The Organized Mind

The formation of categories in humans is guided by a cognitive principle of wanting to encode as much information as possible with the least possible effort.

Two of the most crucial principles used by the attentional filter are change and importance.

relieving hunger,

Switching attention comes with a high cost.

Successful people are expert at categorizing useful versus distracting knowledge.

Third, objects although different in presentation may be of the same natural kind.

For the 3 x 5 system to work best, the rule is one idea or task per card—this ensures that you can easily find it and dispose of it when it’s been dealt with.

Steel identifies what he calls two faulty beliefs: first, that life should be easy, and second, that our self-worth is dependent on our success. He goes further, to build an equation that quantifies the likelihood that we’ll procrastinate. If our self-confidence and the value of completing the task are both high, we’re less likely to procrastinate.

When that neural activity reaches a certain threshold, you become aware of it, and we call that consciousness. Consciousness itself is not a thing, and it is not localizable in the brain. Rather, it’s simply the name we put to ideas and perceptions that enter the awareness of our central executive, a system of very limited capacity that can general

The task of organizational systems is to provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort.