Articles & Guides
Plain-language guides to cognitive load, attention, and workflow complexity — each one tied back to the published research it draws on.
Every article here follows the same contract: an idea from cognitive psychology or human factors, explained in plain language, linked to its primary source, and connected to a tool you can actually run. Below they're grouped into core concepts (the foundations) and applied guides (those concepts on specific problems).
Not sure where to start? Pick a goal
- "I keep burning out and don't know why." Start with Intrinsic Complexity vs. Extraneous Load, then audit your day with the Cognitive Load Estimator.
- "I'm busy all day but produce nothing deep." Read The Attentional Residue Effect and The Cognitive Cost of Meetings.
- "My team's process keeps breaking." Read Procedural Entropy and SOPs That Don't Break Under Pressure.
- "I want the whole model first." Begin with The Cognitive Estimation Framework.
Start here: the core concepts
Foundational pieces that explain the ideas and the metrics the tools are built on.
The Cognitive Estimation Framework: How to Quantify Human Mental Workload
An introduction to CFI, TES, and FRW. Unifying the three core estimators into a cohesive operational architecture.
Why We Burn Out: Intrinsic Complexity vs. Extraneous Load
Understanding the difference between the immovable structural weight of a task and the avoidable cognitive tax of bad systems.
The Attentional Residue Effect: Why Context Switching Kills Deep Work
Modeling the cognitive lag and operational friction generated by task-switching and fragmented environments.
Procedural Entropy: How to Measure and Control Chaos in Complex Systems
Quantifying system unpredictability, branching decisions, and how automation offsets structural step counts.
Applied guides
Putting the concepts to work on specific, everyday workplace challenges.
Diagnosing Workflow Collapse Using the Task Entropy Score
How to identify and repair high-entropy decision nodes before a process fails completely.
Reducing Attentional Residue in Engineering Teams
Structuring communication protocols to protect the Focus Recovery Window during deep work.
How to Audit Cognitive Friction in Developer Toolchains
A practical method to measure the extraneous load of bad CI/CD pipelines and internal tooling.
The Extraneous Load of Modern Dashboards: A UI/UX Audit
Why information density without hierarchy creates alert blindness and system fatigue.
SOPs That Don't Break Under Pressure
How to rewrite Standard Operating Procedures to absorb dynamic complexity and friction.
Measuring the Cognitive Cost of Meeting Interruption Chains
Calculating the compounding organizational cost of scattered meetings on deep work.