Organizing Your Mind in an Age of Information Overload
By: John Uke
Tags: Life Hacking, Wisdom, Book Review, Psychology, Productivity

Each day you’re consuming MANY MANY MANY times more information than your ancestors did. It’s a unique and defining feature of the current age that gets negligently little attention and is far outside your evolutionary biology to naturally manage. There’s too much to absorb or remember, so curating and personalizing has become more important than creating new.

What gets even less attention is where you meet this external curation, which is why the only physical book I’ve finished cover to cover in a while is on this topic. There’s so much good info in it, based on actual well-researched science, that I went slow and took copious notes. I’ve found it’s better to absorb 1/3 of the best information and actually use it, than take in 3x more and not use/remember most of it. This means heavily screening what I take in, taking notes, and actually reviewing those notes.

This philosophy lines up with this great book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in an Age of Information Overload.

Teaching is a way to process info 😈, so here are few of many key highlights:

- Outsource things to other people or take notes so you can be in flow

- Write things out to get them out of your head so you stop thinking about them. Create calendar reminders so your brain doesn’t need to remind you

- Review old notes and sit with things to update your beliefs. It takes years to rewire your brain out of bad habits/beliefs/information (be sympathetic with others)

- You suck at multitasking more than you think. Better to do one task at a time and turn off distractions, and KNOW that’s the most important thing you can be focusing on at that moment. Multitasking also leads to miscategorizing info in your brain. Chunk similar chores together like paying bills. Takes about 50 minutes to get into focus

- Manage your dopamine. It 100% controls your attention. This is why I dopamine diet — starting my mornings with less pleasure than ramping it up over time so I have more control over my life

- Make time for daydreaming/wandering mind. Today’s world is very entertaining and covetous of your attention, at the cost of your peace and creativity. I find it hard to do nothing, but also find doing nothing/meditating to be my most productive time and highly correlated with how well I’m doing in life

- Question your memories and morality for self-interest. Our memories are fictitious and can change over time, and we almost always frame reality so we’re the moral ones when it’s in our self-interest, despite how reality that’s not always true

- Take notes on people after meeting them to remember important details, and review before re-encountering

- Look for depth in others. You’re more likely to believe people in your group are better and more diverse than people in other groups, even when groups are decided by something as arbitrary as a coin toss. Political parties both view neutral reporting as biased against their side

- Break big goals into small manageable chunks. Then pause, reflect, evaluate if reality is mapping out to your ideal mental image/expectation

- Follow experts (actual experts not influencers) with things like workout plans because you can just trust them and not overthink/worry

- Learn and teach indirectly. Better to let lead someone to come up with the solution than feed it directly (too much dense info to do that here)

- Get sleep. It can take a few days to store information so missing sleep even days later can damage earlier memories

- Nap for less than 40 minutes. 10 minute nap = 1.5 hours of sleep for most people

- Grow faster by acting as-if you have the new identity

- Decide how much your time is worth to you on an hourly $ basis so you can make decisions logically about things like how much time or money to spend to save time or money (is it worth spending 20 minutes searching to save $10 on a flight?)

- Early risers are happier, more productive, and more organized than night owls

- 60 hour work week is 50% longer but 25% net less effective than a 40 hr week. Taking vacations, naps, exercise also increases net effectiveness — even when that time could have been spent working

- Give your mind time to relax or ease between meetings — take + review notes before/after call. Therapists do a 50 minute hour

Note that half the population is more on the information gathering side, and half on the organizing side. If you’re extreme on the organizing side it’s likely you’ll still actually do well to take in more information than you are already doing, but you’re likely not reading this anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wrapping up, if a book were to be labeled “Required Reading” then The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in an Age of Information Overload would definitely be a strong contender. Reading it or not, do be mindful of how you meet the information overload in the modern era, or else it will unconsciously consume you.

My own purpose in life is to curate and personalize information at scale, especially in accordance with our individual genetics and personality psychology. Right now this is via GameTree, the top app for curating gamer friends, and in the next evolution as WeTree, a Google for personalized recommendations (friends, dating, work collaborators, products, events…) according to your unique needs and identity. Subscribe to stay tuned for launch.

What’s a tactic you use to manage information in this age of overload?