Name: The Organized Mind
Rating: 4.3 (611 reviews)
Author: Daniel Levitin

What’s in it for me? Learn to organize your life!

Picture the brain as a house. Not a nice clean new house, but a creaky old house that’s been renovated time and time again.

Like a big house, your brain is full of information: memories, plans, ideas, etc. But it’s not like that information is neatly filed away. To help you survive, the human brain developed complex systems and processes to prioritize, store, and retrieve all the information you come across.

Sometimes these systems get tripped up. When that happens, the house becomes uninhabitable, wouldn’t even pass a safety inspection. But obviously, you can’t move out of your brain. Instead, you lose your keys. You forget what you were going to say, right in the middle of a sentence. And you’re less productive, because you can’t keep your priorities straight.

Your hopes and dreams, everything you have planned, are impossible with a disorganized mind.

But why is that?

The answer is in that old creaky house. You have to know how each floor was built – you know, which walls are load-bearing, where the water pipes are – if you want to, say, add central heating, or build a new patio.

The Organized Mind explains how the house was built so you can take charge of the essential information in your brain.

The brain can only focus on a limited number of stimuli at a time.

The brain processes and organizes information through various systems. One of those systems is the attentional system, which determines the way your brain handles and organizes information – anything your brain pays attention to, in other words.

In the creaky old house that is your brain, the attentional system is one of the pillars holding everything together.

Over thousands of years, evolution developed a more nuanced system that can be neatly summed up in one little sentence: our brain evolved to focus on one thing at a time. This thing was always the most important thing.

Just picture our ancestors, tens of thousands of years ago, on the hunt. They’re hiding in a bush, clutching their spears. It was a matter of life and death for them to be able to set aside any possible distraction and focus every ounce of their attention on the wooly mammoth – or whatever they were hunting. Only the most important things (like an approaching predator) disrupted their thoughts and caught their attention.

Nowadays, we put our attentional system under stress, because our brains aren’t equipped to cope with the flood of new facts and sights that we face everyday. These days, we’re constantly attempting to do many things at once. Driving a car, listening to the radio, thinking about an upcoming business meeting – it’s not unusual that all these things happen simultaneously.

Here’s the key message: The brain can only focus on a limited number of stimuli at a time.

One way we can see how our brain is better at focusing on fewer things is that our brains are more interested in change than constants.

There’s an easy way to show what that means in real life. Just imagine you’re driving, and suddenly, you notice the road is bumpy. The crazy thing is, a few moments before, you weren’t consciously thinking about how flat and smooth the street was! That’s not useful information. It is useful to notice and think about the street if it suddenly feels bumpy. You could be in danger: the road could be treacherous, or you might have popped a tire.

The point is, the brain notices the bumpy road because it’s different and dangerous, and doesn’t notice the harmless flat road because it’s expected and harmless.

Again, your brain focuses on what’s most important.

Find a designated place for every single object.

The taxi is idling outside. It’s going to be tight to make the flight. The itinerary is done. You have plenty of cash. You definitely packed your favorite t-shirt. Your partner and kids are loading the bags, you do one quick check to make sure you have the passports and – oh shoot! Where are my keys? They were in my pants!

Keys, glasses, phone, your favorite pen – it’s so frustrating that the objects we need with us all the time are also the ones that seem to go missing most often.

Organize your ideas outside your head.

So far, we’ve looked at a few of the systems in the creaky old house of the brain, and how they influence our memory and our focus. So here’s where the really powerful part comes in. Because now we’ll talk about what you can do to make your brain as effective as possible.

For example, say you were assigned a project at work and you start thinking about so many ideas and thoughts about how to get it started and they’re all just floating around inside your head. What’s the best way to deal with that?

Set aside time to refuel so you can increase your productivity later.

Writing things down, categorizing, junk drawers – these are a few ways to do what the brain really loves: reduce the number of things it’s working on at any given moment. But there are other things the brain also loves – and needs, really – to stay fit. Let’s just talk about one of those, arguably the most important one. We’re talking, of course, about sleep.

Everyone knows that we’re far more productive after a good night’s sleep. And yet we’re often tempted to stay up until one or two am, just to squeeze in a few more emails or watch “just one more episode.”

Kernaussagen in The Organized Mind

Worum geht es in The Organized Mind?

The Organized Mind provides an insightful explanation into the way our brain handles incoming data – a process particularly relevant in this age of information overload. It’s also a practical guide to coping with the multitudes of decisions we’re required to make in everyday life. By learning well-thought-out strategies that will help you organize your life, you’ll become a more productive and effective worker in any task.

Über den Autor

Daniel Levitin is a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist. He is particularly well known for his work in music theory. He has authored several best-selling books, including This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, and The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature.