Sublime

Organization Rule 2: If there is an existing standard, use it.

Cognitive economy dictates that we categorize things in such a way as not to be overwhelmed by details that, for most purposes, don’t matter.

his book The Organized Mind, the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin breaks the bad news: Listening to tunes while we’re doing other things amounts to multitasking. And multitasking is a myth. What we’re really doing, he said, is scattering our attention, zipping back and forth between tasks in a mentally fatiguing and highly inefficient way.

The most fundamental principle of the organized mind, the one most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is to shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world.

2. People consider this aspect of their

The less frame

it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centers in the prefrontal cortex.

These are serial forms of information storage, not random access; everything in them is chronological.