The organized mind: How to survive information overload and accomplish more

While I was checking my e- mail on my phone for preparatory requirements of a business trip on which I was to leave at midnight, I was on speakerphone explaining the budgetary kinks of a different project to a business partner. At the same time, I could hear the minute beeps of incoming messages—undoubtedly related to different matters—while the blank screen of my laptop sat disapprovingly on the side, waiting for an article long overdue. As I mustered my way through multiple tasks, I realized that the Information Age has raised our hopes that we can be smarter, decide faster, and achieve more in our lives than ever before by doing a lot of things with the aid of smart gadgets. Truth is, our brains were NOT designed for multitasking.

Even if we seem to be able to do two things simultaneously, MRI scans show that the brain is not really functioning concurrently, but is actually switching between the tasks in a serial way. The penalty for doing this is high. Jeff Sutherland, in his book “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time,” cited a study that showed that “context switching” or reorienting your mind to focus on an entirely different task, say between five projects, will result in seventy-five percent of your work going nowhere. In other words, you would have worked three-fourths of your day for nothing. This may be counterintuitive, but studies show that working long hours on multiple things means that you actually expend more resources and energy but achieve less.

Our brain, which has evolved over millions of years and remains barely unchanged since the Stone Age, has sufficiently developed to help us survive but it is structurally inept to handle the huge amount of knowledge and demands placed on our attention by a modern world. More data does not mean we are more productive or effective. High obesity rate despite the availability of diet and exercise information is a case in point. The danger of information overload could be an increase in apathy and a sense of disempowerment. A crucial part of our continuing education should be to learn how to sift through and organize information that allows us to make decisions and complete tasks more effectively.

To reduce the brain’s processing bottleneck, Sutherland advises completing a whole task before doing another. Harold Pashler’s experiments in the nineties showed that as you add another task, no matter how simple, the time involved doubled. For every task, the brain apparently has to reboot and reorient itself on what needs to be done; this continuous rebooting process eats up a lot of time as you start and stop on concurrent tasks. Like it or not, people can really only think about one thing at a time. Continual shifting actually “causes the brain to burn through fuel” and depletes the brain of nutrients.

Daniel J. Levitin, a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University, author of “The Organized Mind,” advises offloading a lot of the organizational load of your brain to your environment or using the physical things around you to remind you what needs to be done. This means keeping your most-needed items (e.g. keys, diary or meeting notes) at a visible, regular place; maintaining a filing system with well-thought out labeled categories—physically and electronically; writing things down because memory decays; and keeping redundant sets of things that save you extra time from scurrying around (e.g. toilet travel kit; chargers in your car, luggage, office and bedroom). He avers that a creative mind is actually organized, as in the case of John Lennon who neatly categorized unfinished music and of Michael Jackson, who maintained an archivist. Levitin also counsels moderating our brain’s instinctive urge for novelty (e.g. do e-mail check once or twice a day, time your Net surfing), delegating tasks as much as we can, and getting enough sleep. It is also good mental hygiene to give yourself 10 minutes after a meeting to digest the information and another 10 minutes before the next meeting to allow your mind to switch gradually.

Highly successful executives, artists and athletes have “learned to maximize their creativity and efficiency by organizing their lives so that they can spend less time on the mundane, and more time on the inspiring, comforting and rewarding things in life,” observes Levitin. Overall, wouldn’t that be a better way to live?

Evangeline Navarro is a serial entrepreneur and investor, a finance teacher; and a student at heart on how money and resources affect people. She can be contacted at evangeline.navarro@gmail.com.