The Organized Mind

inattentional blindness.

Instead of asking “Where does this metaphysics of the universe begin?”—which was a virtually impossible question—all he had to do was just hold up two slips and ask, “Which comes first?” This was easy and he always seemed to get an answer. Then he would take a third slip, compare it with the first one, and ask again, “Which comes first?” If the new

Two of the most crucial principles used by the attentional filter are change and importance. The brain is an exquisite change detector:

Organization Rule 3: Don’t keep what you can’t use.

Daydreaming and mind-wandering, we now know, are a natural state of the brain. This accounts for why we feel so refreshed after it, and why vacations and naps can be so restorative. The tendency for this system to take over is so powerful that its discoverer, Marcus Raichle, named it the default mode

Difficult tasks benefit from a sustained period of concentration of fifty minutes or more, due to the amount of time it takes your brain to settle into and maintain a focused state. The best time-management technique is to ensure you have captured every single thing that has your attention, or should have your attention, by writing it down. The goa

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.

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.

The key to creating useful categories in our homes is to limit the number of types of things they contain to one or at most four types of things (respecting the capacity limitations of working memory).