What is cognitive load theory Sweller intrinsic extraneous?

Cognitive load theory Sweller intrinsic extraneous is a concept in personal epistemology: Decision-making information processing energy management and context switching.

Example: You sit down at 9 a.m. with a clear plan: write the proposal, review the contract, design the onboarding flow, and respond to the fourteen emails that arrived overnight. By 11 a.m. you have written half the proposal, opened the contract but not reviewed it, sketched two ideas for the onboarding flow in the margins of your notebook, responded to six emails, and checked Slack eleven times. Nothing is finished. You feel busy but not productive. You tell yourself the problem is time — you need more hours. But you had three uninterrupted hours and completed zero tasks. The problem is not time. The problem is that you hit four different bottlenecks simultaneously without recognizing any of them: you made too many decisions about what to work on next (decision fatigue), you processed too many unrelated information streams in parallel (information overload), your cognitive energy depleted from constant task initiation (energy management failure), and you paid the switching cost every time you jumped between tasks (context switching tax). You were not short on time. You were throttled by constraints you could not see.

This concept is part of Phase 48 (Bottleneck Analysis) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for bottleneck analysis.