Cognitive Overhead

Noun · Slang & Abbreviations

Definitions

  1. The mental effort required just to hold a system, workflow, or set of constraints in mind before any productive work can even start. In engineering slang, reducing cognitive overhead is one of the clearest ways to make teams faster without demanding they work harder.

    In plain English: The amount of mental effort required just to understand and work with something.

    Example: "The old deployment process had so much cognitive overhead that even experienced engineers avoided touching it unless they absolutely had to."

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