We're starting a series today on Developer Tea, and it's all about how your brain thinks about work you have to do. How do you organize the work that you have to do, both now and in the long run? How does a team approach that organization process, and what are some effective strategies understanding the science of how we think about work to do, or how we think about our intentions? We're calling this series Backlog Psychology, and in each episode, we're going to explore one aspect, right? One aspect that is actually backed up by some kind of research or theory that you can actually think about. And apply in your work on a day-to-day basis. Today, we're going to talk about work in progress, and specifically, why it's probably a good idea to limit your work in progress. You've probably heard this if you've been on a Kanban team before. This is a very common kind of principle of Kanban, is to have a specific limit for your work in progress. Why is this? What is the reason? Well, there could be many reasons, but we're going to discuss a specific one today. A specific reason related to your cognitive load. What is a cognitive load? It's basically the strain that is being put on your mental resources at any given point in time. Now, this is distinct maybe from a more academic definition that might be talking about the effort needed to convert that short-term memory thing into a long-term memory thing. Instead, we're going to focus on that working memory. This is, what are you actively thinking about? And with the definition of cognitive load being how much of that active memory is necessary to be in use at a given point in time. You can quickly see how this is going to translate into work in progress. The foundations for this, the kind of scientific foundations for this, are not new. In 1927, the psychologist Blumenwald... Zygarnik published research on this subject. Zygarnik studied this after her professor, psychologist Kurt Lewin, recognized that a server at a restaurant had a harder time remembering orders that had been paid where they could recall orders that had not been paid reasonably well. So the basic assertion is that we remember things. More easily, that are incomplete. But here's the important part of that. If we have too many things that are incomplete, then our cognitive load goes up. Think about this. When things are incomplete, we have a natural tendency to keep them in our working memory. However, whenever they are complete, we tend to resolve them from our working memory. We set those aside. And this makes sense kind of intuitively that you wouldn't need to, there's not really much utility or function in thinking about the stuff that you have just completed as much as the things that you need to complete. Even from a basic incentives perspective, there's more incentive to keep the incomplete tasks in your working memory than there is to keep the complete tasks in your working memory. And so, it makes sense. It makes sense then that we would be very careful with how much we start at any given point in time without having already completed or closed out or resolved things that we had started previously. If we care about our cognitive load, then it becomes imperative that we control our work in progress. Thanks so much for listening to this first episode in our series, Backlog Psychology. Backlog Psychology. Hopefully, you will come back for the next episode. We're going to keep on exploring these topics that help you stop flying blindly when it comes to your task management, stop flying blindly when it comes to how you organize work for yourself or for your team, and instead, actually use some scientific principles and theories that could help you work better. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed this, join the DeveloperTea Discord community. Head over to developertea.com. You can join us there. We talk about these subjects. We talk about books we're reading, problems that we're facing, our career growth, interviews, that kind of career-oriented discussion happens all the time as well. Come and check it out, developertea.com. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.