Daniel J. Levitin

I'm not giving a star rating to The Organized Mind since I gave up at the top of p. 81--that's the third page of a detailed inventory of retail stores' stock and organizational principles, if you're following along. Levitin bemoans information overload all the while overloading his poor readers with unnecessary information in the form of redundancy after redundancy after redundancy, and apparently doesn't see the irony. It's hard to believe that no editor said, "Hey, Dan, your readers are show more smart enough to understand what you're getting at, so maybe we want to cut this bit about Ace Hardware down to a paragraph or two." I simply couldn't bring myself to read another 300 pages of repetition looking for concrete advice that I suspect is going to boil down to putting a bowl for your keys by the door. I already have a bowl for my keys. Works great.

ETA: It occurs to me that he writes like he's lecturing to undergraduates, coming up with example after example to make a fairly basic point because he has to fill 50 minutes of class time. Also, I am super grouchy. show less

I started reading The Organized Mind and have abandoned it as life is too short to waste time on verbose trivia.

In abandoning this book I am applying the author's approach to dealing with information overload: filtering out trivia.

The Introduction takes up fourteen pages to say what could be said in one: Our minds are overloaded by the amount of information we receive and the number of decisions we have to make. Reduce the load on your mind by filtering out trivial information and not show more wasting time making decisions on trivial issued. Oh! I said it in two sentences.

The main text is no less verbose. It contains endless anecdotes of people being overloaded with information and exhausted from making decisions. On page 77 it starts to offer advice on how to declutter. This too is verbose and tiresome.

I quickly got to the point of skimming by reading the first sentences of paragraphs. That only led me to the conclusion that most of the paragraphs were unnecessary.

As Levitin advises, avoid wasting your time on unimportant things. He is right. Apply his approach and avoid this book. show less

We are drowning in information. Levitin illustrates this with a biological example (15). Google Scholar reports 30,000 research articles on the nervous system of a squid. You can have a PhD in biology and never know all that’s been written on the topic!

This superabundance of accessible information has left us confused. We waste our time away making meaningless decisions that would not have been a matter of choice a few decades ago. This plethora of information can leave us overwhelmed. We show more have this vague sense that we can’t quite keep on top of everything we should know.

Daniel Levitin draws on scientific research studies as well as time management gurus to help us understand the problem. More than that, he offers practical ways for us to (as the subtitle says), think “straight in an age of information overload.”

One of the most interesting parts of Levitin’s book was his attack on the myth of multi-tasking. While we think we can do many things at once, “what we really do is shift our attention rapidly from task to task” (306). This leads to two problems:

1. We don’t devote enough attention to any one task.
2. We decrease the quality of our attention to a task.

Levitin is aware that self-professed multitaskers will disagree with this research. In one of the best scientific jargon-laden insults I’ve read, “a cognitive illusion sets in, fueled in part by a dopamine-adrenaline feedback loop, in which multitaskers think they are doing great” (306). Uni-taskers unite!

Multitasking is just a small part of this 500 page book (400+notes and index) in which every section had something interesting and enlightening to offer. If you want to understand more about how your mind works and how you can stay in control of the modern information torrent, Levitin is a great guide. show less

The amount of retention that you gain through Levitin's careful prose is surprising. He elucidates concepts clearly and succinctly while providing relative background information to justify his points. There are also many real-world and abstract examples to support his findings, which helps with the overall flow and poise of the book. This is a mind-building exercise. Through what Levitin teaches, I feel like I have a better comprehension on how to separate important information from that show more which is not. A groundbreaking book in modern non-fiction, it deserves all the aplomb it gets.

4 stars. show less