⭐⭐ The Organized Mind by Levitin
| Full Title | The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel J. Levitin |
| Year Published | 2014 |
| Date Read | August 27, 2021 |
| Rating | 2/5 stars |
Listened to a little over 4.5 hours, about 28%. Ultimately I think I may have simply come across many of the topics Levitin covers in other resources in this area, which isn’t the book’s fault. However, I thought that the pacing was too slow; the author made the all-too-common mistake you see in productivity nonfiction by spending way too long on individual points. There is significant volume to get through per individual insight, which is a bummer.
Still, there are some good concepts to be reminded of here. I liked the author’s metaphor for how keeping things in your head that you know you have to do is akin to having a disorganized room; capturing these tasks in an external system is similar to cleaning up your work area. He also introduces an interesting way of viewing ‘assistants’ — just like now we have many external digital systems (apps for note-taking, events, tasks etc.) that are extensions to our cognition, people employed as personal assistants can be thought of
in the same way. In both cases, we are trying to externalize tasks at low levels of abstraction to free up mental space for higher-level ones. What I didn’t really think about is that the amount of assistance we get as individuals from other humans has actually radically gone down in the last few decades — whereas before we’d have travel agents to help with booking hotels and flights or operators to connect us to the right phone call destination, we now have to do this ourselves (typically, with software as the replacement). Clearly this has democratized access to these services and proved to be very profitable for the software companies that produce such applications. But are these tools actually better than what they are replacing? Or even, how much better could things be if you hired specialists that could also make use of these tools today? I class these kinds of questions into the “paying for advice” area, which I would still like to explore more.