In software engineering, cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in a developer's working memory to complete a task. Think of it like the RAM in a computer: if you try to run too many heavy applications at once, the system slows down, glitches, or crashes.

When a developer's cognitive load exceeds their mental capacity, productivity drops, the quality of code suffers, and the risk of burnout increases.

Somewhere in your organisation right now, an engineer wants to use a tool. It's open source. It's battle-tested. Half the Fortune 500 runs it in production. But first, they need to fill out a vendor assessment form, get InfoSec sign-off, wait for procurement to confirm there's a contract in place, and then — maybe, in four to six months — they'll get a "yes" or a "no" from a committee that's optimised for risk avoidance, not risk management.

This isn't an argument against governance. Governance matters — especially in regulated industries. This is an argument that the way most enterprises do governance today is broken: optimised for the appearance of control rather than the reality of it. The question isn't whether to govern. It's whether your governance framework is actually reducing risk — or just reducing speed.

Meanwhile, the startup down the road shipped the feature last Tuesday.

But hey, at least you've got a contract. You can sue them if things go wrong. Right?

A new project kicks off — migrating a critical system to a platform nobody on the team has used before. Well, almost nobody. There's one person who's built on it. Shipped production workloads. Knows the failure modes.

They don't get the lead. The person with the most years of experience does. The senior. The one with the title.

Everyone defers. The titled lead chairs the meetings, makes the architecture calls, approves the designs. The person who actually knows the platform sits three rows back on the call, unmuted only when asked a direct question.

Six weeks later, the project is behind. Decisions are being revisited. The team is frustrated but can't quite name why.

You've seen this movie. Maybe you've been in it. Maybe you've been on both sides.

A self-journal. Not a blog post with answers — a collection of better questions I keep coming back to.

Inspired by Shaan Puri's "13 Questions That Will Change Your Life" — where he talks about questions being keys that unlock doors. I wanted to build my own keychain.

These are questions I've reframed for myself over time. The left column is how most people (including past me) would ask it. The right column is how I try to ask it now.

Time​

My rule is simple: I only want to spend time doing one of three things — earning, learning, or relaxing. If something doesn't fall into one of these, it probably doesn't deserve my hours.

Money​

Money, to me, is about one thing: freedom. Not luxury, not status — the ability to choose what I do with my time.

Work & Craft​

I choose work I enjoy. In difficult times, work has always been my anchor — you can't stop thoughts, but you can replace them with something more meaningful. I care about craft — doing things the right way, being opinionated for good reasons.

Relationships​

Every relationship is a journey toward something — with the freedom to change direction when it's needed. The question is whether you're walking it honestly.

Growth & Learning​

Learning truly happens only when there's a real change in behavior. Until then, it's just information — not growth.

Self & Identity​

Happiness isn't a destination for me — it's the journey. If I have to name a goal, it's about being useful and maximizing that usefulness as much as possible. At least, that's what I know for now.

This is a living document. I'll keep adding questions as I find better ones. The goal isn't to answer them all — it's to sit with the right ones long enough that clarity shows up on its own.

Because at the end of the day, the answers to these questions aren't things you can buy — they're things you build.

"A fit body, a peaceful mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned." — Naval Ravikant

Look, you worked hard. You stayed late. You shipped that thing nobody else could ship. You earned every single promotion, every bit of recognition, every seat at the table. It was all you. 100%. No asterisks. No footnotes. Definitely no luck involved.

Right?

You send a Slack message to another team. It's a reasonable request — a small API change, maybe a code review, maybe just a question about how their service handles edge cases. You write it clearly. You tag the right person. You even add a polite emoji. And then... nothing. No reply. No acknowledgment. Just the quiet hum of a message marked as read and promptly ignored.

You're not being ghosted because they're bad people. You're being ghosted because the game they're playing rewards ignoring you.

This isn't a people problem. It's a math problem.

You've seen it. Every team is shipping. Every sprint has velocity. Dashboards are green. And yet somehow, the organisation feels slower than it should. Everyone's busy, but nothing moves faster.

Here's a clue from an unexpected place.

Picture a motorway at rush hour. Every driver is making the smartest choice for themselves — fastest lane, shortest route, optimal speed. Nobody's doing anything wrong. And yet the whole system grinds to a halt. More cars, more rational decisions, more gridlock.

This isn't a failure of individual intelligence. It's a failure of coordination. Game theorists have a name for it — the Price of Anarchy — and it might be the most useful mental model for understanding what management actually is, when it matters, and when it doesn't.

Look, I get it. Someone at a conference said "InnerSource" and now Slack is buzzing — or is it Teams? Honestly, who can keep track anymore. People are sharing links to the InnerSource Commons, talking about "breaking down silos" and "cross-team collaboration" like they've discovered fire. Let me save you the trouble — here's why you should absolutely, categorically, never do InnerSource.