The Organized Mind: The Science of Preventing Overload, Increasing Productivity and Restoring Your Focus

by Daniel J. Levitin

The secret to planning the invasion of Normandy was that, like all projects that initially seem overwhelmingly difficult, it was broken up deftly into small tasks—thousands of them. This principle applies at all scales: If you have something big you want to get done, break it up into chunks—meaningful, implementable, doable chunks. It makes time management much easier; you only need to manage time to get a single chunk done. And there’s neurochemical satisfaction at the completion of each stage.

Many, many PhD students fall into this category, never finishing their degrees because they can’t move forward—they’re too perfectionistic. The real job in supervising PhD students isn’t teaching them facts; it’s keeping them on track.

This is why passive learning through textbooks and lectures is not nearly as effective a way to learn new material as is figuring it out for yourself, a method called peer instruction that is being introduced into classrooms with great success.

When professional basketball players got ten hours of sleep a night, their performance improved dramatically: Free-throw and three-point shooting each improved by 9%.

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 promotes greater life satisfaction, efficiency, and performance.

a contributing factor in some of the most well-known global disasters: the nuclear power plant disasters at Chernobyl (Ukraine), Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania), Davis-Besse (Ohio), and Rancho Seco (California); the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez; the grounding of the cruise ship Star Princess; and the fatal decision to launch the Challenger space shuttle.

Here are some guidelines for a good night’s sleep: Go to bed at the same time every night. Wake up at the same time every morning. Set an alarm clock if necessary. If you have to stay up late one night, still get up at your fixed time the next morning—in the short run, the consistency of your cycle is more important than the amount of sleep. Sleep in a cool, dark room. Cover your windows if necessary to keep out light.

People differ widely in their ability to take naps and in whether they find naps helpful. For those who do, they can play a large role in creativity, memory, and efficiency. Naps longer than about forty minutes can be counterproductive, though, causing sleep inertia. For many people, five or ten minutes is enough.

Even five- or ten-minute “power naps” yield significant cognitive enhancement, improvement in memory, and increased productivity. And the more intellectual the work, the greater the payoff.

A number of companies now encourage their employees to take short naps—fifteen minutes is the corporate norm—and many companies have dedicated nap rooms with cots.

To combat it, Jake adopted a strict policy of “do it now.” If Jake had a number of calls to make or things to attend to piling up, he’d dive right in, even if it cut into leisure or socializing time. And he’d do the most unpleasant task—firing someone, haggling with an investor, paying bills—the first thing in the morning to get it out of the way. Following Mark Twain, Jake called it eating the frog: Do the most unpleasant task first thing in the morning when gumption is highest, because willpower depletes as the day moves on.

Those who are younger and single (including divorced or separated) are slightly more likely to procrastinate. So are those with a Y chromosome—this could be why women are far more likely to graduate from college than men; they are less likely to procrastinate.

Large urban centers are associated with a tendency to be better at critical thinking and creativity, but also with procrastination

Across individuals, flow states appear to activate the same regions of the brain, including the left prefrontal cortex (specifically, areas 44, 45, and 47) and the basal ganglia.

Flow can occur during either the planning or the execution phase of an activity, but it is most often associated with the execution of a complex task, such as playing a trombone solo, writing an essay, or shooting baskets.

Engagement is what flow is defined by—high, high levels of engagement. Information access and processing seem effortless—facts that we need are at our fingertips, even long-lost ones we didn’t know we knew; skills we didn’t know we had begin to emerge.

The greatest life satisfaction comes from completing projects that required sustained focus and energy.

Calculable means we can assign precise values in a formula and generate an answer. Countable means we can determine the probabilities empirically by performing an experiment or conducting a survey and counting the results.

This is called the law of large numbers: Observed probabilities tend to get closer and closer to theoretical ones when you have larger and larger samples. The big idea is that the probability of getting a straight flush is both countable and repeatable: If you get friends to perform the experiment, they should come up with similar results, provided they perform the experiment long enough for there to be a large number of trials.

representativeness heuristic.

One of my favorite examples of the usefulness of fourfold tables comes from my teacher Amos Tversky. It’s called the two-poison problem. When Amos administered a version of it to MDs at major hospitals and medical schools, as well as to statisticians and business school graduates, nearly every one of them got the answer so wrong that the hypothetical patients would have died!

Take cardiac bypass surgery—there are 500,000 performed in the United States every year. What is the evidence that it is helpful? Randomized clinical trials show no survival benefit in most patients who had undergone the surgery.

Angioplasty went from zero to 100,000 procedures a year with no clinical trials—like bypass surgery, its popularity was based simply on the logic of the procedure, but clinical trials show no survival benefit. Some doctors tell their patients that angioplasty will extend their life expectancy by ten years, but for those with stable coronary disease, it has not been shown to extend life expectancy by even one day

So, of the 47 people who were not helped by the surgery, roughly 24 are going to have at least one side effect. To recap: For every 48 prostate surgeries performed, 24 people who would have been fine without surgery experience a major side effect, while 1 person is cured. You are 24 times more likely to be harmed by the side effect than helped by the cure. Of men who undergo the surgery, 20% regret their decision. Clearly, it is important to factor quality of life into the decision.

It was only when I brought up a 2008 study in the journal Urology that they admitted that one month after biopsy, 41% of men experienced erectile dysfunction, and six months later, 15% did. Other side effects of “inconvenience” include diarrhea, hemorrhoids, gastrointestinal distress, and blood in the semen that can last for several months. Two of the physicians sheepishly admitted that they deliberately withhold this information. As one put it, “We don’t mention these complications to patients because they might be discouraged from getting the biopsy, which is a very important procedure for them to have.” This is the kind of paternalism that many of us dislike from doctors, and it also violates the core principle of informed consent.

“I’ve never heard of the binomial theorem and I’m sure it doesn’t apply here. I don’t expect you to understand this.

“I’m a research scientist—a neuroscientist. I lecture in our graduate statistics courses and I’ve published some statistical methods papers.” “But you’re not an MD like I am. The problem with you is that you don’t understand medicine. You see, medical statistics are different from other statistics.”

An increasing number of individuals seek alternatives to the professional medical-hospital system for treating illness. Because the industry is unregulated, figures are hard to come by, but The Economist estimates that it is a $60 billion business worldwide.

As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, one of the greatest advances in work productivity was the division of labor. Dividing up tasks in any large human enterprise has proved extremely influential and useful.

Companies can be thought of as transactive memory systems. Part of the art of fitting into a company as a new employee, indeed part of becoming an effective employee (especially in upper management), is learning who holds what knowledge.

Leaders show greater integration of electrical activity in the brain across disparate regions, meaning that they use more of their brain in a better-orchestrated fashion than the rest of us.

“There are no technical alternatives to personal responsibility and cooperation in the workplace. What’s needed are more people who will stick their necks out.”

The combination of high autonomy and an internal locus of control is associated with the highest levels of productivity. Internals typically “make things happen,” and this, combined with the opportunity to do so (through high autonomy), delivers results.

Other factors contribute to productivity, such as being an early riser: Studies have shown that early birds tend to be happier, more conscientious and productive, than night owls. Sticking to a schedule helps, as does making time for exercise. Mark Cuban, the owner of Landmark Theatres and the Dallas Mavericks, echoes what many CEOs and their employees say about meetings: They’re usually a waste of time. An exception is if you’re negotiating a deal or soliciting advice from a large number of people. But even then, meetings should be short, drawn up with a strict agenda, and given a time limit. Warren Buffett’s datebook is nearly completely empty and has been for twenty-five years—he rarely schedules anything of any kind, finding that an open schedule is a key to his productivity.

It is now well known that some of the most productive companies—Google, Twitter, Lucasfilm, Huffington Post—provide perks such as in-house gyms, gourmet dining rooms, nap rooms, and flexible hours. Google paid for 100,000 free employee massages, and its campus boasts wellness centers and a seven-acre sports complex with basketball, bowling, bocce ball, and roller hockey. The statistical software giant SAS and Toyota distributor JM Family Enterprises feature in-house health care; Atlantic Health System offers on-site acupressure massage; Microsoft’s campus has a spa; SalesForce.com provides free yoga classes; Intuit lets employees spend 10% of their time on any project they’re passionate about; Deloitte encourages employees to donate time to nonprofits for up to six months by offering full benefits and 40% of pay.

Separate research by Kahneman and Tversky shows that people are unable to ignore information that is not relevant to them, so there is a real neural cost of being presented with information you don’t care about and can’t use.

discernible pattern, similar to the random letters in example number 2 above:

This story is entirely fictional, but it is a very close analogue to what Wikipedia does. I say this with some trepidation because Wikipedia has done at least two very admirable things: It has made information massively, unprecedentedly, ridiculously accessible, and it has made it free.

But there was a trade-off: an antipathy toward expertise. This is according to no less an authority than Lawrence Sanger, the cofounder (with Jimmy Wales) of Wikipedia! The problem, he notes, is that anyone—anyone—can edit a Wikipedia article, regardless of their knowledge or training. There is no central authority of credentialed experts who review the articles to ensure that they are factual or that they are being edited by someone with knowledge on the topic. As a reader of Wikipedia, you have no way to know whether you’re reading something accurate or not. And this isn’t an unwitting side effect; it was part of Wikipedia’s very design. Jimmy Wales has stated that experts should be accorded no more respect than novices, that there should be “no elite, and no hierarchy” of them to get in the way of newcomers who want to participate in Wikipedia.

My former professor Lee Ross of Stanford University conducted a study that revealed an interesting fact about such politically and ideologically based biases in news reporting, dubbed the hostile media effect. Ross and his colleagues, Mark Lepper and Robert Vallone, found that partisans on any side of an issue tend to find reporting to be biased in favor of their opponents.

Consider that in this particular case, you’re seeing only those letters he chose to send you—you’re not seeing the letters he sent to anyone else. Statisticians call this selective windowing. The case I’m describing actually occurred, and the broker was imprisoned for fraud. At the beginning of the whole scheme, he sent out two sets of letters: One thousand people received a letter predicting that IBM stock would go up, and one thousand received a letter predicting that it would go down.

Selective windowing occurs in less nefarious and deliberate ways as well. A video camera trained on a basketball player making ten free throws in a row may selectively window the successes, and the one hundred misses surrounding it aren’t shown. A video of a cat playing a recognizable melody on the piano may show only ten seconds of random music out of several hours of nonsense.

For over a decade, when Google conducted job interviews, they’d ask their applicants questions that have no answers. Google is a company whose very existence depends on innovation—on inventing things that are new and didn’t exist before, and on refining existing ideas and technologies to allow consumers to do things they couldn’t do before. Contrast this with how most companies conduct job interviews: In the skills portion of the interview, the company wants to know if you can actually do the things that they need doing.