It’s about how much brainpower you need to get something done.

The goal is to internalize mental models so it feels less heavy.

Here are the two main types:

1) Intrinsic: It’s just the task being hard, plain and simple

2) Extraneous: When the author makes it harder than it needs to be

My team hit this recently. As top-tier agency devs, they were churning out too many shallow APIs.

I stepped in, and we focused on 6 deep APIs that could power 3+ solid products for users.

I believe the key to it all is internalizing mental models to lighten the cognitive load.