Hey everyone and welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about this concept of cognitive load. My goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. And clarity in particular in today's episode is what we're going to focus on. This concept is one that can change the way you think about structuring your day. It can change the way you think about, if you lead reports, for example, how you structure their time, how you structure a sprint, what kind of work you assign to them, what kind of design, how well a person is expected to focus in a given circumstance. And there's some very simple ways to kind of experience what we're talking about in today's episode, to actually feel it while you're listening to the episode. I'm going to try to do some of those kind of proofs or examples during this episode. The first kind of assumption that we make before we get into this episode, and hopefully you can follow me here. The first assumption that we're going to make is that software engineering, and not just software engineering, but our careers, our careers as professional adults throughout our lives are chock full of learning. Learning that a huge portion of the work we do is fundamentally learning. Learning about a problem, learning a new technology, learning how to work with another person, learning about the product that we're building, right? This is all gathering information in our environment, whether that is explicitly defined information or if it's something that we have to go discover. And reasoning about it, learning about it, creating the connections in our brain, right? If anybody disagrees with this, I'd love to hear your theory on why this isn't the case. But fundamentally, a huge part of what we do as engineers, and really, it doesn't matter if you're an engineer or not, if you're working in any kind of knowledge work, if you're working in any kind of startup, for example. A huge part of what you're doing is learning. All right? So we're going to kind of take it for granted in order to take the next leap in this discussion. The concept of cognitive learning theory, right? Cognitive learning theory, the kind of core tenet of cognitive learning theory is that there is some optimal load under the surface of the environment. Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? optimizes our learning ability. It optimizes how much information can we learn in a given unit of time. Overloading or underloading, right? Overloading our cognitive capacity or underloading our cognitive capacity is detrimental to this rate, to this cognitive learning rate. Okay, so you can kind of think about this as a corridor. And likely, you know, there's some range where most of the benefits, if you're thinking kind of another mental model to pull into this, is you're trying to get most of the benefits. You can't get perfect cognitive load necessarily, but there is some optimal amount. And as long as you're close to that optimal amount, you're probably going to get most of the benefits. Of this phenomenon, right? I'm not really sure what the falloff looks like. I haven't really dug into the studies that have been done to that degree. I suspect that there is some kind of exponential falloff. And once you go past a certain cognitive load, your learning ability tanks pretty quickly. That would be my guess. It doesn't really matter too much for what we're actually trying to target here, right? Which is to recognize that cognitive load, right? So we have a direct relationship between our capacity to learn, which we've already mentioned is essentially our capacity to succeed, right? Because the vast majority of what we do is learning. Our capacity to succeed is directly related to how much we're able to handle versus how much we're trying to handle. What is the input versus what is the input versus what is the input versus what is the input versus what is the input versus what is the input versus what is the input versus what is the input versus what is the input versus our current load? All right. So now here's the critical insight I want you to take away here, okay? Our cognitive load does not discriminate on any kind of categorical basis. All right? Another way to put this is our cognitive load does not care where the load is coming from. Cognitive load does not discriminate on if it's work information that we're processing, if it's trying to order lunch because we haven't eaten, we missed our lunch break, if it's tired, if it's anticipation, if it's a messy desk. All of these external factors that have absolutely nothing to do with our cognitive load. So we have a lot of information that we're going to have to do with our work, take up some of our cognitive load capacity. That leaves less headroom, right? It leaves less available space to perform optimally, okay? The vast majority of problems, by the way, in this, I guess, category are going to be overload problems. The underload problems do exist, all right? And they do still happen. You may have a manager, for example, who, in order to not overload you, they end up not giving you a lot of challenge, which means that your cognitive load is low, and it's low enough that you disengage, all right? So there is some benefit, like, um, some study benefit to loading more if you are in dis, if you're in a disengaged, in particular, if you're in some kind of, like, low energy board kind of disengagement, right? So having a higher challenge, having more cognitive load in that situation is likely going to help you. The vast majority of people who are listening to this right now, what you're dealing with is likely excess cognitive load. But if you're a manager, I want you to listen to this part especially, okay? Pay attention to this part. Cognitive load, is not a static value, even for the same person from one day to the next, all right? What does that mean? It means that a given person on your team is going to do what humans do. They're going to have a variety of experiences from one day to the next, from one month to the next, from one year to the next. There will be things that tax their cognitive ability. And your job as a manager is not to ignore that. It's not to push them past their limit. It's not to try to compress that out. But it's to recognize that. Recognize and to open the conversation with your reports. This is my very opinionated take, okay? And I believe that it's backed pretty well by available research. 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So we have to kind of dig out why, but we start with that evaluation. If you're high energy, we've probably got the load just about right, right? Most of the time we're going to hear people say, I'm dipping on energy because I'm a little bit tired because I've been running really hard. That's usually the reason why we see a dip in energy. Sometimes it's because they're bored with what they're looking at. And some of this, there's some kind of, there's different types of load. If you go look at cognitive load theory, there's a lot more to it. Just, you know, a single bucket of cognitive load, right? It adds up to that essentially, but there's different categories of load. There's things like intrinsic load. Intrinsic load is what is the level of cognitive energy required because of the subject itself, right? You can imagine that intrinsic load then is going to be directly related to somebody's experience. Right? It doesn't have any experience with, let's say scaling a database. Well, there's going to, the intrinsic load doesn't necessarily change from one person to the next, but how they relate to that intrinsic load is going to change, right? So there's different types of load. Sometimes, sometimes, and again, this is a manager, something to pay close attention to as a manager. Sometimes the, the load that you experience is going to be related to the subject that you're working on. So you're going to have to have a lot of experience with that. Right? So you're going to have to have a lot of experience with that. Right. And so the, the load that you experience because of a particular subject is low because you're not interested in it. And so the cognitive processing slows down, uh, not because you're overloaded and not because you're underloaded, but because you're selectively underloading, you're choosing not to, uh, sometimes this happens unconsciously. You're, you're kind of bored by that. You're bored by that particular topic. So this is another reason why cognitive load is so important. It's because you're you end up with low performance, uh, from somebody who you're giving them a good challenge. They're caught like in terms of, uh, the load level, this might be the appropriate load level, but it's the wrong subject. It's the wrong kind of work for that person. So they're not going to engage at the cognitive load level, uh, that would encourage like an optimal output, right? So the critical takeaway here, the most critical takeaway, you can have is cognitive load is not static. It's going to change day to day, reducing your cognitive load that is not producing value gives you higher overhead, but it comes with an important caveat that if you are providing yourself more overhead availability, then you risk underloading, right? You risk getting to a place where the challenge is actually insufficient for you. And you end up in that kind of situation. So the art here is because humans have varying degrees of cognitive load, the art is trying to figure out what is that balance, right? It's also interesting to kind of evaluate yourself and what are your behaviors when you're underloaded versus overloaded? When can you recognize that you're overloaded? What are the signals? What are the feelings that you have? This requires a lot of kind of, um, awareness and, and being able to focus on the moment and focus on the feelings that you have as a result of a given cognitive load level, for example, right? Uh, being able to be in tune with that can help you choose. Should I adopt more into my load path today? Like, should I have more on my plate? Should I have more on my plate? Should I have more on my plate? Should I have more on my plate today? Or should I scale down or, or do I need to talk to my manager about a chronic disengagement that I'm recognizing my own behaviors? I'm chronically disengaged. Um, this is something to be aware of because you're going to optimize your own, uh, kind of working capacity by doing this, right? Um, a very simple example. We're going to end with this very simple example. Uh, and we've done this before. There's a couple of different examples. One of them, uh, is the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, examples. One of them, uh, that I like to do is, is also a good example of why multitasking doesn't work very well, right? But it's a cognitive load is the kind of fundamental reason why it doesn't work very well. So we can do that one quickly. If you get out a piece of paper and you try to write down first, I want you to like set a little timer or something next to you, start it, and then write your first and your last name, and then your address, right? Your, your, your, your, your, your, your mailing address. We don't have a mailing address. You can write down your email address, right? Or, or your phone number. So write those things sequentially. Now, uh, I want you to do the same thing, but instead of writing sequentially, I want you to write one letter from each thing, right? And time it. You're going to notice, I mean, by a long shot, uh, the second version of that is going to take drastically longer. Right? Some of this is switching costs, some moving your pin more space, right? Even if you were to eliminate the switching costs, you're still going to have a higher cognitive load because you're having to switch through those different pieces. You're having to try to hold more in your head and it's going to reduce your capacity. There is a point at which you will become overloaded. It was actually a principle, uh, when I was going through flight training, for example, this is a principle. That, uh, CFIs learn a CFI is taught to put their students at the point of task saturation. Task saturation is essentially cognitive load at the very edge of their capacity, right? So what does, what does this look like? It looks like, uh, once you hit this point, your CFI can recognize it very quickly because, uh, people tend to, uh, they're not going to be able to do the same thing. They're going to be able to do the exact same thing. They start to freeze up. This happens, uh, to almost every flight student that ever gets training, right? And the fundamental reason is because that task saturation creates this overload. And again, that performance tanks off of, off of the, uh, off of the right side of that graph. If you were to visualize this as a graph, your performance is going to tank if you're overloaded. So the interesting thing about this training is that it's going to take a lot of training is that over time, if you experience that task saturation overload, but you continue to bring yourself up close to that point, your skill, and this is, this is a really interesting kind of dynamic, your learning and your skill and your practice make it such that your cognitive load lowers. It's not that you, are becoming more capable of higher cognitive load. If that was the case, then you would see that, you know, you would see that ability across multiple other areas as well, right? So your ability to handle more cognitive load is not necessarily improving. Unfortunately, that would be great, right? Instead, what's happening is in order to operate, in order to perform those particular skills, the necessary cognitive load, to do those skills, to actually perform that, to, you know, fly that particular maneuver, that cognitive load goes down, right? Because you've started to develop muscle memory, or you've started to develop a little bit more internalization of that skill, rather than having to think about how to do it. You're kind of just remembering or going through the motions. There's less cognitive load in order to accomplish the same outcome, right? This happens with everyone in almost every way. So if you're doing that, you're going to have to do a lot of evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution evolution internalize and allow us to accomplish more with lower cognitive load. We accomplish the same amount, let's say, with less cognitive load. So as we continue to grow, growth in this theory or in this paradigm, growth is essentially measured by how much cognitive load does it take in order to perform a particular skill. That's a very narrow definition, but it's a powerful definition because what this really looks like in our careers is it looks like being able to take on new, different cognitive load or more or both. This tends to be the pathways for growth. Either you're... You're able to produce more of the same thing up to a certain point, up to a certain threshold, or you're able to take on a new, a different type of cognitive load in parallel. So you have one skill and you're developing a second skill or a third skill. You're able to perform the same skills in parallel with a new one that requires higher cognitive load because now you're adopting that skill into your repertoire. So if you're a newer developer, that load is going to be higher earlier. So trying to adopt seven skills all at once is going to likely be an overload, right? So this theory really does help you understand, one, you know, how do we develop these skills over time? What does it actually mean to have a skill? It means being able to do the thing more internally. Right? Without having to think about it a lot. Right? That's really what it means to have the skill. And secondly, that our day-to-day management of our energy, we shouldn't be expecting ourselves to do the same exact output all the time. We're going to have some distribution, probably something like a normal distribution of output over time, dependent on our cognitive load, which doesn't care about what category we're talking about. Right? This is one of the reasons why managing your personal life is such a critical part of success in your career. Right? And vice versa. Managing your career is such an important part of your success in your personal life because this ability to handle things, right, the ability to be able to learn, once again, this fundamental skill. Being able to learn is moderated by the cognitive load that we experience in a given frame. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope this was enlightening or at least is engaging the parts of your brain. If you've ever experienced, you know, imposter syndrome, for example, this is a great theory to understand why you're learning or your ability to learn is so important. Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right?! effectively. So I hope you'll take this and you'll, you'll at least think about how this plays out or how, how you are interacting with your own cognitive load, how much cognitive load you're expecting your team to be able to handle in a given period of time. And hopefully this also encourages you to have empathy with other people who are going through things that may be increasing their cognitive, their ability to do something really difficult, right? Maybe moderated by the fact that they have something really difficult going on in their lives. So my encouragement here is for you to build your empathy, build your understanding for other humans, understand that, you know, our brains are, are not just machines. And that our cognitive load is actually affecting us in a universal way, not in these categorical ways. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.