Cognitive Load for Knowledge Work — Matt Wynne

If you’re responsible for a budget that pays programmers or other knowledge workers, you probably care a great deal about getting good value for money from them.

This post describes a model of the burdens we place on these teams and the results we expect from them, called Cognitive Load. It’s a great thinking tool to help us manage capacity to achieve quality results without burning people out.

If you’ve ever been a programmer yourself, you probably have some sense of what Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais mean when they talk about the cognitive load on a software team.

Cognitive Load Theory comes from education, and it’s important to be aware that it has not been studied in the context of day-to-day programming work. However, my experience is that programmers spend all day learning: about their problem domain, their codebase, their tools and programming environment, their production environment, their team-mates and themselves, and so the application of this theory to knowledge work feels instinctively right to me. The authors of Team Topologies have made a great case for it.

I find these original names a bit abstract and difficult to grasp. I propose some new names that I think better express what they mean, at least the context of knowledge work:

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