 we are living in the age of information overload. The paradox of choice is everywhere from deciding what show you should watch next, what book you should pick up, or what type of milk you should drink with your cocoa buffs. And if more information was the answer, then we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs. And if you find yourself constantly distracted and not being able to focus, slowing down and focusing on one thing at a time might be the best thing to do. And the question I want you to ask yourself is what if you could learn to build an organized mind and use the modern day devices and your surroundings to your advantage. Hello everyone and thank you for joining this initiative. I want to sort of revive on the channel because I used to have this in the past as well where I'm going to provide key ideas and insights from books I enjoyed and would recommend. And today we are talking about a book called the organized mind, thinking straight in the age of information overload. The author of the book is Daniel Leviton, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing this correctly, but this is one of the books I really wanted to keep on my bookshelves. And the book starts with the idea that our human brain is very good at storing information but not so very good at retrieving that information and using it at the right time and place. Some neuroscientists believe that nearly every conscious experience is stored somewhere in our brain and oftentimes a lot of information comes out distorted or incomplete or even misleading. And this is why we need to create systems that can do the job for us instead, thus removing the friction and allowing us to spend our time doing creative work instead. And this is what Daniel calls shifting the burden of organizing from our brains to the external role. Now the key idea number one is that in today's role we have too much information at our fingertips and thus we are more and more primed to make fast decisions. And let's face it, I mean on a regular day our mind is essentially flooded right from the moment we wake up. We pick our phone up and we probably have to decide which message we should reply first, which comment we should engage in, as always which app we should open next. Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend is competing for resources in your brain. And then you add up the things you need to do, your grocery shopping list, your daily chores, your site projects. And again all of these small decisions you need to take sort of compete for brain resources and your attention. And these are just seductive distractions that will slow you down if you cannot find a way on how to organize them. As Daniel put it, your brain has a daily processing limit, why waste it on cat photos. And our brain has actually evolved and it is trying to focus on a few inputs at a time, as we were not able to hide from predators and also think about why the sky is blue, as that would make the difference between catching and being caught. And our brain is now bombarded by more and more information than ever. And this information again consumes our energy forcing us to just sort of keep up. And now the solution to this problem is actually pretty simple, you need to gradually start removing the things you consider distractions out of your daily input. And for some it might be the clothes they wear, thus choosing to wear a uniform to simply remove that what am I going to wear today decision. Others you enjoy eating slightly the same meal every day while the metahumans went even further and started eliminating technology out of your life. Now the second key idea is related to how we can organize our home, the way we work, our environment, our social world, and ultimately our time. And now one of the key ideas here is that if you don't want to attempt to just control your environment your environment will end up controlling you. And the author argues that if you want to simplify your life you should start by tweaking your home or your room first. And assigning a specific place for the objects in your home might be a good place to start. So the same way as you probably have a spot for your shoes you can also create something similar for other objects so that you won't have to worry about where you put them. So you can simply start with small things such as creating a place for your keys and wallet as these are the objects of daily importance. Then you can go even deeper and start sorting out your files, your books, your clothes, your drawers, and even your fridge. And the author outlines that our brains hippocampus is very good at storing locations and really enjoys a good categorization system. And he also gives this example of the junk drawer. I suppose we all have this type of drawer in our homes, essentially the place where we store all sorts of random things such as matches, lighters, batteries, and much more. And in terms of organizing the way we work we should strive not to keep useful objects on our desks. Essentially trying to just maintain the desk as clutter-free as possible as the small objects on the desk are sort of like competing for brain resources on a just like subconscious level. And maybe you're a person who enjoys having a desk full of stuff and thrives of the idea that you can stumble upon a small object and get a crazy mind-blowing idea going but it might be worth your time to clean up your desk and see if you can operate better. Then you can look at your digital life as well swiftly moving to your computer and cleaning up your desktop files, tidying up your folder structure and system as well. And also the author argues that in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task the knowledge of an email sitting unread in your inbox can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points. Also one should aim to make use of a technique called resetting default. Which means that after you're done working you should try to place everything back in its proper place and not keep anything that you don't need and use. If you're using a daily notebook or journal make sure you place it in the proper place when you are done with it. This also applies to your pencils and duct tapes and other various knickknacks you might have lying around. And in terms of removing friction from your social interactions one can start thinking about removing toxic people out of their life or at least stop engaging with them as this type of relationship can be energy draining as your brain will have to process it in the background. So it might be a good tactic to slow down that particular pattern. Now the author argues that the processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at something like 120 bits per second which means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time. And the way to ease up the resources and the processing power is to use external devices to regain your focus. Now I believe that we've all stumbled upon a cool quote on the internet which says that your mind is for having ideas not holding them. And this is about shifting the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world. And maybe some of us don't want to remember some specific things such as I don't know the area code for the state where your cousin is living in or by when are you supposed to pay that specific bill. And this is why you can work on creating a system and storing this information in various locations by using your computer your phone or evil a simple notebook. You have the device you have the software you have the app you have the processing power you have all these resources out there and you can use all these resources to simply store the information from your brain to an external device an external place an external capsule. And if we can take some processes out of our brains and put them into the physical world we are less likely to make mistakes. So you can feel free to jot down ideas as much as you can use software to plan and schedule your tasks and leverage the abundance of the internet. And you can check it whenever you are not sure of that particular information and you do not have to worry about storing it inside your brain thus allowing you more space to be creative. Now the third key idea is related to how we can organize and clear our mind from information overload so that we can improve our rest our sleep our work and overall performance. And again the author starts by stating that when people think they are multitasking they are actually switching from one task to another very rapidly. Now I believe that this is actually to some extent very much true we are all guilty of a little multitasking from time to time and again it's not multitasking it's just like rapid fire task switching and I personally believe that from time to time there's nothing wrong with doing fast task switching with fast actions per minute. Some quick speed running through the content you want to consume or the things you want to do online and if you grew up on the internet I believe you kind of understand me. As alt-tabbing is very much your friend here but the main point is that if you want to produce deep work like say writing a novel task switching comes up with a cost as it will be mentally taxing every time you make the switch. Maybe there are some individuals out there who mastered the art of task switching thinking about rockets on one side and then trolling people on twitter on the other side but a stable simple way to organize your mind is simply to disconnect and stop using all of your devices and all of the external stimuli and also create a routine for your brain and body and as always you have simple things going on such as going to bed at the same time waking up at the same time trying to sleep in a cool dark room and covering your windows to keep out the light and essentially I believe that you should experiment with different things and find a way to build your own system as you are the one owning your energy your time and your life