Fallout counter

[abitrolly]

Having web app for people to record and share where their cognitive Action Points are spent would help many stubborn devs and (maybe even more important) unaware managers to get what Development eXperience is all about, and how much money and/or potential contributors are they potentially losing every day.

In the Fallout screen above (taken from this guide) the player character has 10 AP until next turn. In development world each turn is a day, and I would say that 7 AP is the most for most people to handle. Unless there is a SOP (standard operating procedure) that you can follow mindlessly. Realistically I would say 4 AP is the limit per task after which people may start to feel tired.

Unlike physical activity, when a person is exhausted mentally, in can be draining and non-recoverable. The task that takes too much AP will deplete them over and over even without taking actual steps and just thinking about them. I observed that on people learning programming and I observe that on myself when I take more than I can chew.

After AP reserve is over, the person falls out. The good design on cognitive load is reduce AP per action (for everybody) and extend AP limit (for specific person). Making things simpler and automating things both can help. Fallout AP can be used as real metric. Not sure like KPI/OKR metric, but probably a metric on its own.

[zakirullin]

@abitrolly Wow, that's a really great analogy! I wonder how we can add this to the handbook

[abitrolly]

@zakirullin I think you've already got it here.

Repeating it in Fallout context won't hurt I guess, but it would be more helpful for make it a Fallout exercise. Start with a full bar of AP, choose a project you'd like to contribute, get some issue, and then start to cross AP one by one, taking note for each AP - what consumed that point? Once AP bar is over, publish it and be free. If some action takes more than one hour, feel free to take 2 AP for it. There is no strict AP to hour mapping, but after 10 hours you will be definitely exhausted with no AP left. It much more likely to spend all 10 AP in one hour if faced with high stress critical task.

The next day repeat the process and take a note how you feel. Do AP stay there, do they feel more lightweight, more heavyweight? Do you see them different colors? I think this exercise should be good to start thinking about daily cognitive load, so that people can propose more analogues and tools to deal with that.

The trick with the load is that it highly depends on a person knowledge, experience, skills and task at hand. I think in companies people like managers are the ones who need to estimate the strain on their team members to prevent burnout, and "the Fallout exercise" might be helpful for them.