The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

"Well, it’s kind of a funny story. I’ve met Dan—he’s a great guy. When he was halfway through writing his book, he came across mine and freaked out, and he went to his editor to say: ‘Oh my God, maybe I should just stop—because David did it.’ So it’s very simpatico. I’m glad he didn’t stop because he has accumulated and curated a whole lot of really cool research that basically just validates the need for an external brain. Your head is not designed to remember, remind, prioritize, or manage relationships with more than four things—and that’s new cognitive science data. I’ve known this experientially for the last 35 years: your head is for having ideas, but it’s a terrible place to hang onto them. I mean, your head is a crappy office. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So he validated that in a very rigorously researched book. He’s Professor Emeritus at McGill University, Fellow of the Haas School of Business at Berkeley . . . I mean, this guy’s got creds up the wazoo. I thought that was great—and it’s a good reminder for anybody who thinks that you should just carry stuff around in your head to grow up. It recommends you should have a system. I mean, Dan’s got some tips and tricks and techniques in there that are useful, but we all kind of know them. Put stuff in front of the door, so you don’t forget it in the morning. You could call that a system, but that’s just kind of obvious. In the book, he points out that our brains have a daily processing limit and we may be wasting it on looking at funny pictures on our phone or reading articles online. Just in speed and volume, that’s all. And the accessibility and the ubiquity of it. If you were out in the forest, it would take you a while to find things to distract you, but you still could. But now it’s in your pocket. In the next book, as you’ll see, Theo Compernolle’s got a major rant about how shallow people are thinking now. Just having your iPhone in your pocket or your purse or your pack creates a dopamine rush, wondering who might be pinging you. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s highly addictive, all that stuff is. But the issue is old as dirt. If you know what you’re doing, it’s a great time to be alive, because wow, how cool is it that you and I can talk on Skype from the other side of the world? You’ve got a huge network of people globally that you can chat with, and hang out with, and get value from, and share with. How neat is that? But it’s very easy to get hooked into it if you’re not sure what you’re doing, or if you want to find a way to avoid doing the tough, ugly thing you know you need to do."