The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin
(New York: Penguin, 2014), 396
Fundamental Principle of Organization: “shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world” (370)
Chapter 1 - History of Cognitive Overload
- Paradox of choice (someone who lived in communist Romania and then moved to the US)
- Highly Successful People have employees who filter things for them so they never need to worry about focusing on the right thing
- We have strong filters (change, importance) that help us focus on what is important and ignore everything else
- Switching attention comes with high costs; our brain is optimized to do one thing at a time
- Active sorting: shift organization from your mind to the physical world (Gibsonian affordances)
Chapter 2 - How Attention and Memory Work
- Mind wandering mode (decentralized network) bs central executive mode
- Four parts of attentional system: wandering, central executive, switching, filtering?
- The central executive can be thought of as a series of lenses for zooming in and out on the appropriate category
- Theoretically you can represent every known particle in the universe with your brain...crazy
- Analog: prevalence of using tangible things to external use memory, such as notebook and pen
- Index cards and systems for tasks: 2 minute rule, do no, delegate, defer, drop, etc
Chapter 3 - Organizing our Homes
- ACE hardware: items in functional categories but also located near similar items since they will likely be associated by your mind or the task at hand
- Reading this (colored pants in department store for instance) makes me think about principles of visualization and how our minds categorize information.
- To not lose things, have a designated place
- Key point/strategy: use the environment to offload items out of your mind
- How to organize your home:
- Define categories that are meaningful to you
- Avoid putting too many different things in the same category, unless a misc item
- Organization rules:
- A mislabeled item is worse than a not labeled item
- If there is an existing standard, use it
- Don’t keep what you can’t use
- Digital home: Have a separate device (computer) dedicated to different activities, with different background, etc to make it recognizable
- Declare “email bankruptcy” and delete/archive everything and start over
Chapter 4 - Organizing our Social Lives
- Recaptcha for OCR training
Chapter 5 - Organizing our Time
- Negative genes that kick in after peak age of reproduction don’t have a means for natural selection to weed them out
- Reasons why multi tasking doesn’t work
- Prefrontal cortex for breaking a project into components and planning
- Car wash example: split jobs with different attentional sets to reduce cognitive costs of switching
- Sleep is important for consolidating memories and solving problems
- Bi-modal sleep was the norm for most of our history and changed only with the invention of artificial light
- He gives recommendations for helping your body adjust to travel across time zones
- Eat the frog: do the worst task first thing in the day
- Being outside in nature replenishes self-regulatory mechanisms in the brain
- Successful people don’t subscribe to a faulty belief that life should be easy
- To focus:
- Write everything you need to do down to get it off your mind
- Take a break and exercise
- 5-minute rule for little tasks
Chapter 6 - Organizing Information for the Medical Decisions
- Discussion of probabilities and common fallacies
- Bayes: "Organizing our decisions requires that we combine the base rate information with other relevant diagnostic information" (229)...Base rates and representativeness hueristic
- Applying Bayes to decisions about your medical treatment
- Our brains easily notice co-occurrence of events, but not lack of occurrences
- Parking ticket example:
- Parking costs $20
- Parking ticket costs $50, and there is a 25% chance you get a parking ticket
- Therefore, the expected value of paying for parking is -$20, and the expected value of not paying for parking is 25% * -$50 = -$12.50. So you shouldn't pay for parking.
Fourfold (contingency tables): allows us to calculate Bayesian probability models, for example "What is the probability that I have a disease, given that I already tested positive for it?"...example (page 231+ and appendix):
- You took a blood test that came back positive for the disease
- The blood test is wrong 2% of the time (false positive and false negative)
- The base rate of disease is 1 in 10,000 (0.0001)
- Medication ends with unwanted side effect 5% (0.05) of the time
- Should you take the medicine...?
Here is our four-fold table:
| Test (Positive) | Test (Negative) | |
|---|---|---|
| Disease (Yes) | Correct ID | False Negative |
| Disease (No) | False Positives | Correct rejections |
| Test (Positive) | Test (Negative) | Totals | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disease (Yes) | 1 (1-0) | 0 (1 * 2%) | 1 |
| Disease (No) | 200 (9,999 * 2%) | 9,799 (9,999-200) | 9,999 |
| Totals | 201 | 9,799 | 10,000 |
Now, to answer our question: what is the probability I have the disease given that I tested positive?
Or, p(You have the disease | You tested positive) = 1/201 = 0.49%
Say we decide to take the test a second time (assuming that test results are independent):
| Test (Positive) | Test (Negative) | Totals | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disease (Yes) | 1 (1-0) | 0 (1 * 2%) | 1 |
| Disease (No) | 4 (200 * 2%) | 196 (200-4) | 200 |
| Totals | 5 | 196 | 201 |
p(You have the disease | You tested positive twice) = 1/5 = 20%
Chapter 7 - Organizing the Business World
- Fundamental principle of this book: externalize memory
- Many great leaders are also great storytellers
- Internal locus of control: being in control of our lives, which promotes success, happiness, satisfaction
- Take 10 minutes after meeting or stopping project to write what happened or prep for starting the next time
- Plan for failure with your IT infrastructure, file types, etc
Chapter 8 - What to Teach our Children
- Discussion of benefits and (mostly) risks of Wikipedia model of knowledge
- Because information is so accessible on the internet, the purpose of education shifts partially to identifying experts and determining the credibility of information you find
- Think about numbers logically to see if they are plausible. Set boundary conditions
- Back of the envelope test: estimating the weight of the Empire State Building
- With kids: how many uses can you think of for a pencil?
Chapter 9 - The Power of the Junk Drawer
- Fundamental principle of organization: “shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world” (370)
- For remembering names, you need to give yourself 5 seconds to encode the information (374)
- The 21 century information issue is one of selection
Topic: PKM
Created: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2022-07-05-Tue