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

Thoughts: The biggest idea in The Organized Mind is that people can become happier, healthier and more productive by finding ways to “shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world,” and after reading Levitin repeat this thesis several times, I was left confused at some of the topics he chose to discuss. Some chapters of the book directly addressed this main idea; other sections—long descriptions of heuristics, biases and fallacies and their bearing on social judgements, or a crash course in statistical thinking for making medical decisions—, while interesting and relevant to the larger goal of “thinking straight in the age of information overload”, seemed out of place. I was also a bit confused as to the book’s target audience: some passages seemed to be pitched at seniors, while another chapter was mostly relevant for managers or executives in large companies. In all, while it contains many useful ideas, I found The Organized Mind to be ironically scattered.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering. I read this as an e-book, so page numbers are as they appeared in the app I used, Libby.)

Levitin, Daniel. 2014. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. Allen Lane.

Introduction: Information and Conscientious Organization

• 23: When creating systems to help us better remember things, it is useful to think of memory involving two main processes:
  • encoding: how information is input into our memory
  • retreival: how do we get information out of our memory
• 29: Conscientiousness (one of the five core personality traits): “it is the best predictor of many important human outcomes, including mortality, longevity, educational attainment, and a host of criteria related to career success”. One of the best measures of conscientiousness: how organized one is.

Part One

Chapter 1 - Too Much Information, Too Many Decisions: The Inside History of Cognitive Overload

• 34: satisficing: approaching decisions with the goal of finding a solution that is good enough (compare to maximizing - trying to find the optimal solution)
  • 35: Satisficing allows us to not waste time on decisions that aren’t high-priority
  • Levitin does, however, recommend maximizing for things that are our main priority
• 36: re: decision fatigue: The decision-making network in our brains has an upper limit to the number of desicions it can make. It’s worth noting that this network doesn’t prioritize - a low-importance decision takes up just as much of our daily decision budget as a high-important decision
• 68: High-achievers tend to be very active in sorting the information they’re dealing with, consciously deciding which information/tasks are more important and which are less
• 70: “The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.”

Chapter 2 - The First Things to Get Straight: How Attention and Memory Work

• 82: Levitin identifies four components in the human attentional system:
  • default (mind-wandering) mode
  • central executive mode (responsible for letting us focus on a specific task)
  • attentional filter (monitors our environment, and only draws the attention of our central executive circuits to details it deems are sufficiently important)
  • attentional switch (responsible for regulating which mode of thought we’re in at a given moment)
• 88: “the more we can externalize memory through physical records out-there-in-the-world, the less we must rely on our overconfident, underprecise memory” cf. p. 70 above
• 100-: how do our brains categorize things? largely, three ways:
  • 100: gross or fine appearance - things that look similar can go into the same category
  • 101: functional equivalence - things that can be used to accomplish the same task can go into the same category (e.g. foutain pen, crayon, charcoal and lipstick can all be used in a pinch to write out a message)
  • 101: if they are used in particular situations (e.g. sunscreen, bathing suit and beach ball are all used at the beach)
• 104: it’s important to note that categories in our brains can either be hard (a thing is a triangle, or isn’t) or fuzzy (a person can be worth thinking of as a friend in certain situations, but not in others)
• 107: “People at the top of their professions, in particular those known for their creativity and effectiveness, use systems of attention and memory external to their brain as much as they can.”
• 108: to read: David Allen’s Getting Things Done
  • mentioned wrt his “clearing the mind” note-taking system - whenever a thought intrudes on whatever you’re working on, make a note of it so that you can deal with it later, then get on with your task
    • (also, when something comes up during mind-wandering)
  • 109: Allen also noted that whenever he wrote a long list of whatever was on his mind, he was more relaxed and more able to focus on his work
    • this could be a good reason to start each day with a “daily thought dump”
• 110: one system for dealing with tasks/thoughts - the 3x5 system
  • write each task/thought on a cue card, one thought per card
  • allows easy sorting/prioritization; easy random access
• 113: to read: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Phaedrus, the main protagonist (?) had a system of writing notes on index cards that sounds very similar to the zettelkasten system

Part Two

Chapter 3 - Organizing Our Homes: Where Things Can Start to Get Better

• 125: You can buy/make items whose affordances prevent you from losing things: key hooks are natural places to hang (and look for) keys; an envelope-sized tray is a natural place to put mail
• 126: use the same offloading principle above to prevent yourself from losing things: “use the environment itself to remind you of what needs to be done.”
  • e.g. if you need to remember to grab something when you leave the house, leave it in front of the door
  • corrolary: if you don’t need a thing, put it away. reminder systems like these only work when there is something out-of-the-ordinary about your environment
  • 127: If you find yourself losing something because you’re used in different parts of the house (e.g. scissors), it is worth buying duplicates of that item, so each can be left in its designated place in each space.
• 132-133 : Levitin outlines three general rules of organization:
  • 1. “A mislabelled item or location is worse than an unlabelled item” - much better to have a junk/miscellaneous drawer for odds and ends
  • 2. “If there is an existing standard, use it”
  • 3. “Don’t keep what you can’t use” - if it’s broken and you’re not going to get it repaired, throw it out
• 134: If it’s within your means, Levitin suggests having different devices for different domains - e.g. a work computer separate from the computer you use for leisure time
• 137: Levitin suggests that paperwork should be filed into categories of 5-20 items
  • j: should I follow similar guidelines when making my obsidian notes?
• 141: not only is multitasking detrimental to cognitive performance, even the opportunity to multitask negatively impacts cognitive performance.
  • one study found that having an unread email in your inbox reduced participants’ effective IQ by 10 points
• 158: Levitin suggests that buying/creating an organized “storehouse” for different tasks can save a lot of time in the long run, compared to buying things piecemeal. examples:
  • home-repair kits, including commonly used tools and common sizes of nails and screws
  • first aid kits

4 - Organizing Our Social World: How Humans Connect Now

• 166: A study found that “people who read literary fiction (as opposed to popular fiction or nonfiction) were better better able to detect another person’s emotions, and the theory proposed was a literary fiction engages the reader in a process of decoding the characters’ thoughts and motives in a way that popular fiction and nonfiction, being less complex, do not.”
  • j: this could be a good reason to read more fiction. On the other hand, this is just a single study, and sounds like a correlational one
• 170: attorney Robert Shapiro makes notes on each of the people he meets, noting where/how he met them, area of expertise, who connected them with him etc., and enters it into his contacts list to give him context for future interactions
• 172: tool for maintaining social connections: create ticklers - recurring reminder to get in touch with friends if you haven’t recently connected with them
• 180: “Studies have shown a dramatic decline in empathy among college students, who apparently are far less likely to say that it is valuable to put oneself in the place of others or to try and understand their feelings.” Levitin suggests this is due to interactions via social media replacing irl interactions. j: this surprised me
• 189: Grice’s Four Maxims:
  • Quantity: your statements should be as, but not more, informative as required
  • Quality: don’t say things you believe to be false, or things for which you don’t have enough evidence.
  • Manner: Avoid ambiguity, be brief, be orderly, don’t use words you don’t expect your listener to understand
  • Relation: your statements should be relevant to the conversation at hand.
• 198: The Fundamental Attribution Error: people systematically overestimate the influence of a person’s traits on when trying to explain their behavior, and underestimate the power of the situation.
  • “An additional part of the fundamental attribution error is that we fail to appreciate that the roles people are forced to play in certain situations constrain their behaviour”
• 200: people commit the fundamental attribution error more often when experiencing information overload
• 200: another aspect of FAE: outcome bias: we tend to overweight final outcomes when comparing people, even when situational factors explain outcomes better than factors intrinsic to people
  • j: relevant to discussions of why the super-rich are as wealthy as they are
  • 201: like many biases/heuristics, the outcome bias leads to correct results in many (but not all!) cases, while being efficient and requiring little cognitive effort
• 203: belief perseverence: even when evidence in support of a belief is explicitly removed, beliefs derived from the discredited evidence can be very sticky
• 204: in-group–out-group bias: we tend to think of in-group members as individuals and multidimensional, while thinking of out-group members as a collective and as generally similar
  • 204-205: “In general, a group will be perceived differently, and more accurately, by its own members that by outsiders.”

5 - Organizing Our Time: What Is the Mystery?

• 230: when trying to accomplish a large task, it is important to break it into “meaningful, implementable, doable chunks”
  • in completing a such a multi-step project, it is important to balance / alternate between doing and monitoring. The doing requires simply putting your head down to accomplish a task, while the monitoring requires stepping back to evaluate the relationship between the sub-task and the project as a whole
    • cf. Julia Galef’s worker mode vs. ceo mode
• 232: it’s worth finding opportunities to batch tasks - do a bunch of similar chores in succession, answer emails all at once, etc. Allows us to more easily maintain focus, and minimizes the downsides of task-switching.
• 233: self-generated motivational systems are often very difficult to follow.
  • cf. fundamental attribution error: if someone hands us a regimen, it is easy to think “they’re the expert, I’ll just follow it”. Whereas when we make a choice to follow a motivational system of our own devising, we have access to a bunch of internal reasons why we might have adopted a different system.
• 242: sleep is really important for memory consolidation; “Disrupted sleep even two or three days after an experience can disrupt your memory of it months or years later.”
  • 248: “Sleep is among the most critical factors for peak performance, memory, productivity, immune function, and mood regulation. Even a mild sleep roduction or a departure from a set sleep routine (for example, going to bed late one night, sleeping in the next morning) can produce a detrimental effect on cognitive performance for many days afterward.”
  • 249: “Bimodal sleep appears to be a biological norm that was subverted by the invention of artificial light, and there is scientific evidence that the bimodal sleep-plus-nap regime is healthier and promote greater life satisfaction, efficiency, and performance.”
• 256: eating the frog: starting the day with the most unpleasant task on your list of tasks. Effective since willpower depletes as the day goes on.
• 266: “[Flow states] can occur only when one is deeply focused on the task, when the task requires intense concentration and commitment, contains clear goals, provides immediate feedback, and is perfectly match the one’s skill level”
• 270: “Creative people often arrange their lives to maximize the possibility that flow periods will occur, and to be able to stay in flow once they arrive there.”
  • j: this could be a good reason to treat pomodoros more flexibly
• 274: when we’re working on a big project, it’s important not to let the little things slide. This creates a lot of cognitive overhead, as we keep thinking of all the tasks that remain unfinished and must eventually be returned to

6: Organizing Information for the Hardest Decisions: When Life Is on the Line

• 286: people who make lots of high-stakes decisions tend to sort their decisions into categories, effectively performing triage:
  • decisions that can be made now, since the answer is clear
  • decisions that can be delegated (to those with more time or more expertise)
  • decisions for which you have enough information, but need more time to think about
    • good to attach a deadline or set a reminder to return to this one
  • decisions for which you need more information
    • again, good to attach a deadline
  • cf. Eisenhower matrices?
• 290: Levitin, to some extent, sidesteps the frequentist vs. Bayesian debate by saying that there are two kinds of probability, and that they refer to different things
  • j: this is a useful way to think of things! frequentist probability seems to be allied with platonic ideals—we assume we’re dealing with an exactly fair coin, for example, which can be cleanly reasoned about through math—while Bayesian reasoning is much more empirically driven, fuzzy, and pertains to the world-as-it-is about which we have imperfect information.
• 295: the representativeness heuristic: if a person/situation seems to be representative of an idea, it can very easily overpower our ability to think statistically or attend to base rates.
• 335: humans have a hard time dealing with probabilities, but this is much more true for numerical statistical reasoning than for visual statistical reasoning. Thus, visual presentation of likelihoods etc. can lead to better decision making

7: Organizing the Business World: How We Create Value

• 362: locus of control: how people view agency in the world. People with an internal locus of control believe they can influence / are responsible for their life outcomes, while people with an external locus of control believe that their life outcomes are beyond their control. “Locus of control turns out to be a significant moderating variable in a trifecta of life expectancy, life satisfaction, and work productivity.”
• 388: load effect (Levitin neologism): when making a decision, people can handle about 10 pieces of information before their decision-making ability suffers. Given a choice, people tend to want to have more information, even though it hampers their decision-making ability beyond the optimal point.
  • 389: a study by Kahneman and Tversky showed that people are actually unable to ignore extraneous/extra information about a decision
• 406: planning for failure: it is worth doing things like preparing a travel toiletry kit, emergency food packs, kit for making a mobile office (j: also disaster preparedness kit, first aid kit…) with duplicates of all the items you may need in a situation, so you won’t need to remember all of those things when the situation arises
  • cf. “storehouses”, above

Part Three

8 - What to Teach our Children: The Future of the Organized Mind

• 440- : Section Approximately OK summary: good exercises:
  • make fermi estimates
  • play lateral thinking games

9 - Everything Else: The Power of the Junk Drawer

• 458: one useful thing about learning and being curious about the world is that the externalizing of information has already been done for you, if you only know how to read the signs. Levitin offers the example of the US interstate highway system - if you know how it’s numbered, you can get a lot of information about where particular roads go just looking at their numbers
• 460: sometimes, organizing information can lead to new discoveries, or hints at where new discoveries may be lurking. Levitin offers the example of the periodic table - once Mendeleev and others began organizing chemical elements, they realized there were gaps where elements with particular properties might be expected to be found.
  • even in mundane situations, having a clear organization can make it clear when an item is mis-filed or has gone missing
• 466: mentioned: James Gleick’s book The Information. Gleick notes that when looking for documents, a slower, find-it-on-the-shelf look for a source can lead to fortuitous new discoveries that don’t tend to happen when downloading academic papers from a database.