Plugging The Leaks in Your Cognitive Resource Tank
Many would argue that we have unlimited brain potential, memory or cognitive resources, but this is easily misunderstood as unlimited in quantity, rather it’s unlimited in threshold i.e without bounds, and like everything else in the universe, is a finite resource. Hence, it’s important to keep a check on this resource tank especially the most easily depleting one of it’s attribute, the will power resource.
The thought of writing this came after I watched a talk from one of the prominent authors, a name well known in the computer science community, Kathy Sierra. The gist of her talk was -
“Expertise Requires Cognitive Resources Management”
Basically she suggests that there are typically three categories of activities that we have to do in our daily routines, activities that you -
- Can’t do (but need to)
- Can do (but requires effort)
- Have mastered (automatic/ a second nature)
“A Half-Assed Skill”
Though we would want to have a major chunk of those activities in the third category, but as we are constantly learning new things and especially for a developer who has to keep up with modern tech, the task becomes difficult as a lot of skills that you start out to learn are never polished and mastered, at least not by many, and they remain what we call as half-assed.
“Split a skill into smaller sub-skills”
The problem with moving a task to the third category is that it often takes a lot of time, and that is primarily because we want to master a big piece of something, rather than an independent module. For example — you start by learning a new programming language, of course you can master that language to about 80–90% and that would take some 8–10 years or so (as per most researches), but if you start by learning a subset -
“High Quality — High Quantity Examples”
And the way to achieve that while learning something, to make sure that it has been learnt ?
Immersively learning something, in chunks is far quicker than learning a bigger piece, the reasoning behind this is that our brain is good at recognizing patterns, so when we see something a hundred times we know how this is supposed to work, so that’s how we should perhaps go about learning something.
A module of that language and repeatedly do many iterations on that before moving onto a new module then you have mastered one thing, with quality and are onto the next. This gives one more confidence as well has the knowledge lasts -
“Half a skill beats a Half-Assed skill”
Another great talk on something similar was by Daniel Lebrero, he talks about the importance automating stuff (forming habits) and how crucial it is to have fast feedback loops while learning something new, or developing something.
Not to forget, this matters in our daily routines as well apart from professional stuff, like why “The 5 am Club” keeps their running shoes by their beds (not literally of course, or maybe?) — to spend as little as possible will power on such tasks.
We can associate other concepts with this as well, one in particular of that of the power of our subconscious mind. Forming a positive habit and convincing your conscious mind/ brain about it is just about doing it enough so that our brain continues to think of it as a pattern and approves of it anytime it sees it again.
Personal Thoughts —
I have always felt than everything that we do, in our lifestyle has a framework, might be broken at start but the idea here is to have a framework, a repeatable template you follow to do things, it just makes the job easier as it is something similar to “filling in the blanks” once you have mastered the framework. It’s all about consistency, with right progression.
References —
- Her Book — Badass : Making Users Awesome
- Kathy Sierra’s Talk
- Daniel Lebrero’s Talk — Habits of Efficient Developers
