Cognitive Load Theory

There are stretches of time where you feel like you’re running on fumes and you can’t really explain why. You slept okay. You ate. Nobody yelled at you. But your brain just won’t cooperate. You sit down to do something and the gears don’t turn.

I think a lot of people experience this and chalk it up to laziness or lack of discipline. I used to do the same. But there’s a more useful way to think about it.

Your brain is a battery

Cognitive Load Theory was originally developed by John Sweller in the late 80s as a framework for instructional design. The basic idea is that your working memory can only hold so much at once. When you overload it, performance drops. Learning stops. Decision-making gets worse.

But it applies way beyond the classroom. Think of your brain as a battery that starts full in the morning and drains throughout the day. Every decision you make, every piece of information you process, every context switch, every “where did I put that file” moment takes a little bit of charge off the battery.

The theory breaks cognitive load into three types:

• Intrinsic load is the difficulty of the thing itself. Some tasks are just hard. You can’t avoid this.
• Extraneous load is the unnecessary friction around the task. Bad tooling, messy folders, unclear instructions, hunting for a bookmark you saved three months ago. This is the stuff you CAN control.
• Germane load is the good kind. It’s the mental effort that goes toward actually learning and understanding. You want to maximize this.

The goal is simple: kill as much extraneous load as possible so that when you sit down to do the hard thing, you actually have the capacity for it.

The quiet drain

Here’s what people don’t talk about enough. It’s rarely one big thing that empties the battery. It’s a hundred tiny things.

You open your laptop and your desktop is a mess. You need a file but you don’t remember where you saved it. You have 47 browser tabs open from three different tasks. Your email inbox is a wall of unread. You need to send a message but you can’t find the right Slack channel. You want to reference something you read last week but your bookmarks are a graveyard.

None of these things are hard. But each one costs you a tiny decision, a tiny search, a tiny moment of “wait, where was that again.” And they add up. By the time you get to the actual work you needed to do, you’ve already spent half your battery on logistics.

Organize before you need to

The fix isn’t complicated. It’s just boring enough that most people don’t do it.

Your files

Pick a folder structure and stick to it. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be consistent. When you save something, you should know where it goes without thinking. The moment you have to think about where to put a file, you’ve already lost a little bit of charge.

Your bookmarks

Sort them. Folder them. Delete the ones you’ll never click again. Your browser bookmarks should work like a library, not a junk drawer. If you reference something regularly, it should be one click away.

Your email

Folders, labels, filters. Whatever your email client supports, use it. The goal is that when you open your inbox, you see what matters and the rest is already sorted. Inbox Zero isn’t about being obsessive. It’s about not starting your day with a wall of noise.

Your shortcuts

Learn the keyboard shortcuts for the tools you use every day. Set up aliases in your terminal. Create text expansion snippets for things you type often. Every time you reach for the mouse to do something you could have done with a keystroke, that’s a micro-drain. One doesn’t matter. Fifty a day does.

Your phone

Turn off notifications for things that aren’t urgent. Every buzz is an interruption and every interruption is a context switch. Every context switch costs recovery time. Your phone should be a tool, not a slot machine.

Use technology to cover for your brain

This is the part where people get weird about productivity tools and I get it. But the point isn’t to become some optimization robot. The point is that your brain has limits and technology doesn’t.

A calendar reminder doesn’t forget. A cron job doesn’t get tired. A well-organized note system doesn’t lose track of things after a long week. Let the machines handle the stuff that machines are good at so your brain can focus on the stuff that only a brain can do.

Write things down. Set reminders. Automate what you can. Not because you’re broken, but because working memory is genuinely limited to about four things at a time and pretending otherwise is how you end up staring at a screen at 15:00 wondering what you were supposed to be doing.

Plan for the low points

The battery metaphor is useful because it implies something important: you can plan around it.

If you know you’re sharpest in the morning, do the hard things in the morning. Save the emails and the admin for the afternoon when your battery is lower. If you know Mondays are rough, don’t schedule your most demanding work on a Monday.

And when the battery is genuinely empty, stop pretending it isn’t. Rest isn’t a reward you earn after productivity. It’s maintenance. You don’t wait until your car breaks down to change the oil.

The real point

None of this is about being more productive in some grindset sense. It’s about being realistic about how your brain works and setting things up so that when the hard moments come, and they always come, you’re not already running on empty from a thousand paper cuts.

Take care of the small stuff before it piles up. Your future self will thank you.