The Organized Mind

It has to do with the difficulty of attentional switching. We can state the principle this way: Switching attention comes with a high cost.

In general, activities with a long time to completion—and hence a long time to reward—are the ones more likely to be started late, and those with an immediate reward are less likely to be procrastinated.

For Phaedrus, an unassimilated pile helped solve the problem. “He just stuck the slips there on hold until he had the time and desire to get to them.” In other words, this is the junk drawer, a place for things that don’t have another place.

Bayes’s rule allows us to refine estimates. For example, we read that roughly half of marriages end in divorce. But we can refine that estimate if we have additional information, such as the age, religion, or location of the people involved, because the 50% figure holds only for the aggregate of all people.

People at the top of their professions, in particular those known for their creativity and effectiveness, use systems of attention and memory external to their brain as much as they can. And a surprising number of them, even in high-tech jobs, use decidedly low-tech solutions for keeping on top of things.

Attention is a limited-capacity resource.

Eastward travel is more difficult than westward because our body clock prefers a twenty-five-hour day. Therefore, we can more easily stay awake an extra hour than fall asleep an hour early. Westward travel finds us having to delay our bedtime, which is not so difficult to do. Eastward travel finds us arriving in a city where it’s bedtime and we’re

This illustrates another important concept in medical practice: the number needed to treat. This is the number of people who have to take a treatment, such as a medication or surgery, before one person can be cured. A number needed to treat of 201 is not unusual in medicine today.

Early on, Jake identified his chief weakness: a tendency to procrastinate. He is of course not alone in this, and it is not a problem unique to people with attention deficit disorder. 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