Day to day work at at $largetechco requires such an enormous amount of context that even a simple task can cause my working memory to overflow, triggering my “t

Day to day work at at $largetechco requires such an enormous amount of context that even a simple task can cause my working memory to overflow, triggering my “this must be fixed, too complex” instinct, and paralyzing my ability to work for long stretches of time. I find that I have to make a practice of ignoring my refactor instincts, because there usually just isn’t anything I can do. Externalized context definitely helps, but 1 year in, I’m finding my brain has not adapted to this reality. I use playgrounds and design documents to do most of my thinking because I simply cannot reason about the real application without my head exploding. This has improved my thinking tremendously, as I was never someone capable of outlining thoughts before coding them. I still can’t do that, but when I encounter a challenge, I can draw up the simplest possible version of it in a playground, write a document about it, discuss with stakeholders, formulate a plan, then return to the real code where I can put my full focus on managing the background complexity, having already worked out the feature complexity elsewhere.