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Tackling vague learning tasks as a neurodivergent person

First Planted: 1 May 2025 Last Tended: 1 May 2025

Why can't I start this task?

I suffer from a high cognitive load in my project.
My tasks tend to be vague, and I don't get much, if any, guidance on solving them.
I feel isolated and overwhelmed a lot of the time, and that is environmental!

Overwhelm is a classic outcome when you have:

  • High expectations
  • Low structure
  • Low clarity
  • Little support

When is an automation tool harder to pick up?

There is a difference between working with (let's say) Cypress, and an (almost undocumented) in-house tool.

Well-known and popular tools! With that come online forums with thousands of people eager to share their tips and tricks. Bloggers, course creators, stackoverflow answer-ers, tutorials abound! You get example usages, snippets, starter sets, tools and manuals everywhere!

And I have... well, none of those things. How can I find out what tooling exists? Going to have to crawl through the repo reading code, I guess. Good luck guessing on what they might be named or where in this monolithic system they might be found! Is it missing, cryptically labelled, likely to do what I need? I have to 'just figure it out, read the code (other people manage)'.

Ok so just 'figure it out' isn't the end, I do get offers of help. But.

Why "ask if you're stuck" is a cognitive burden

I work with genuinely kind and helpful people, but 'I'm here if you have questions' is super uncomfortable.

  • Cognitive load of framing the question! Even knowing what to ask is hard!
  • What am I supposed to know? Will I seem stupid asking this? Fear of being judged that is legitimate in a system where low performers are analysed by management by asking for opinions from peers.
  • What information is relevant here? Over/under-explaining?
  • What's their time budget? Am I interrupting important tasks? Anxiety about wasting time that is, again, legitimate in a very fast-paced project under immense pressure to deliver.

Basically “just ask!” becomes “lose hours of your life focusing on the wrong thing and then gamble with your self-esteem every time you get stuck.”

The burden should be on the instructor to make information accessible.
'Ask if you're stuck' shifts the entire cognitive burden onto the learner.

How this environment triggers executive dysfunction

This whole situation is ESPECIALLY difficult if you are neurodivergent. Cognitive Load + Task Ambiguity = executive dysfunction trigger!

I, like many ND folks, need a lot of structure for a happy learning brain to keep going:

  • Clearly defined tasks and scopes
  • Predictability, consistency, structure
  • Visible understandable systems, traceable causality

Unstructured environments are almost paralysing.
I end up trying to build my own structure, but that's another task/struggle before I can even START.

"Just automate a test" is super ambiguous.
Each step contains a whole bunch of other steps that mostly consist of "what does THIS mean?"

  • Task Paralysis: where do I even start with this??
  • Hyperfocus and Avoidance: spending hours on the wrong thing or not at all (this article is a great example)
  • Procrastination: not to be confused with laziness, this attempts to reduce massive anxiety
  • Executive Fatigue: I have to convert something vague into many useful steps from scratch

It's not just uncomfortable, it disrupts the way my brain is wired to learn. I also don't tend to feel rising stress until it's overwhelming. I suddenly get angry and shut down without understanding how it was building up!

How do I cope?

Lol, badly. With a lot of anxiety and stress and overwhelm and confusion.
Why can't I do {the thing}?? Why won't my brain work? Why is this SO HARD?

When I have the capacity to do them, there are things that help:

  • Defining my own high level goal(s)
  • And mini-milestones (progress)
  • Assigning myself concrete, time-bound, self-contained learning missions
  • Learn through visualising (diagrams, sketchnotes, miro boards)
  • Document! Create external memory! Especially re-usable snippets
  • Learn through teaching (writing for a hypothetical future colleague or 'my past self')
  • Finding a buddy or forming a cohort (for accountability and sharing)
  • Taking the time to prepare/formulate very specific requests for feedback and input
  • Seeking informal mentorship / willing allies to ask for pairing or how-do-you-think sessions

Basically, I have to be the detective and guide and student and manager and teacher all at once.

Ideally, of course, I would have a mentor and a well documented and structured learning course for all the skills and tools I need to do my work! But that's unlikely in the extreme, so I must continue to crawl on through this inhospitable desert and draw my own flipping map and manual. Perhaps they'll be of use to any unfortunate travellers who pass this way after I'm gone.