Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior; it prevails when we don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter, or more accurately, when we don’t waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.

Traditionally, cognitive psychologists have made a distinction among different areas of study: memory, attention, categorization, language acquisition and use, decision-making, and one or two other topics.

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.

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

The essential point here is that during your daily sweep through the cards, you have to do something with that index card—you do something about it now, you put it in your abeyance pile, or you generate a new task that will help to move this project forward.

Successful people are expert at categorizing useful versus distracting knowledge.

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

Complex questions like this are easily solvable with a trick I learned in graduate school—fourfold tables (also known as contingency tables). They are not easily solved using intuition or hunches. Say you wake up with blurred vision one morning. Suppose further that there exists a rare disease called optical blurritis. In the entire United States,

A germane finding in cognitive psychology for gaining that control is to make visible the things you need regularly, and hide things that you don’t.