The Untied Shoe Rule

It’s late January and the city’s got that cold, gray heaviness I can’t quite shake. I remember last Sunday, slipping out for my usual walk to the coffee shop, feeling the leftover drag from another brutal sprint week. Halfway down the block, I looked down and saw my right shoe was untied—the laces trailing, catching grit. I actually stopped, not because I wanted to fix it, but because for once I just… didn’t care.

My body was tired, my brain was tired, and the idea of adding another tiny chore felt like a balancing act with too much already stacked. I knew I could stop, kneel, retie, add just one more flick of order to my universe. Instead, I kept walking. That small decision felt weirdly rebellious. I let a little untidiness hang loose, just for the walk.

Sometimes, it all piles up and you just hit a wall. I just can’t. Doesn’t matter how many productivity hacks you know, or how good you are at ticking boxes—sometimes each extra “small thing” starts to feel like the straw that’ll crack the whole stack.

The untied shoe, right then, became a kind of symbol for the choice to reduce cognitive load for engineers amid all those micro-tasks that crowd a developer’s day. It’d be so easy to bend down and fix it, but honestly, the idea of stopping to tie my shoe felt like one thing too many.

There was a life lesson hidden in my shoe—here’s what it taught me.

Relentless Little Asks, Fragmented Focus to Reduce Cognitive Load for Engineers

It’s wild how fast a morning can dissolve unless you actively avoid context switching when PR comments, Slack messages, and those “could you just” pings pile up. Each one feels harmless, but when IMs and Slack messages stack up, complexity and interruption mediate their influence—fueling technology overload and splintering attention. The result: a packed day turns into fragments, and you barely remember what you set out to do.

Cognitive load isn’t some abstract thing engineers talk about in status updates. It’s just the plain truth that our heads can only juggle so much. Our working memory can really only handle three or four items at once, meaning just a handful of micro-tasks can max us out source. Toss on extra requests, half-resolved threads, little reminders peeking up from the backlog, and there it is—the edge where thinking turns fuzzy, work slows, mistakes sneak in.

Honestly, polish pressure feels a lot like trying to overcome perfectionism in engineering by stopping to tie every shoelace, every single block, all week long. You fix one tiny nit, only to get pinged about a missing emoji or a whitespace tweak, and then someone else asks for a “quick review” that ends up being anything but. I’ve lost entire afternoons to these, derailed by a dozen tiny asks more times than I’d like. Last week alone, I bounced between half-finished code, doc comments, and six Slack threads that wanted “just a moment”—none of which actually moved my project forward. By Friday, it hit me. Most of those fixes were invisible by Monday. I had let a month’s worth of progress splinter into stray tasks instead of finished features.

I used to think I could power through every little ask and keep my codebase flawless, but that mindset just eats your whole week. The real problem is simple: when every minor task is treated as urgent, attention splinters and progress stalls. You burn hours reorganizing dust instead of building anything that lasts.

So here’s the question. What if, just for a bit, we let one harmless lace dangle—long enough to actually keep moving?

The Practice: Deliberately Defer One

And here’s why this isn’t just wishful thinking. Once we commit a plan to defer, the pressure of that goal suspends—our minds free up until it’s time to revisit it. That mental relief is real. It’s not “ignoring,” it’s deciding—with purpose—which loop can safely stay open for now, clearing cognitive space for what matters most.

Of course, the tricky part is choosing the right thing to park. Low-impact means no one’s blocked, nothing crashes, and no fires burn if it sits untouched for a while. “Non-blocking” might look like: a UI color tweak for accessibility that’s nice-to-have but not required for launch, or updating a TODO comment that’s already tracked somewhere else. But—real talk—I’ve misjudged these more than once. Once, I skipped a tiny “update error copy” note, only to get pinged later because its weird wording confused a reviewer. Now, before deferring, I always double-check. Does anyone else depend on this task? Is there a hidden sequence where skipping this creates a silent blocker? If not—good—onto the ‘not now’ list it goes.

Mechanics make this real, not just a mantra. Actually write the deferred task down. Add a timestamp so you know when you parked it. Schedule a revisit window—maybe next Friday’s sweep, maybe after release, whatever fits your flow. That way, no forgotten threads, just safe, visible deferrals. Trust builds when the loop isn’t lost, just parked.

Quick messy moment—I once spent an entire hour untangling electricity cords under my desk, only to find out that the “mystery” unplugged cable was for a lamp I hadn’t turned on in months. Not exactly mission-critical. Looking back, I wish I’d just left the tangle till after the real work was done. Lesson learned: not every loop needs immediate closure.

Letting one thing wait might feel awkward at first, like walking with a loose lace, but it’s a simple way to let small tasks go. But give it a try. You’ll see how giving yourself permission to defer, just once, unlocks a rare kind of steady focus. That’s what moves the needle, especially under pressure.

Deferral in Practice: Steps, Scenarios, and Team Rituals

Here’s how to actually put the ‘defer one’ rule to work. Each morning, when you’re surveying the wreckage of your Jira board or Notion to-dos, pause for a minute of triage. Find a single, truly low-impact, non-blocking task—one stray shoelace, so to speak—that can wait. Flag it in a plain visible way. A quick ‘not now’ column on your board, a sticky note on your monitor, whatever makes sense for your team’s system.

Then, zero in on the one task with the highest consequence, lock your focus, and let yourself advance without worrying about the small mess you’ve deliberately left behind. Framing it for yourself helps: “This stays loose so the big work moves—come back to it on Friday.” The rest of your workflow doesn’t change, just one less thing pulling at your sleeve.

This really comes into focus with live projects. The other week, our ML pipeline started drifting—outputs off, customers confused, stakes high. I had a branch open to clean up variable names, make everything pretty, but it wasn’t actually going to fix the bug or help anyone right now. I let the “pretty names” ticket sit untied and turned straight to comparing training data sets, debugging the heart of the issue first. The urge to polish is there, but choosing to maintain momentum in engineering matters more.

Now, if you’re leading a team or working inside tight code review workflows, trust hinges on communication—not hiding deferrals under the rug. Name the deferred task out loud. “Flagging the doc typo for later—no one’s blocked; I’ll circle back this sprint.” State why it’s harmless to wait, then list when you’ll check in again. Not every moment has to be productive or polished—a little slack is part of moving fast without burning out. That clarity is contagious, and it signals that everyone’s focus is on what ships, not on endless “busywork.” When you frame a pause intentionally, framing cuts down back-and-forth, which stabilizes team progress over time.

Quick gut check. Is it worth the few seconds to jot down a defer-for-later to reduce cognitive load for engineers versus letting attention splinter all day? In my experience, making that ‘not now’ note might cost you half a minute. If you skip it, chasing every dangling micro-task all day, you’ll lose actual hours to mindless context switching and recoveries. The brief pause is a net win. Shipping meaningful work is what counts, not having a tidy desk at every moment.

Try it—tomorrow morning, leave a shoelace untied on purpose. See how freeing a little, visible clutter can be, so long as you’re moving forward where it matters most.

Resolving Fears: Debt, Safety, and Team Trust

Let’s talk about the fear that pops up the second you start a ‘not now’ list. It’ll grow, quietly turning into a monster backlog or, worse, a heap of forgotten problems. I get it—letting go isn’t natural for most engineers. The way through is to cap that deferred list and actually check in on it. I audit mine every Friday, usually late in the afternoon when my brain’s winding down.

Anything starting to age—maybe a two-week-old doc typo or a formatting nit that’s now sticking out? Promote it before it turns into a silent blocker or an annoying review catch. Set a recurring calendar reminder if you need to. It’s not about dodging tasks. It’s about being honest with your attention, and making sure nothing important sits in limbo long enough to hurt momentum.

And when you hit another overloaded stretch—say, mid-February or after some tough release—come back to that untied lace on my Sunday walk. Pressure will spike, you’ll feel the pull to fix everything at once, but you can choose steady momentum. The next time overwhelm hits, deliberately defer one thing and let yourself keep moving. That’s often exactly what gets you—shoelaces trailing and all—to the work that matters most.

One thing I still wrestle with: there are days I see a pile of little tasks and, despite knowing most can wait, I still feel guilty for not closing every loop right away. Maybe that tension never completely goes away. I guess that’s just what happens when you’re wired to tidy things up, even when the shoe’s untied and the coffee’s getting cold.