Escaping the 'Bloat Mode' of Your Brain
Hurt Your Brain Today or Be Tortured Later
That first draft of that e-mail you’re writing? It fucking sucks.
Any first version of my articles? It’s a boring sludge of clichés.
That first MVP scope you proudly cobbled up? It’s an over-engineered mess where you could cut 2/3 of the scope and achieve much better results.
This happens because the default of our brain is ‘Bloat Mode’. The only way to fight Bloat Mode is to intentionally torture your brain. We don’t like punishing our mind, so we offload our laziness to the receiver of our work.
What should we be doing instead?
Write that e-mail. Rewrite it ten times. Remove as many words as possible and replace complicated sentences and words with simpler ones. Make sure that the first sentence is the most important one.
Doing this well is extremely hard and we rarely make enough time for it. We’re too busy and don’t have time to escape our default Bloat Mode. Because we don’t make time to replace our bloat with clarity, our lazy sludge comes back to haunt us.
Someone misinterprets that e-mail and sends an e-mail back. Another person doesn’t even read it, because it’s too long. A third person takes the wrong action, because they misunderstood the message.
We’re trading being less busy now for being ten times busier later. Our bloat mode ensures we will forever remain in bloat mode. Sometimes a wrong e-mail means we’ll be making wrong and irreversible decisions.
That bloated MVP you came up? After the release it contains a convoluted permission system you didn’t need that 10X’ed any future feature we want to deliver. The permission bloat even makes certain features impossible, unless we redo everything.
Brevity is confidence. You can only be brief when you know what you’re talking about. You can’t hide in simple language. Leaving out stuff is incredibly scary. It’s much easier to ramble and add on more words.
When you’re rambling, you’ve left nothing out, but you’ve buried what matters the most. Don’t be scared of leaving something out. Important things have a natural tendency to resurface.
The unnecessary is what should scare you the most. It’s like a forever chemical that sticks around indefinitely and cannibalizes what’s necessary. Bloat is like an evil cuckoo that throws out all the eggs that matter.
Eliminate the unnecessary to reveal what’s essential. Escape your bloat mode by pruning branches so the fruit can show and grow.
This framing hits different because it nails why editing feels so painful, you're literally fighting your brain's default state. The connection between lazy writing now and being 10x busier later is spot on tbh. What really gets me is how bloat compounds over time, like that MVP permission system example shows how technical debt isn't just about code but about every overcomplicated decision that seemed easier in the moment. Once bloat enters a system it metastasizes into everything downstream making each subsequent change exponentially harder. I spent 3 months last year untangling a features that could've been 2 functions if anyone had bothered to simplfy the original spec lol.
Further proof that programming is the same as writing. George Orwell:
Orwell’s 6 Rules:
From “Politics and the English Language”
1 Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2 Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3 If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4 Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5 Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6 Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.