On Cognitive Load

It is day two of ICPC in Baku, Azerbaijan.

ICPC is the International Collegiate Programming Contest. This year about 140 teams (of 3 students) from around the world are here. Past champions and finalists include Nikolai Durov, cofounder of Telegram, Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, Craig Silverstein, first employee of Google, and Adam D’Angelo, first CTO of Facebook. They were not the CEOs, but their ability to focus on problem-solving shaped the companies they helped build. The Telegram story is a lesson on its own, but this post is not about that.

When I am in Singapore, I practice yoga every day. When I travel, I sometimes open ClassPass and look for a gym. There is overhead with that.

Today I noticed something about symmetry in yoga. Teachers often build flows that mirror left and right. Short chains for some. Longer chains for others. A class can have two or three long sequences that fill the hour. Ten minutes on one side, then the same ten minutes on the other. That is already twenty minutes.

I realized I do not like that in my own self-guided practice. The real issue is not symmetry. It is cognitive load. Tracking perfect mirrors adds work for the teacher and the students. You have to remember each move, in order, and then replay it. That attention cost breaks flow. The principle is balance, not bookkeeping. If you stretch one hamstring, you should probably stretch the other. If you twist one way, you should probably twist the other. Exact mirroring is not the point.

If you stop forcing perfect symmetry, you can feel your way as you go. You can build more interesting flows that are not mirror images yet still touch both sides. The overall practice stays balanced without the extra mental tracking.

I think the same thing applies to work, to building products, to launching a startup, and to raising kids. There is strategy and a plan. But there is also the moment you are in. Reducing unnecessary cognitive load makes execution better. Keep the principle. Drop the parts that only add tracking overhead.

I am not a yoga teacher yet, but I have facilitated about a dozen sessions so far. I used to feel pressure to comply and mirror both sides exactly. I did not want students to judge the class. Starting today, I will tell future classes that the session will not be symmetrical. I do not want them to count moves. I want them to be present. I will still call the cue. I might demonstrate. I will also invite everyone to deviate at some point and do something different.

Back to ICPC. Competitive programming is also about cognitive load. Great teams lower it. One person reads and reduces the problem. One codes the simplest working version. One builds tests and checks edge cases. They keep a short shared list. They reuse templates. They cut anything that does not move the solution forward. The principles stay the same. Clarity. Correctness. Complexity in bounds. The overhead goes away.

A side note on Gen AI and coding. It is useful to build harnesses and scaffolding, to explain proofs, and to create small variants of the same idea so you can see the invariant. Use it to offload prep work and bookkeeping. But ultimately you need to keep the thinking. That is the link to yoga. Hold the principle. Remove the unnecessary load. Do what is right in this moment and trust yourself.

namaste