Your mind has a surprisingly strict capacity. Not infinite. Not even close. Research consistently shows our brain’s working memory can only juggle a handful of distinct pieces of information simultaneously. Beyond this threshold lies cognitive overload, where comprehension crumbles and frustration builds.
You’ve experienced this limitation countless times. That moment when someone interrupts you mid-thought and you completely lose your train of thinking. When you walk into a room and forget why you entered. When you’re introduced to several people at once and immediately forget most names.
I unwittingly tested this principle when creating two different projects. The first involved dozens of small, interconnected components requiring constant mental reference to one another. Returning to it after months away felt impossible. It was like trying to hold water in cupped hands. The second project used fewer, more comprehensive modules. Despite almost equal complexity, I could immediately grasp its organization, because no single part required tracking too many connections at once.
What we design, be it software, schedules, or systems, either respects or ignores this cognitive limitation. The most elegant solutions aren’t those with fewer total parts, but those requiring fewer parts held in mind simultaneously.
Look at what’s overwhelming you today. The solution isn’t “try harder to remember.” It’s redesigning the task to require less simultaneous remembering. Transfer what’s in your limited working memory to external systems. Write things down. Create checklists. Combine related items into meaningful groups. Break complex sequences into distinct stages.
A repeating struggle with the same process is a design problem waiting to be solved. Redesign it to require fewer simultaneous mental connections. This is the essence of good UX design. And perhaps most importantly, protect your peak thinking hours from interruptions for complex work, acknowledging that your cognitive resources are precious rather than infinite.
Pick just one overwhelmingly complex task today and restructure it to demand less from your working memory. What system in your life is asking too much of your perfectly normal human brain?
