Organize Tomorrow Today

Have you ever felt the need to make a positive change in your life? Maybe you’ve already made a list of all the small things you’d like to alter. But making a long list isn’t the most effective way to go about making improvements.

Why? It’s a fact that our conscious mind can only process between five to nine concepts, or pieces of information, at a time. This phenomenon is called channel capacity, and was first identified by psychologist George A. Miller in 1956.

No matter what you’re reading or looking at, from words to colors or numbers, your working memory can only store a limited amount of data at any given time. And working memory is all a person has from moment to moment, whether making an argument or trying to solve a math problem.

So given this limitation, it makes sense that trying to tackle too many tasks at once can be overwhelming. This also holds true when you try to change too many things at once in your life.

Since every task you try to complete requires its own amount of data, your working memory can suffer from information overload when you try to juggle multiple tasks. When this happens, important data can get improperly processed and you might make a mistake, or worse, your conscious mind will shut down. You can think of this like a computer freezing when you’ve opened up too many applications.

The author has witnessed this dilemma firsthand. People have told him that when they try to change two or three things in their life at the same time, they get stuck. But when they focus on only one thing, the results can be unbelievable.

So the best way to improve your life and get positive results is to commit yourself to changing just one thing at a time!