Stream of consciousness, Sept. 27th, 2025
Continuing on the topic of available resources: I believe, just like there only being limited time and energy in a given day to work on things, there also is only limited mental space to have things in your head that you currently deal with (wether you're actively working with them or not).
I've started listening to Evy Poumpouras on Diary of a CEO yesterday where she touches on the topic as well:
[...] the other thing [...] they were very good at [is] delegating. So they didn't need to know everything because confident people are okay with not knowing all the information. So your brain is like a bathtub. The bathtub can only hold so much water. If you keep warding water in the bathtub, it's going to overflow. That's your cognitive load.
This is something I am very conscious about lately. I've stopped doing most IC work recently, which give me a lot more time to find and focus on leveraged work. A big part of my day is not information gathering, figuring out where potential levers are. And doing that is like drinking from the firehose. There is so much information, so many potential topics to work on and so many asks that you hear if you start to listen that it's impossible to keep all of them in your head.
I'm certain I am not good at this yet, so I'm hardly in the position to give proper advice here. What I can share is my observations, though: I personally like to be in as much control as possible about the things that happen around me. I think for management (and life in general), this is a fools errand. I will never be able to control everything that happens around me. At this point, I'm not convinced it is possible to control anything at all or if we're just really good at telling us that we control a thing if we spend enough time on it. So for me, this also is an exercise in growing my character, in learning to let go, to trust other people and processes and to accept that tings will go different to how I expect them to go.
What I like to do is briefly think about a topic when I hear about it: Is this something that is important or can have a big impact? What will happen if I just leave this alone? What would be the potential upsides of me being involved in this? Is this something that I should delegate or something that nobody should care about? My process for that usually involves writing those topics down somewhere so they are out of my head but I know where to go to revisit them. Giving this some timely space seems to help me make a more objective decision.
For writing down, everything works as long as I know where to go to find those things again. I personally do a mixture of physical and digital notes, following not particular system as to when I use which. For digital notes, I use Things and new... things just go to my inbox which I review when the number next to the tab gets big enough to make me uncomfortable. For physical notes, I recently started doing lists on post-its. This give my cognitive load a nice, physical representation: When there are many post-its on my desk, I have a lot of cognitive load, and its time to go through and get rid of some.
Another thing that helps me is to just turn off my brain sometimes, to unplug completely. I'm pretty sure that my brain keeps doing the work because I usually get back with better ideas, but I don't actively think about it in these moments, and that helps a lot. I do that by being outside, often with the dog and the family. I'll put my phone into Airplane mode for half an hour or so. Not because I would get so many messages of importance, but as a gesture for myself to say its time to unplug. Recently, I started to play World of Warcraft. That helps as well, it very clearly shows that I'm not doing anything serious right now, I'm playing. I'm working on being able to enjoy that without feeling guilty.