The Organized Mind
Daniel Levitin’s ’The Organized Mind’ brings many of the entrenched ideas within the fields of productivity, cognitive behaviour, neuro-science, psychology, and behavioural economics to a mass market audience. As with many of these types of popular science books - it does feel slightly watered down, and because I had come across many (if not all) of the ideas before - I didn’t gain many new insights from the book. I don’t think this is the fault of the author though - I just don’t think that I was the intended target market.
If someone is getting into personal development and productivity for the first time, it’s a good primer on some of the main ideas and systems that can add value.
Here are some of my notes on things that resonated with me:
(All quotes below come from the author)
’Satisficing’ - "Not getting the best option, but one that is good enough.” This is a great way to think about breaking through decision paralysis on less important decisions. “Do not spend more time on a decision than it’s worth.”
Attention is the key resource to protect and direct efficiently. Switching attention comes at a high cost. Multitasking is an illusion. What you’re actually doing is rapid task switching.
The fundamental principle of an organised mind is to shift the burden of organising from our brain to the external world. The more we can build systems and processes in the real world to get things out of our head, the better we’ll be able to action those ideas. This insight was popularised by David Allen with the GTD methodology. Every time an idea or thought comes to you, you should be writing it down and storing it in a system that you trust.
“Our own lives seem to us to be more filled with rich diversity of thoughts and behaviours because we are experiencing a wider range of behaviours in ourselves while effectively having only one-sided evidence about others.” This is known as the invisibility problem, coined by Daniel Gilbert. The inner thoughts of others are hidden to us. This is exacerbated by the social media phenomenon where we only see the very best things from other people.
I rated this 3/5 on my Goodreads, but again this is because there was nothing new here for me. For others it might be very worthwhile.