I have a very particular way of gardening.
The weather has to be good. I need to have a good chunk of time, not a scrap of it, a proper block. And I need the energy.
All three need to line up. Then I make a coffee, put my gloves on, and head out the back with one specific task in mind. Not “do the garden.” One task, like a specific garden bed, or edging the paths in an area. or… weeding.. urgh.

Ideal conditions, ideal headspace, clear goal. It’s the only way I do it.

Which is why, after a health crisis in June and months of recovery, the garden didn’t get done. It wasn’t a decision to formally deprioritises the backyard. It just sat below everything else, quietly getting worse.

This week I turned a corner. My energy is coming back and Melbourne is about to tip into spring, my favourite season. So today I went out to deal with things well overdue. No big landscaping project, just some quiet, repetitive, hands in the dirt time. The kind of task where your brain wanders off while your hands keep working.

Mine wandered to learning design. Yep. The learning nerd.

The garden waited. Most things don’t.

Here’s what struck me, pulling weeds out of a bed I’d avoided for three months: I got to wait for the right moment.

The garden was patient. Nobody sent me a reminder that my weeding was overdue, or escalated it to my manager.

Learning at work isn’t like that. The deadline lands in the week your kid is sick. The module opens on the Thursday afternoon when you have nothing left. People don’t meet learning when the weather’s good and they’ve got a clear hour. They meet it in the gap they could find, with whatever they had left. Sometimes flat, distracted, or a bit resentful about it, but they do it anyway, because it’s due.

So there’s a mismatch in the middle of a lot of what we build. We design for someone who arrives the way I arrive at the garden: coffee made, tools ready, good conditions. Almost nobody arrives like that, and nobody arrives like that every time.

I find it shows up two ways.
Some people start, get pulled away, and never come back. This isn’t necessarily because it was hard, it may be because returning was expensive. Re-find your place, re-load what it was about, redo a bit you’d already done. Exactly what happened to my backyard. Others do turn up, but often on empty. They may be clicking around or through content, but they’re not learning much.

We read both as motivation, but I don’t really think that is the case.

Capacity isn’t a constant

We design as though everyone brings the same headspace every time.

They don’t. Not between people, and (this is the bit we skip) not within the same person across one week.
Sleep, illness, caregiving, grief, medication, ADHD, a brutal morning. The working memory someone can spend on your content is different on Tuesday than it was on Monday.

Cognitive load isn’t a fixed property of the material. It’s a ratio: how much the thing demands, against how much the person has that day. We’re good at managing the first half. We treat the second half as a constant.

“Just let me know if you need support”

Here’s where I think we’ve let ourselves off the hook.
We do offer flexibility. Extensions, alternative formats, the line in the kick-off email. But everyone requires the learner to notice their capacity is low, name it, and ask. That’s demanding admin, required on their worst day. It asks the most self-advocacy from the person with the least available to spend on it.

Design doesn’t require anyone to ask. That’s the whole difference.

Weeding is not the same as growing

The fair objection is: so we just make it easier?

No, and the garden is a great way to think about it.
A plant pushing roots through soil is doing the work that makes it strong. Take that resistance away and you get something that falls over in the first bit of wind. Learning is the same: effortful recall, spacing, sitting with something difficult. That’s where the learning lives.

But a gate that sticks, a bed too overgrown to get into, tools locked in a shed at the far end of the yard, or just crappy Melbourne weather… none of that grows anything. It just costs you before you start.

Keep the effort that grows things. Clear the stuff that only taxes people on the way in.

What that looks like

• Make the ten-minute visit count. Chunk things so stopping feels like finishing something small, not abandoning something big.
• Design the return, not just the start. A resume point that says where someone was and what it was about — not a bookmark dropping them cold into slide 14.
• Offer a short path and a long path, and mean both. The minimum version has to be genuinely enough.
• Put the summary and job aid at the front, not unlocked at the end as a reward. It’s mulch. It lowers the cost of every future visit.
• Say how long it takes, and say they can stop anywhere. People manage their energy better when they know what’s being asked.

Most of this costs nothing but a decision.

The point

I’ll get the garden back over the next few weekends, because it waited for me and I set the schedule.

The people doing your onboarding, your system rollout, your compliance module, or learning a new features… they don’t get that. They turn up when they can, with what they’ve got.

Our job isn’t to grow the thing for them. It’s to make sure the gate opens easily enough that they come back.

Off I go to take on some milk thistles down the back in the snake zone before dinner. Not fun, but I’ll feel great if I put the effort in and can stop for the day knowing I ticked that box.