Have you ever been getting ready for work in the morning and find that you have absolutely no idea if you’ve taken your vitamin (or washed your face, or some other repetitive task that you do every day)? It happens to me regularly, and it turns out there’s a reason.

According to Gary Marcus’s new book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, context is “one of the most powerful cues affecting our memory.” So, if you learn something in a classroom, you’re more likely to remember it in a classroom. If you smelled lavender while memorizing a list of words, lavender will help you recall them. (Study after study proves it.)

It turns out that the more contextual clues you have about something, the easier it is to remember. But that also means that the things we do most often, and have the most cues for, are strongest and tend blend into each other. That’s why I can’t remember to take my vitamin.

According to Marcus, “What we remember and what we forget are a function of context, frequency and recency…” Memory prioritizes. The things we’ve thought about recently are easiest to remember. This is the reasoning behind something like the Noguchi filing system, which organizes files according to how recently we’ve accessed them.

The brain works much like the Noguchi system. Says Marcus, “For our ancestors, who lived almost entirely in the here and now (as virtually all nonhuman life forms still do), quick access to contextually relevant memories of recent events or frequently occurring ones helped navigate the challenges of seeking food or avoiding danger.”
The solution is something pilots know: checklists help with repetitive tasks. Can you imagine flying every day for weeks at a time? Would you remember every step of the takeoff procedure?

When checklists aren’t practical, we need to arrange our lives to compensate for our weaknesses in memory. Take a look in my car’s glove compartment and my office desk drawer. You’ll find vitamins there.

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I’ve got a special treat for you this evening.  David recently presented GTD to the Hewlett Packard Corporation.  Following his presentation he took the time to sit down with Ian Griffin , an executive speech writer for the company.  Ian is also the author of the Professionally Speaking blog and that’s where this great podcast he’s done with David is hosted.

It’s Friday.  Take a break. Put your feet up, and indulge yourself for ten minutes while David talks about Getting Things Done…

By the way, great content like this - from more audio and video to articles, commentary, and even forums where you can get answers to your personal productivity questions - can be had with a GTD Connect membership.  In addition to the email newsletter subscription written personally be David Allen, there is an entire member’s only section of the DavidCo website that is reserved exclusively for GTD Connect subscribers.

As an extra bonus, here’s another podcast with David Allen - this one from the DonationCoder blog:  Part 1,  Part 2.

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Earlier today I got the chance to get a personal tour of a new application called Presdo that makes it fast and easy to schedule meetings with one or more people. My tour guide was Presdo founder Eric Ly who also happens to be one of the co-founders of another little application called Linkedin. Eric and his very small team - which he calls one and a half people - has been laboring over Presdo for the better part of the last two years and it shows.

Presdo, unlike one of its principal competitors, Tungle, (previously profiled on GTDtimes here) is a completely web-based application which means there’s no client to download, no limit to the type of operating system it will work on and no need to integrate the software into any other product such as Outlook or Exchange.

[Read more →]

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Editor’s Note: We’ve had an incredible response to my request for contributor’s with a cognitive sciences background. Several notable individuals have very kinds offered to author posts that deal with questions of the brain that I believe are of great importance with respect to helping us understand why we do what we do, why GTD works where other systems fail, and how to get the most out of our own curious intellectual circuitry.

One such contributor, Jennifer George has authored the post below and will begin her contributions to GTDtimes with a series of posts based upon the ground-breaking book, Kluge, authored by Gary Marcus.

Jennifer George is a productivity geek and Web addict who writes the blog Lifemuncher. In the real world, she is a fundraiser for UCLA and
a graduate student in clinical psychology at Capella University.
by Jennifer George

Gary Marcus’s book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, examines the strange collection of more or less ancient systems that makes up the modern human brain. As he explains in chapter one:

“Measured nucleotide by nucleotide, the human genome is 98.5 percent identical to that of the chimpanzee. This suggests that the vast majority of our genetic material evolved in the context of creatures who didn’t have language, didn’t have culture, and didn’t reason deliberately. This means that the characteristics we hold most dear, the features that most distinctly define us as human beings — language, culture, explicit thought, must have been built on a genetic bedrock originally adapted from very different purposes.”

The word Kluge is an engineering term, and means an inelegant solution that works, but not in the best way possible because of historical and/or environmental constraints. Since our brains evolved over millions of years, building on existing systems rather than scrapping them and starting fresh, we find ourselves with a brain that’s like a marvelous Rube Goldberg device, held together with duct tape and chewing gum. It’s great at things that helped us survive and reproduce on the African savannah, and not quite as good at things related to language and abstract thought, which evolved much more recently.

According to Marcus, the human brain is primarily interested in helping you survive - noticing predators and food sources and finding potential mates. Figuring out the next step on that computer program you’re writing? Evaluating whom to vote for for president? Not so much.

The book is a fascinating and humbling overview of the evolutionary forces that built the modern brain and the resulting strengths and weaknesses that constrain and influence the way we live. Much of what Marcus describes is directly relevant to GTD and productivity, and could give us insights on better ways to do things. In a series of posts, I will be examining his findings on and trying to apply them to the life of a modern office drone. Look for the first one, on memory, later this week.

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I usually do OK tracking individual actions and small and medium sized projects. These are items for which I can easily envision the completed state - I know what “done” will look like and I know I will mark these complete in a few days or weeks. Sometimes, however, I have projects where the completion date is not days or weeks ahead but months or years ahead. I find those harder to keep in front of me. Even with regular review, I sometimes find it difficult to keep a sense of time about a project that is off in the distant future.

As I prepare to launch eProductivity, a GTD implementation tool for Lotus Notes , I need to keep one or two key milestones in sight at all times. Specifically, we have a few big milestones - things like “launch web site” or “Prepare for meeting with David” or “Deliver presentation to IBM” that we have been working on for many months or in the case of the product launch, several years.

Several months ago, I watched a NASA Shuttle mission video and I was inspired by their countdown clock and their mission elapsed clock. I decided that I needed my own countdown clock, so I decided to create one for myself.

Starting with a countdown clock mechanism that I purchased on-line, I created a custom clock face and built five eProductivity countdown clocks. I set each one to the date of a key milestone. I kept one clock for myself and I sent the other four to key people on my team. Now, I have a tangible reminder of each event and the time remaining in which to complete it. I’ve had the clock on my desk for a few months now and it’s been a fun reminder of an event that I am looking forward to. The key question “What’s your next action?” keeps me focused on the little things that I need to accomplish to achieve my goal.

It’s been a fun way to get things done.

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