you're listening to developer team my name is jonathan cuttrell and we're talking today about lowering cognitive load we've been talking about this in the past two episodes of developer t i encourage you to go back and listen to them right now for you to lower your cognitive load i encourage you to stop doing whatever it is you're doing even if it's just for 10 seconds take a few breaths and then refocus on whatever you're doing if you're trying to listen to this podcast while you're doing something else it's probably worth considering stopping listening to this and focusing entirely on what you're doing some things can be run at the same time we have muscle memory for this stuff and we talked about that in the last episode there's kind of different ways of uh of accessing this information or dealing with different kinds of inputs for example it's fairly easy to listen to music while you are exercising but it's not very easy to listen to music that has lyrics in it while you're doing something like coding or writing an essay in today's episode i want to focus on a proactive step that you can take to change the way you think about how you schedule your time this may change the way you think about prioritizing your time it's very simple that is to look at your primary activities this is a classification exercise look at the things that you're doing if you have a calendar this is a really good way to do this retrospectively and try to add to that calendar you know combine it with your personal calendar right that idea here is to try to look at all of the kinds of events that you participate in not just the work ones not just the the ones that make it to your calendar but everything that you do and i want you to identify primary activities these primary activities might be something like focus time it might be something like meetings maybe it's writing maybe it's scheduling maybe it's processing some information some list of information right you can see these are these are intentionally kind of vague or abstract but these primary activities that you participate in every day all of your activities should fit within one of these things it's important to make space by the way for primary activities that may seem a little bit more fluid like socializing don't limit yourself to things that you think should be in this list of primary activities all right so this is the your list of primary activities and now for each of your primary activities you likely have two or three different modes for those primary activities sometimes they have one but usually there's two or three for example you may have writing code as a primary activity and then writing code for a new feature writing code to fix a bug or writing code as a proof of concept or a prototype these are all different modes for that primary activity you're going to think differently for each of those modes even though the primary activity is the same there are different kinds of meetings that you're going to attend a stand-up is a different mode from a retrospective a retrospective is a different mode from a one-on-one these even carry over into those more fluid activities for example you may have a social mode with people that you're well acquainted with or you may have a social mode where you're meeting new people now the goal here is not to create mechanics around every single thing you do in your life right instead it's to understand and apply this concept so that you can have a clear picture of what those primary activities are and the different modes that you're going to be doing now this may be a daunting exercise to try to do all of your activities all at once instead you can kind of stop for some of the activities that you don't necessarily want to create those mechanics around right hopefully you can see that if you wanted to progress with all of them you could but focus on you know one or two primary activities maybe three primary activities that you care about improving in this particular area i remember i said i'm going to reduce your cognitive load and so far it may seem like i'm actually increasing your cognitive load what we're actually doing is we're creating a schema right we're creating slots and these slots are going to be they're going to essentially act like an index for your brain all right we're going to get to that in a second the science behind this is called queuing and it's something that humans are actually pretty naturally good at queuing is a version of symbology if you think about a particular word you're going to be able to do a lot of things with it and you're going to be able to word you associate a lot of feelings or emotions or pictures in your mind with that word you may associate experiences with it it can all be triggered off of a single word and this is an artifact of the way that our brains work we tend to create associations with things and so if we have a highly associative word it can act as a pointer when we use these pointers as reminders reminders then that's called a cue. We can use a pointer, a word or a picture, an environment can do this, a certain kind of music can do this, really any kind of sensory cue. You can use this as a trigger to remind yourself of a lot of things at once, right? And this is essentially just a cue response cycle. We get some kind of sensory input and we respond. We train ourselves to respond to that sensory input. So hopefully you can see what's coming next. What we want to do is evaluate all of these primary activities and specifically the modes for those primary activities, attach the kinds of context that we want in those modes. For example, if you're a manager and you have the one-on-one mode, you may want to use the one-on-one cue, right? Because the primary action or primary activity here is a meeting. The mode is a one-on-one. The cue might be, for example, going on a walk. I've had managers that do this and I have done this before as a manager. Going on a walk gives me a specific kind of undeniable sensory cue that reminds me that I'm in one-on-one mode. And for each of these modes, it's worthwhile to spend some time. And again, we're talking about doing this over the course of, let's say, eight to 12 different modes that you might be working in in a given day. Spend some time to specifically think about what makes that mode special, what makes it set apart from the other modes. If you're, for example, in the earlier coding example, where you're coding a feature or you're coding a proof of concept, these are two different modes. When you're working on a feature, you may be highly sensitive to bug-prone or error-prone code, whereas when you're working on a feature, you may be highly sensitive to error-prone code. At the same time, you may be highly sensitive to bug-prone or error-prone code, whereas when you're working on a proof of concept, you may be able to reduce that sensitivity. And this is one of the things that sets these two things apart, right? It sets your mindset is a little bit different. So these are distinct from each other for that reason. It's worth considering what makes each of these modes distinct from each other. What makes a retrospective distinct from a sprint planning meeting? So this all ties together when you can effectively use the cues, whatever your chosen cues are for each of these modes, to remind you what are these distinct things? What are the distinct characteristics of this specific mode of this primary activity? Now, here's where things get really interesting. And understanding that this may take time to adopt and understand how this fits into your practice, but it's also a great way to understand how this fits into your practice. Your workflow. This is definitely not a set of rules. So I don't want you to apply this as if it was kind of an all-encompassing framework or anything like that. This is just a way to try to lower some of your cognitive load. Now, here's the important thing to recognize. When a new kind of event enters, right? Let's say you have somebody that invites you to a meeting and you don't necessarily have a mode. It may fit in one of your primary activities, but it doesn't necessarily have a mode that you can readily identify. Well, this is where your cognitive load will spike. And this is by design. If something goes outside of your normal primary activities, right? Or of your normal modes for those primary activities, it probably is worth thinking about. Remember, cognitive load on its own is not necessarily a bad thing if it's not a good thing. So if you're in a mode where you're used in the right places, we just don't want cognitive load to constantly be present when we're trying to understand our calendars. And that's the whole goal of this exercise, to give you a set of tools that allow you to treat those activities as distinct. In other words, you don't treat every meeting the same, but also rely on your ability to associate those cues so you can shift modes effectively. And very importantly, recognize when something is totally different. So if you're in a mode where you're in a mode where you're in a mode where you're in a mode where you're in a mode where you're in a mode where you're in a mode where you're out of place, when it doesn't fit within your normal primary activities or modes for those activities. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope that you take away this idea of using cues, even if you don't apply every single bit of this categorization framework to your work, that you use cues to lower your cognitive load. That is the ultimate goal here for you to utilize cues to shift your cognitive load. Shift into different modes throughout your working day, throughout your life. Thanks again for listening to this episode. 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