The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin | Book Summary and PDF
The Organized Mind is for anyone looking to make the most of their mind for creating, performing, and remembering things that matter. Listen to my podcast interview with the The Organized Mind’s author, Dr. Daniel Levitin, above.
In The Organized Mind PDF you will learn:
- 2 examples of “brain extenders” and how they can help you remember things better
- A powerful attention mode that enhances your creativity
- The science to procrastination and how you can turn it around through an improved formula
- A paradoxical difference between successful entrepreneurs and those who failed
- Why multi-tasking is a lie and what to do about it
- 3 action steps that you can start now towards a more organized mind
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Background
Who Should Read THE ORGANIZED MIND
It is for the general reading public, especially for those who want to put their days to good use.. If you are an entrepreneur, The Organized Mind can help you focus on your goals, set priorities, and be in the zone.
About the Author
Dr. Daniel Levitin is a musician, record producer, author of three consecutive No. 1 bestselling books, and professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University. The Organized Mind is his recent bestseller.
The Idea Behind THE ORGANIZED MIND
The idea that inspired Levitin to write The Organized Mind came to him about six years ago, when he found himself in a situation that a lot of people are in.
Levitin felt like he was getting less done, and at the end of the day, he felt more stressed out and he was comparing it to when he was younger. He also felt less less creative.
“I had less time to myself, less time to spend with loved ones and pursuing the activities I really love.”
Because of the nature of his life and the path that he has been on, he has been surrounded by a lot of very successful people. These include Nobel Prize winners, heads of Fortune 500 companies, rockstars, and government leaders, all of whom are living a life full of activities and satisfaction.
Levitin then thought that maybe he could learn from them how to recapture that sense of possibility and of time. He thought that maybe they were doing some time management things in their lives that he didn’t know about.
And then it hit him. “I’m a neuroscientist — maybe I can tie what they say in to what the neuroscience research has learned about attention and memory and productivity,” he thought.
This was after spending about a month in libraries and bookstores looking for a book about this. There were a whole lot of books about how to be more efficient and how to be more productive, but he found that none of them were based on science or on real people’s experiences. Finally, he figured that he had to write the book that he wanted to read.
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Key Points
How to Solve the Most Difficult Business Challenges with an Organized Mind
1. Use ‘Brain Extenders’
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Make Use of the Environment
Levitin suggests to try to use the environment — or things in the environment — to enhance the brain capacity so that you can free your brain up from the drudgery, trivial reminders, and chores that it might normally do.
Entrepreneurs must think big thoughts and think strategically to solve problems.
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Make Use of Written Language
Writing things down is an example of a huge brain extender. For tens of thousands of years, our ancestors had to memorize all kinds of things like recipes, financial exchanges, and instructions for how to prepare foods. Once we began writing things down around 5,000 years ago, that set the stage for all of the innovation and technology that we have today.
“I think all of us can empty our minds. David Allen’s big idea is to do the mind clearing exercise once a day, more or less often, depending on how much chatter you have up in your head. Just write down everything that’s in there.”
The brain can only handle three things at once, so your capacity to actually focus on your work or solve problems is compromised by these reminders your brain is giving you.
As soon as you write them down, your brain knows that you’ve written them down and it stops bothering you with them.
Even better, write it down by hand
Writing things down by hand involves deeper cognitive processing than typing it. It’s just the nature of motor action planning and so you’re more likely to remember things that you wrote down, even if you lose the paper that you wrote it down on, just through the act of writing it down.
EXAMPLE: Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, has lots of meetings in Silicon Valley. She carries around a pad of paper and a pen and people look at her like she’s carrying around a stone tablet and chisel. She’s right at the heart of Silicon Valley but she’s figured out that this is the way that she retains information. Levitin has also run into a lot of Nobel Prize winners and busy, technically sophisticated people who use 3×5 index cards.
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2. Take a Break; Get in the Daydreaming Mode
Another key idea from The Organized Mind, which comes from neuroscience, are the 2 primary modes of attention:
a) Task-Positive Mode (the central executive mode of the brain)
- You’re engaged in a task
- You’re focused
- You’re not distracted — everything’s coming together
b) Task-Negative or Antithetical Mode (Levitin calls this the Daydreaming Mode)
- You’re not engaged in a task
- You’re not in control of your thoughts
- Your thoughts are loosely connected to one another
- Your thoughts are sort of taking you for a ride
- A feeling that you were off in another world
Daydreaming is an antidote for too much time in the executive mode
“Being in the executive mode for a long time is exhausting. You’re literally depleting neurochemicals when you’re focused and engaged, which is why we feel tired after really hard intellectual work. People who do intellectual work, people who think for a living, have to sleep more at night than people who do manual labor because thinking is more tiring. No matter how awful and difficult the manual labor is, it takes less time to recover from the mental work.”
Apparently, people who can enter the daydreaming mode periodically throughout the day, even for just 15 minutes, get more done at the end of the day, more than making up for the 15-minute time that they spent daydreaming.
Their work is judged as of higher quality and more creative.
How to Get in the Daydreaming Mode
The following are just some of the ways:
- Take a walk
- Do an exercise
- Immerse in nature and in art such as music and literature
- Meditate
- Ask yourself: Is the activity goal-directed and purposeful, or not?
EXAMPLE: in the case of social media, it requires you to actively select, and you’re very engaged and you’re controlling the flow of information. While Levitin doesn’t mean you should never do that, anybody who’s been in the daydreaming mode knows that what it’s like is not typically what you get from Facebook and the rest.
“Some days you’re a little bit more focused than others. The reason is out of your control. I’ll typically work for an hour and 45 or an hour and 50 minutes and then I’ll take 15 minutes off to play the guitar or to go for a walk. I don’t do the 25-minute, 5-minute Pomodoro, which has become a fad. Also, I take 2 or 3 20-minute walks every day. I have a little 20-minute loop around my house and it involves some hills, so I get some cardio. I’m in nature because around my house there’s a lot of trees and gardens. Or I’m always in the middle of a novel. Right now I’m reading ‘The Dispossessed’ by Ursula Le Guin, and I’ll be sure that I get a good 20 minutes of that every day. All of that helps.”
A Powerful Attention Mode for Creativity and Problem-Solving
There is a recognized attentional state, which is very close to the daydreaming mode, whose power is creativity and problem solving. A lot of people have experienced this mode during a brief period —
- Just when they’re going to sleep, or just as they wake up
- They’re kind of halfway in the two worlds
- Not exactly asleep and not exactly awake
- Some people hear sounds or see images
- Thoughts are seemingly fluid
“If you’ve tried to solve a problem deliberately and purposefully in your central executive mode and you haven’t come up with a solution, it may be that the solution isn’t linear. It may be that you’ve got to follow some circuitous path or make links between things that you hadn’t previously seen as connected. That kind of insight often comes from the daydreaming mode because, by definition, it’s connecting thoughts that aren’t typically connected. So if you’re there clicking through your Facebook feed and you see this and it reminds you of that and now I want to check in on what this person’s doing — that’s pretty linear.”
3. Avoid Procrastination Effectively
“There is a science to procrastination, and people procrastinate for different reasons. Sometimes it’s always the same reason for a given individual. Sometimes all the reasons apply to somebody and we all procrastinate. Let’s face it. And I think all of us would like to procrastinate a little bit less.”
First, we have to understand why procrastination happens.
Why do we procrastinate? Here are the top reasons:
- Fear of failure
- Finding the task unpleasant
- Not being sure where to begin
It’s a matter of human nature that we put things off, according to Levitin.
“Most of the things that most of us do, don’t yield an immediate result, especially entrepreneurs — we’re sowing seeds for a long term, what I would call an event horizon. The point at which I’m going to get an external reward for something might be very far out in the future. And yet the brain is wired for immediate reward. So if I can answer an email today or 10 of them, I get a little bit of reward, and it’s an actual chemical reward in the brain in terms of the release of dopamine.”
How can we stop procrastinating?
- Fight the tendency to do the things that are clearly less important in terms of long-term success but that give an immediate reward
- Rather, sow seeds for the long term.
- Be aware of the procrastination equation to change how you see procrastination.
Levitin’s improved Procrastination Equation:
Time to complete the task x Distractibility x Delay
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Self-confidence x Task value
We are left with 2 faulty beliefs:
– Life should be easy
– Our self-worth is defined by our success
A Paradox:
Our self-worth as a human being has to revolve around things other than success, because as every entrepreneur knows, there are lots of failures. If you’re going to be doing anything worth doing and you look at successful people, the paradox is that most entrepreneurs have had many more failures than the people we consider to be “failures.”
Most successful people have tried a lot of different things before they hit on something that worked. Interestingly, for many of the people who failed, if they just would have kept at it, they probably would have found success.
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CONCLUSION
Key Action Items from THE ORGANIZED MIND
- Stop multitasking. The brain just doesn’t work that way. Immerse yourself in a single activity or task.
- Write things down. This gets your ideas out of your head, clears your mind, and helps prioritize the tasks that you have to do.
- Take breaks. Take breaks often and make sure that they’re really restorative. You’ll find that you can get a lot more done in a day if you just walk away from your work every couple of hours, even to the point that you’ll find that you’re solving problems during your break times that you couldn’t solve as quickly if you kept plugging away at them.
Also:
- Listen to our podcast with Daniel Levitin about The Organized Mind by clicking here.
Related Readings
- Make It Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger III, & Mark McDaniel
- Getting Things Done by David Allen
- Deep Work by Cal Newport
The Organized Mind PDF Summary
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