking, you can significantly improve your analytical skills, make more informed choices, and build robust strategies.

This episode explores why maintenance tasks, despite their fundamental importance, are often neglected or deprioritised in our daily lives and professional work. It delves into the psychological biases that make consistent maintenance challenging, such as hyperbolic discounting, where immediate gratification is valued over future gains, and the construal level theory, which highlights how psychological distance makes preventative work less impactful. The concept of the "maintenance paradox" is introduced, explaining that when maintenance is done well, its benefits go unnoticed, diminishing the sense of reward. The episode encourages listeners to adopt a maintenance mindset, making these tasks a standard habit rather than relying on typical prioritisation structures, as they are crucial for enhancing the quality of overall experiences and preventing future, more urgent problems.

This episode introduces a profound yet simple principle: knowing your baselines. This concept is crucial for effectively detecting and measuring change in your life and career.

This episode explores the complex landscape of receiving advice in your career, particularly during uncertain times. It offers insights on how to critically evaluate feedback and external information, prepare for potential negative outcomes outside of your control, and adapt your focus to thrive in a changing industry.

This episode addresses the fear surrounding industry changes, such as AI and potential outsourcing, and offers actionable advice for engineers, managers, and leaders to navigate these challenges. You'll learn why shifting your focus from just developing skills to embracing ownership and responsibility is crucial for long-term career resilience and agency.

This episode provides tactical ways to own your time, reduce meeting load and obligations, and regain agency, especially when feeling burnt out. You'll learn how to use a simple two-part model focusing on Pliability and Volatility to evaluate your tasks and meetings and make intentional choices about how you spend your time.

This episode explores the dichotomy between iterative planning and target state planning in software development, discussing the benefits and drawbacks of each approach and providing decision factors to help you choose the most appropriate method for your situation.

This episode delves into practical principles for navigating the unexpected in your life and career. Rather than attempting to predict specific events, the focus is on cultivating resilience and optionality by identifying vulnerabilities in your systems and adopting a proactive mindset to transform potential challenges into strategic advantages.

This episode introduces a **simple yet highly effective communication habit that can be adopted by anyone to significantly reduce the risk of misunderstandings and enhance connection**. It explores how this practice, which requires thoughtful communication but no special skills, can benefit individuals at all career levels.

This episode introduces a valuable meta-tool for understanding the generic shapes of models, focusing specifically on the concept of **logarithmic relationships** and how they manifest as **diminishing returns** in various aspects of our lives and work. Understanding these patterns can help us make more informed decisions about where to invest our time and resources.

This episode introduces the concept of **dimensional reframing** as a tool to gain new perspectives on problems and facilitate decision-making by considering a new dimension.

This episode explores the concept of **Chesterton's fence**, a principle that advises against removing or altering something without first understanding its original purpose.

This episode discusses how to reframe areas of growth identified in performance reviews with your manager, turning potential weaknesses into strategic strengths. It emphasizes focusing on excelling in your existing strengths rather than spreading efforts thinly across all areas of improvement.

This episode provides a tactical question to elicit useful feedback by taking responsibility for seeking it out and framing the request in a way that encourages advice rather than judgment.

This episode introduces a simple quadrant tool to visualise different working modes that a team or individual task might be in, based on levels of autonomy and definition.