Stop Wasting Brainpower

How many times have you found yourself saying: “I worked all day, but I didn’t get anything done.” I know, we have all been there. We feel bad about it, too.

On the surface, it looks busy. Your calendar is full, Slack is notifying you, and your todo list is endless. There’s no shortage of movement, and yet, strangely, very little progress. If you’ve ever felt this way, you’re not alone. I wish it was as simple as laziness or poor time management. What’s actually draining us is cognitive load. Our brains aren’t running on infinite RAM. They choke on noise, interruptions, and the dumb complexity we keep piling on.

Psychologists define it simply: our working memory is limited. Every task we take on eats into that limited space. Some load is necessary. The actual problem we’re solving. But most of what burns us out isn’t the work itself, it’s the extra baggage: the clutter in messy codebases, the endless notifications, the scavenger hunts for configuration files, the thousand tiny decisions that drain mental bandwidth.

This is Cognitive Load Theory: once your working memory is maxed out, your brain slows down, mistakes multiply, and frustration goes through