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Weekly Reflection #2 - Mental Shortcuts and Sensible Defaults
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Each week, I share one insight. One piece of wisdom. One question to reflect on. (and a little Lagniappe) InsightMental shortcuts can be wonderful. They are so efficient! They help reduce cognitive load while leveraging the hard-won wisdom of people who came before us. But some things can’t be shortcut. If you want to lift more weight, you don’t skip leg day. You do the work. You show up and lift. Lifters lift. Dancers dance. Singers sing. The point isn’t the outcome; it’s the practice itself. If you think for a living, thinking is your leg day. The tricky part is that not all mental shortcuts are equal. Some accelerate your thinking; they give you a starting point so you can focus on what actually matters. Others replace your thinking entirely. They become the answer instead of a direction. The art is knowing which is which. Rules of thumb, truisms, and conventional wisdom can be incredibly useful. The danger isn’t in using them. It’s in letting them do the thinking for you. “That’s just how it’s done” or “this is best practice” is the sound of a shortcut that’s stopped serving you. The best mental shortcuts don’t give you answers. They point your thinking in a useful direction while leaving room for your context. They’re guardrails, not cages. WisdomIn 2024, Martin Fowler joined the Book Overflow podcast to discuss his book Refactoring. When the topic of best practices came up, he shared something that stuck with me: “We avoid the term best practices… the terminology we like to use, for what we do, is sensible defaults… Because it carries the notion of, if your context is different, then maybe the default doesn’t work here, and you’ve got to adjust based on that.” What I love about this framing is that it destroys the pious notion that a solution from the past is still (and will always be) the best way to do it in the future. It simultaneously preserves the value of collective wisdom from the past. A Sensible default tells us, “Well, if you don’t have a strong opinion about this, start here,” or if you do have a strong opinion, you really need to justify why you aren’t starting with the sensible default. Check out the Book Overflow interview here. ReflectionWhen has a ‘best practice’ led you somewhere you didn’t intend to go? Lagniappe
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