Is your life cluttered and chaotic?
Do you sometimes feel as if you are drowning under a deluge of emails, texts and tweets? Do you struggle to keep up with appointments and myriad decisions that you need to make every day?
If you have limited wardrobe space for clothes, for example, keep the clothes you wear regularly in there and pack away others.
If you constantly lose your car keys or glasses and feel generally worn out by the effort it takes to keep up with the pace of modern life, then American neuroscientist and international best-selling author Daniel Levitin might just be able to help.
In this exclusive extract from his new book, The Organised Mind, he explains how, by pulling together the latest brain science and expert advice, we can reduce day-to-day stress and regain control over our home, workplace and time.
Ditch technology
One thing that surprised me during the course of my research for my book was the large number of people at the very top of their professions — even those in high-tech, IT-related industries — who still rely on decidedly low-tech solutions to keep on top of their busy lives.
Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, for example, who is reported to be worth more than £650 million, doesn’t use an all-singing and dancing app to organise her day as you might expect.
Instead, she carries a simple notebook and pen with her to keep on top of her impressive to-do list — even though, she says, it’s regarded by her techy colleagues as the equivalent of ‘a stone tablet and chisel’.
Indeed, the majority of industry leaders and experts I spoke to said they felt more relaxed and better able to focus on their work when they wrote things down on an old-fashioned paper to-do list.
As ridiculously simple as this solution sounds, writing tasks and reminders down actually makes perfect sense in neurological terms. When we have something on our minds that is important, our brain tends to automatically go into overdrive, tossing that thought, date or concern round and round in circles in our heads to stop us forgetting it, in something that cognitive psychologists refer to as a rehearsal loop.
Physically writing to-do items down, however, gives both implicit and explicit permission to the rehearsal loop in our brain to let them go, so we can focus on something else.
Efficiency expert David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, says writing your to-do list on a stack of index cards rather than in a notebook is by far the best way to organise yourself. The rule is only one task can be written on each card, so you can easily find the individual reminder you’re looking for and then physically discard it once you’ve dealt with it.
Scan through your cards every morning, and start by applying a two-minute rule, says Allen. So if you can sort any item on the list in two minutes or less, do it immediately. Anything that is going to take longer than two minutes, defer to a suitable time in the day and, if there are some things that just aren’t worth following up any more, discard them straight away.
Never lose anything again
Few of us feel that our homes or work spaces are perfectly organised. We lose our car keys, important pieces of mail, our glasses. In the best-case scenario, the house is neat and tidy, but our drawers and cupboards are cluttered.
One solution is to put systems in place at home— an infrastructure for keeping track of things, sorting them, placing them in locations where they will be found and not lost.
Research shows that multi-tasking, like texting and walking, makes us demonstrably less efficient — and incredibly stressed (picture posed by model)
To keep track of your important stuff, follow these rules:
Everything in its place
Create a place for your keys, phone or mail and stick to it — rigidly. Buy a hook or bowl for your keys, a stand for your phone or tray for your letters. Place the organiser in a logical spot and be compulsive about using it until it becomes an unconscious habit.
If the phone is ringing, hang the keys up first. If, your hands are full, put the bags down and hang the keys up.
Cognitive psychology theory suggests you should spend as much as you can on your organising accessories. It’s much harder to leave your mail scattered around the house when you’ve spent a small fortune on a decorative letter rack.
Buy duplicates
When organised people find themselves running between the kitchen and home office to get a pair of scissors, they buy an extra pair.
This might sound like cluttering- but buying duplicates of things you use frequently and keeping them in different, useful locations helps to prevent you losing them.
Don’t keep what you can’t use
We’ve all done it — pulled a ballpoint pen out of a pot, found it doesn’t work, then put it back in the pot thinking: ‘Maybe it’ll work next time’. But the clutter of a pot full of pens, some of which work and some don’t, is a brain drain. Throw out what you can’t use.
Prioritise
David Allen says that what people usually mean when they say they want to get organised is that they need to get control of their physical and psychological environments.
One way to do this is to make visible the things you need regularly, and hide the things you don’t. Keep your environment visually organised and there are less distractions when you’re trying to work, relax — or find things.
The same applies in the kitchen. Keep Christmas cake decorations in a box devoted to Christmassy things, rather than in your everyday baking drawer. Something you use only two weeks out of the year shouldn’t be in your way for the other 50 weeks.
Stop multi-tasking
We text while we’re walking, answer emails while having lunch, and work while watching the news. Although we like to see ourselves as incredibly adept multi-taskers, expertly juggling jobs and responsibilities, according to Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it’s all an illusion.
‘We’re not wired to multi-task well. When people think they’re multi-tasking they are actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost.’
As a result, research shows that multi-tasking makes us demonstrably less efficient — and incredibly stressed.
Frantically chopping and changing between tasks has been shown to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol, as well as the fight or flight hormone adrenaline in the body, which can overstimulate the brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. It’s tiring, too. Asking our brains to continually shift from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum — the two areas of the brain responsible for planning and motivation — to burn up so much oxygenated glucose, the fuel our brains need to function and stay focused — we can quickly be left feeling exhausted and disorientated.
Unfortunately, multi-tasking can be addictive. Each time we look up something new on the internet, check our emails or send a text, the sensitive novelty centres in our brains are tweaked and the feel good hormone dopamine is released into our bloodstreams, says Miller. It feels great, but makes us want more of the same, which in turn makes it incredibly hard to focus on any task for long.
Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, multi-tasking leaves us with the temporary high that comes from completing hundreds of little — often irrelevant — tasks.
Control your inbox
In the good old days, our post was delivered once a day. These days, we are deluged with email and texts. Set aside certain times of day when you’ll deal with email, social media and texts. Experts recommend that you deal with email only two or three times a day at dedicated times, rather than as and when they come in.
Daniel Levitin was surprised to find during his research that a high number of people at the top of their professions still use pen and paper to keep to-do lists
Take a nap
Sleep is among the most critical factors for peak performance, memory, productivity, immune function and mood regulation. Even a mild sleep reduction or departure from a sleep routine (for example, going to bed late one night, sleeping in the next morning) can produce detrimental effects on cognitive performance for many days.
However, a quick nap can be an important part of resetting worn-out neural circuits, boosting creativity, memory and efficiency.
The ideal time is soon after lunch. Just five or ten minutes has been proven to yield significant cognitive enhancement and increased productivity.
Naps also allow for the recalibration of our emotional equilibrium — after being exposed to angry and frightening stimuli, a nap can turn around negative emotions and increase happiness.
Napping has also been shown to reduce the incidence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke and heart attack.
(From ‘The Organised Mind: Thinking Straight In The Age Of Information Overload’, by Daniel Levitin, penguin.co.uk)