I was supposed to take a break from work and recharge.

Instead, I built a pipeline that turns TV episodes into swimlane flowcharts. Because my working memory can't hold five Love is Blind couples, their backstories, their doubts, their families, AND who said "I do" at the altar. Not simultaneously. Not even close.

Most people's solution to losing track of five simultaneous relationships on screen is "just pay attention." The clinical solution is neurofeedback training at $150 a session (which, yes, I'm also doing). Mine was building a data pipeline on my lunch break.

Fragile working memory doesn't mean you're not tracking. It means you're reconstructing every scene from scratch, every time the camera cuts. Five couples. Parallel timelines. Cross-storyline drama. Every camera cut is a hard reset on context I was barely holding together in the first place.

So now I have a cheat sheet. Vertical lanes, one per couple, time flowing top to bottom, cross-lane connections where storylines collide.

Charlotte hasn't had to pause the show to answer my 17 questions per episode since.

Building for the brain you actually have > pretending you have the one everyone assumes.