Cognitive Overload is Killing Your Tech Team’s Productivity

What is Cognitive Load?

Cognitive Load was coined by Australian educational psychologist John Sweller in 1980. It refers to the amount of information you are processing at a given time, and how the volume of that information can burden our cognitive capacity.

Everyone underestimates their own cognitive load. We often think we have room in our brains to hold more, even though we’re already slipping and making mistakes.

Too much information, or cognitive overload, causes decision fatigue, overwhelm, inability to prioritize, and reduced effectiveness.

This is especially true for your technical team. In fact, your team can handle less complexity than you think.

What is Flow State?

Writing code takes focus. Our goal when coding is to achieve a flow state, where you are in the zone and focused on one task. Because you’re often solving complicated technical problems or designing something new, it’s important for software engineers to have that space to focus. Focus allows you to achieve flow state and make marked progress on one initiative at a time.

Your dev team will almost always see an increased cognitive load when building your product, as they have to consider the moving parts and technical debt (which only increase as your product/code base becomes larger and more complicated).

The more information you inundate your team with, the harder it becomes to achieve and stay in that flow state.

Cognitive overload will kill your productivity.

How to reduce cognitive load

So what can you do to be cognizant of and reduce cognitive load for your technical team?

Keep the main thing the main thing

We always identify a north star for each project we work on. This aligns the team on the highest level outcomes we want to achieve for any project. This helps us stay focused on what we’re trying to achieve, rather than getting distracted by shiny ideas that might be fun but don’t get you any closer to your north star.

Force rank your priorities

Everything cannot be at the same level of critical importance. Consider your north star and force rank your priorities so you can communicate an ordered list of priorities. Once you have this list, only talk about, plan, and build one of those priorities at a time (perhaps 2-3 at a time if you have a big enough team). Having a clear north star can also help your team self-prioritize based on your shared understanding of what you’re trying to achieve.

Don’t tap the fish bowl

I think we can all relate to how distracting an unexpected phone call, visitor, or slack message can be to the task at hand. Engineering takes a lot of uninterrupted focus, so leave your team to work as much as possible. We’re not advocating for weeks on end of silence either (in fact, we would never advocate for that), rather create structured times for communication and structured times for work within a given day. A lot of teams will block off hours during the day where no meetings can be planned so focus work can happen.

One tip we’ve found helpful: let your team book their own meetings with their manager, rather than the manager scheduling a meeting time right in the middle of their focus time.

Part of being a great technical leader is empowering your tech team to work their best way. By reducing cognitive load, providing clear direction, and allowing space for focus, you are empowering your team with the space to create better solutions and better products.