The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo. Your job

This ability to recognize diversity and organize it into categories is a biological reality that is absolutely essential to the organized human mind.

A third way we categorize is in conceptual categories that address particular situations.

if a work is wanted, “it can be asked for; but to be wanted, it must be known.”

If you can attend to one of the things on your list in less than two minutes, do it now (he

time of their bosses so that the boss knows that whatever is in front of her is the most important thing she could be doing right now. She doesn’t need to worry about projects or tasks that are going unattended, because the assistant is keeping track of them for her.

Switching attention comes with a high cost.

We don’t always remember everything about an event, but if we can remember one thing (such as the approximate date, or where a given document fell roughly in sequence with respect to other documents, or which person was involved in it), we can find what we’re looking for by using the associative networks in our brains.

By 1850, the average family group in Europe had dropped from twenty people to ten living in close proximity, and by 1960 that number was just five. Today, 50% of Americans live alone.

the more cognitive load one is experiencing, the more likely one is to make errors in judgment about the causes of an individual’s behavior.