I’ve just finished reading Dave Crenshaw’s “The Myth of Multitasking” and have to say that this little book was both a pleasure to read and offered some very practical advice in the form of a modern day fable.  Basically the point of the book is to convey the idea that multitasking is a lie.  As a GTD’er, you probably already know this and if you’ve been to a David Allen seminar you’ve heard him say it.  Humans simply cannot do two things that both require concentration at the same time.  We may think we can but in reality we’re “switch-tasking”, not multitasking.

The problem with this, as Dave explains in his book, is that each time we switch from one task to another we lose valuable time. This is because we have to reset our mental processes to deal with the changing task and we have to figure out just where we were before we get started again.

For those of you that think this rule doesn’t apply to you, I strongly suggest you take the self test that Dave explains in the story and provides for you to give yourself at the end of the book.  The results are sure to suprise you and wake you up to the truth -  that - as both Dave and David have said; multitasking is a lie.

If you want to test yourself now you don’t have to wait: Dave and his team have created a multitasking test you can take online right here.

BONUS:  For the first three people that write to me and include their addresses, I have extra copies of this book to share.  There’s a caveat though, after reading it you promise to come back here and post one new way this book taught you to eliminate interruptions so that you can focus on one task at a time - fair enough?

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If you haven’t seen it already, you probably ought to check out the September issue of Fortune Magazine featuring a great comparison of three approaches to personal and professional productivity; David Allen’s GTD, Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits and James Loehr’s Human Performance Institute.  In case you missed the article, Rob Thompson of Rob Thompson.com has gone to the trouble of making it available online here.

Like Rob, I felt the piece was well written and generally fair to all three coaches.  Unlike Rob I have direct, personal experience with two of the three coaches and have read the books and purchased the products of the third.  This gives me a little bit of additional insight into the coaches and their methods which might be of value to anyone considering applying these methods to their own lives.

My greatest personal contact is of course with David Allen and I am a follower of his Getting Things Done systematic approach to personal productivity.  It wasn’t an easy thing to get me to embrace this approach but perhaps my unwillingness to take other’s word for it that this approach works lends even more credibility to my conviction that it does work so long as it is diligently applied.  Of course this would hold true for all three systems but in my experience diligent application of the principles  of each of these approaches does not yield equal success.

The difference with GTD is that it is eminently practical.  Every part of the process yields concrete and measurable results.  You don’t have to be a believer to be an achiever.  You simply have to DO what David lays out as the appropriate thing given your context and the material you are working with.  It  is quite simple from a simplistic viewpoint:  Collect, Process, Organize,  Review, Do…it really is straightforward and like Rob says in his review you don’t need any fancy equipment to implement GTD - in fact keeping it simple might be one of the best ways to successfully implement GTD in your own life.

From my personal perspective no other approach can deliver so immediate a change in your outlook by giving you such a significant change in your environment.  There’s a lot to be said for David’s bottom up approach - take it from a converted non-believer.

As far as James Loehr is concerned, Rob wasn’t too familiar with him and neither was the author of the Fortune article.  I, on the other hand, am intimately familiar with his work.  It has been a part of my life for over 20 years.  That’s because James spent some time at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs in the mid 1980’s and I happened to be a resident athlete at the time.  His focus was on mental toughness training for sports and he even authored a book by the same name. (I highly recommend this to any athlete, by the way).

Most of my fellow athletes thought that this was a joke - they simply didn’t believe that lying in the dark and doing breathing and visualization exercises had any chance of making them better athletes.  Well, it’s been said that the brain is the most powerful muscle in the body and based upon my experience with James Loehr’s strategies I have to agree.  While my contemporaries where yucking it up and making life hard for the not-yet-famous Loehr, I was deeply focused on learning his methods.  The payoff is not immediate but it is profound.  I learned over time that the more consistent I was in my application of his exercises and the more deeply I was able to visualize myself performing perfectly the more capable I became at actually delivering perfect performances.  In other worse, his ideas are legitimate - or at least they are as far as I am concerned.

The problem is that it takes a significant investment and a lot of conviction in order to apply his teaching.  This is not a see it - do it- reap the benefits process.  It takes time and effort to learn how to apply James Loehr’s techniques.  And from my experience in the executive world, time is the one thing that we all find in short supply.  From where I stand James Loehr’s approach is probably more useful to athletes than to executives - some exceptions might be trial lawyers or professional speakers that need to “perform” (surgeons also might benefit from Loehr’s techniques). If you’re a golfer and you want to hit par, James Loehr might be the guru for you, however.

Last but not least is Stephen Covey, the only one of the three coaches that I don’t know personally. I imagine that just about every performance oriented executive has looked into Seven Habits and for some I am sure that this approach is exceptional.  The problem for a lot of us - or at least for me is not that I don’t know what I want to accomplish, but rather that I get lost trying to get there.  It’s hard to have your head in the clouds when you keep on tripping over books on your office floor.

Personally, I think that Covey’s system is better for people that are naturally good organizers but who aren’t sure what their mission or even their long term goal really is.  For people like that I imagine that Covey is like a sliver bullet that can almost miraculously put them on their life’s path.  They don’t need to know how to go somewhere, what they need to do is figure out where it is they want to go and this system is probably ideal for helping to solve that problem.

Ultimately, there are significant benefits to every one of these approaches.  Mostly how well any one of them works comes down to the individual and how serious you are about putting any approach into practice.  Like most things in life you’re going to get out of it what you put into it. Whether that output will be realized tomorrow or a year from now depends largely upon which system you choose and how you go about putting it into effect.

Of course I know that most of you reading this are believers in GTD but have any of you tried the other two approaches?  What about another system that we haven’t mentioned?  Please share your experiences in the comments!

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During the GTD Application Panel discussion at the recent Office 2.0 Conference David Allen revealed to a rapt audience his recent revelations about software applications designed to support the implementation of an individual’s GTD system.  Summed up eloquently as the Five “I’s”  they are as follows:

 Interception: the software must support the process of capturing ideas as they occur to you.  A premium is placed upon the speed, ease and context appropriateness of this process.

Interpretation:  David says that interpretation relies more upon executive function than any other aspect of the five eyes.  What he looks for is an answer to the following question:  Can the tool help me to make a decision or keep it in my face until I have made a decision about i?

Integration: David considers this area to be were the software (or the person using the software) needs to determine what the next action is.  For example, is it a  phone call, some other action - this can also be seen as list management

Investigation:  According to David the software should help you quickly locate those things that are critical to performing a particular task at any given moment.  For example, I have a call with Micheal and I have five things that I need to talk to him about.  The software should make those five things immediately available.

Implementation:  This is where the rubber meets the road in a next action.

One of David’s comments about software is that so much software fails because it forces the user to think too much on the front end about what they need to do with something. He stressed ease of use, flexibility, and context appropriateness.  He also mentioned the difference between input and interception.  (interception is the actual capture of a thought whereas input is the process of taking some already captured information and placing it into a particular trusted system).

So, based upon the above, what applications are you using and how well do they meet David’s “Five I’s”?  Please let us know in the comments.

If you’d like to see the full video, go here: David at Office 2.0

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Bloggers from around the net were in attendance and they were quick to post on David’s rather surprising dual appearances (actually the first appearance had been announced on the Office2.o website months ago) but David’s second appearance, sitting on the GTD Applications Panel was a delightful surprise made all the much more exciting for what David revealed… (we’ll get to that in another post). Among the bloggers that had something to say about David’s speaking at Office 2.0, Ed Brill was excited about David’s discussion of lotus notes and the fact David claims that the David Allen Company  has more Notes databes than it does employees.j

Meanwhile, Internet.com’s Richard Adihikari wrote a comprehensive post on the entire event as well as the practice of GTD.  Richard’s in particular is a great read and I highly recommend you click on over to his site and check it out.

The team at the Enleiten blog and website has also written some nice material about David’s appearance  at Office 2.0.  In particular they’ve done a nice job summarizing the reasons why a person might need to use GTD and what that initial implementation looks like in the most basic terms.

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At ‘that’ moment, you understand the power of getting it out of your head.

Some might think that means merely writing it down, but it actually requires one to implement Peter Drucker’s thinking from the Effective Executive treatise (1969) that one must:

1. decide a desired outcome
2. frame a next action and, if possible,
3. execute that next action as quickly as is  possible (in an attempt to achieve the desire of your  outcome).

When you are concerned about:

1. your soon-to-be-newborn’s heart  rate
2. the speed with which they are intending to  induce your wife and
3. the fact that you are still 45 minutes away  from the hospital,

you realize the power of being able to focus past your desired outcome toward next action execution.  At times like these, with as little unproductive stress as possible, you hope to conduct yourself such that you can eliminate all drag associated with achieving the desire of your outcome(s).

And thanks to Providence and the mechanics of GTD, I was able to arrive just in time to see them starting the inducement process and to be the support my wife needed (I still need personal growth in this area) to get through the initial steps in the process.

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Question: When you identify important projects, do you clearly define the successful outcome?
Do you clearly describe, either in the project title or description what success, even “wild success” will look like?

If you are not doing this, you are missing out on perhaps the most powerful productivity tool available to help you accomplish your goals and dreams: your brain.  In fact, if you don’t regularly do this, you’re leaving your brain in park when it could be driving you to accomplish wild success.

This fantastic image is from Joan M. Mas and

 her collection of amazing GTD Drawings

Visualizing the Successful Outcome
Many years ago, David Allen shared with me that one of the first things he did when planning his first book, the best-selling, Getting Things Done, was to write the Wall Street Journal review of his book, first. He wrote the book review as he would like it to appear in print, even before writing the first chapters of his book. For many years I’ve written my projects in the past tense — as if they were “done” and I found that helped me to “see” done as the objective.  I thought that David’s example of writing a formal review of his book project was very clever and a powerful visualization tool, so I made note of it.
My Personal Application
When I set out to develop my eProductivity software, I followed David’s recommendation and wrote my own review. I determined to summarize the product in two sentences, one from the perspective of the Notes community since eProductivity is built on Lotus Notes; the other from the GTD community because eProductivity embodies many of the principles that I learned from David’s book.

For the Lotus Notes community, the most concise review I could come up with (after many iterations and variations) was this:  “eProductivity: The Ultimate Personal Productivity Tool for Lotus Notes.” This eventually became the marketing tag line and company mission. It is my hope that I have accomplished this and that people in the Notes community who evaluate eProductivity will tell us that we have accomplished this objective.

For the GTD community I came up with a slight variation: “eProductivity: The Ultimate GTD Implementation Tool for Lotus Notes.” For those aspects of the product that were specifically designed with the GTD methodology in mind this was my driving measure. As I worked on eProductivity I would regularly refer back to my “review”.  Not only did this help keep me motivated but it also helped me fix in my mind the final product and how it would work, how people would use, and how it would improve their ability to get things done.  For me, like for David, creating the review helped me to visualize exactly what done looked like.

Do you know what “done” looks like?
If you don’t know how “done’ looks for a particular task, not only will you be incapable of  knowing when you are done, you will also miss out on the ready help available to you from your most valuable and trusted resource — your brain.

How does this work?
In my experience, writing my project definitions in terms of their outcome creates a cognitive dissonance between what I have defined as done and the present reality. As a result, whenever I read that project statement (or in my case, look at the product logo and tag line) my brain has to subconsciously decide if it agrees with the statement. If it does, great. I’m done. If not, it usually identifies one or more things that I need to do to make the statement true.

A Built-in Personal Success Coach
It’s quite easy to enlist your brain to define the next actions you must take toward success: all you have to do is craft a clearly defined outcome statement and read it. Immediately, your brain will decide if it is true or not. It may say, “Self, well done.” Or, it may say, “Self, that statement’s not entirely true because this is not done yet.” If so, simply capture what has your attention on to an appropriate list and act on it. Shortly, you will be completing actions that are in alignment with your successful outcome and you will be accomplishing your goals.

This exercise of beginning with the end result in mind has been a powerful tool for me — a productivity tool, even — to help me in the decision making process. Whenever I had a decision to make about this project — whether it was in design, architecture, features, programming, or budget — I would ask myself “what decision can I make that will bring me closer to the two outcome statements I defined? There were times in prior years when I simply wanted to wrap up the current feature set and put the product out there, however, it did not meet my criteria for my successful outcome. So, we waited, and persisted, and continued working, learning, and refining until we are where we are at today.

I encourage you to think about creating one or more successful outcome statements for each of your major projects.

If you decide to try this, post a comment and let me know how your brain worked out as your personal success coach.

I think you will be amazed at the result.

Update: If you would like to see the result of my project, eProductivity, I invite you to watch the overview video

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Editor’s Note: Maurice Gavin is a new contributor to GTDtimes.  He’s one of David Allen’s certifed GTD Facilitators - a great GTD Coach and a prolific writer.  He’s already submitted a number of great articles that I’ll be posting over the next week or two.  Please join me in giving Maurice a warm welcome.  I’m sure you’ll appreciate his intelligent and practical advice as much as I do.  If you’d like to schedule a coaching session with Maurice, please contact the David Allen Company directly.

During a recent seminar I delivered,  a  senior company leader asked the following question: How do you recommend I delegate?

I have been asked this question before but lately it seems that this question, or one like it is being asked more and more frequently.

Usually this question is being asked by individuals who manage others and/or who describe themselves as those who ‘get their work done’ through educating, inspiring, leading and supporting others–sound familiar?

It seems to be a more and more common concern for people who are senior in their roles and responsibilities: “How do I delegate such that I hedge my bet to improve the odds that what I delegate will be done  on time, within budget and to my standard of quality”.

The person who asked the question then proceeded to tell a near horror story: what they had delegated to trusted staff turned out terribly.  The end product was

• Far afield from  what they thought they had asked for,
• The quality was  poor
• The available  time to make adjustments was lost
• And a last minute  decision had to be made to either go with what they had or scrub it  altogether–neither of which was acceptable.

As a result the person who had delegated the task found themselves staying up late that night (the presentation was the next morning) correcting and finalizing the previously delegated task (a critical component of the impending presentation) and doing what they could have done themselves (had they just hung on to the item in question).  Fortunately, after burning the midnight oil, the deliverable was turned in and the day was saved.

The bad news… this manager has the emotional scars from this experience burned into his subconscious.  Now every time they consider delegating to that same individual or anyone else they second guess themselves and more often than not hold onto the item and do it themselves to ensure “it gets done right”

My response to her question and my response to others  who have this question is always the same (I paraphrase for our purposes) .  “ The failure “  was not necessarily in delegating in the first place, or to that particular individual (usually one intuitively knows who is right for the task or is offering that person an opportunity to ’step up’), but in the failing to clarify whether the item in question was fully quantified and communicated at the point of the hand-off in the minds and systems of all parties concerned (in this case the senior leader and her direct report)

I frequently will then say, “Did you delegate the desired outcome regarding this item?” in an attempt to get the person raising the question to see for themselves what contributed to the target being missed .

At this point, there is usually a pause as they think about my words and the syntax I have within I have framed them .  Sometimes, they immediately get the play on words, and shorty thereafter they realize the power of ‘Desired Outcome’ as it relates to delegation.

I often will follow-up with questions similar to the following, just to ensure that they have a chance to visualize the steps during the delegation process where they could have inserted the elements of GTD to their mutual benefit:

• Was the image of  the deliverable you desired to receive in completed form clearly  illustrated?  Often times,  merely understanding the manner in which the deliverable will be utilized  will keep the task on vector toward its desired  outcome
• Did you reference  earlier times when something similar was done that could serve as a comparable  to this task you were asking them to undertake?  “Remember last  quarter when we delivered the XYZ Report to corporate and the 3rd  section graphs and corresponding analysis”?  Using commonly understood  completed examples will also save time and  frustration.  Did you indicate  the varied audiences that would be consumers of their work and any  sensitivities therein that could serve as landmines en route to their  successful completion of the task delegated?  One example:  “The CEO will  be reviewing this  so the  tone will be a critical element in getting  this to pass muster.  Be sure to make it sound like her quarterly report  letters to the shareholders as she thinks that this is how all correspondence should  sound”
• Was the  ‘preferred by’ deadline clear?

Everyone is  usually clear on the actual deadline, but often people have unstated comfort  zones that represent how far ahead or behind schedule they are comfortable  being.  This can be a major point of stress for both the person doing the delegating  as  well as the person to whom the work was delegated  (often at a less than conscious level—‘when do they  really want this back’)

Did you identify  the ‘Next Action’ you see as being ‘next’ as the start point you preferred  they undertake first to get them headed in the right  direction?
I am now seeing  leaders train their followers to ask:

• What do you see as the ‘Next  Action’ for this item you are about to delegate to  me”
• Did you ask them  for feedback prior to concluding the hand-off such that they could ask for  clarification before finalizing their acceptance of the delegated  task?  Sadly, most managers  (this senior leader included) realize that they hand tasks off at  ‘light speed’ (really fast for you non-Star Wars fans) and never follow up  to determine whether the hand-off was complete.
• Did you identify  a check-in point where they could identify any ’sticking points’ while there  is still time for course correction during the term allocated to complete the  delegated task?

Frequently when I ask these questions, senior managers that delegate many tasks will nod in agreement as they realize that the only direction they have given was the stated  deadline.  In many instances their direct reports are  intimidated and as a result they do not come back and ask for  clarity for fear of being seen as less than  ‘up-to-the-task’.

The Desired Outcome Must Be Delegated

If we are going to be effective when it comes to delegating tasks, we must take steps to be certain that what we are delegating is absolutely clear to the person to whom we are delegating the work. This means that:

1. We must define  ‘what done means’ regarding the thing we are trying to hand off
2. We must identify the start point so it is clear to the person receiving the task:  ‘what they should be doing first’.
3. We should give  the the person to whom we have delegated the task an opportunity to provide  immediate feedback as to where or how they  see themselves undertaking this task.  The intent here  should be to ensure that their trajectory is well aligned thereby enhancing  their probability of arriving at the desired outcome ahead of schedule, on  time and under budget.
4. We must allow for  periodic feedback so that we can monitor the progress of those people to whom we delegate tasks.  This will allow us to see if there are  problems, questions or concerns  and if or when these crop up we will have the time to quickly address them or provide corrective feedback.

As we are more and more dependent on others to support us in the realization of our desired outcomes at work and in life, it is critical to become as effective as possible at task delegation.

I recommend becoming so by “Delegating The Desired Outcome”.

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Editor’s Note:  Most of the people at The David Allen Company are on Lotus Notes.  As a result a considerable body of knowledge has been developed around using Notes for GTD.  When you see the Quick Lotus Notes for GTD headline or the Lotus Notes for GTD tag, you can be sure that you’re about to get some battle tested GTD techniques from the vanguard of GTD’ers.  If you have questions about the techniques presented here, please post them to the comments and I’ll see what I can do about getting you some answers.

You have the ability to organize your Lotus Notes workspace and databases.
You probably each have about 6 Workspace Pages on the top of Notes. If you right-click on one of the tabs that has nothing in it, you can remove it:

For the ones you do want to keep, you can choose Workspace Properties and change the name and color.  To move database tiles within the workspace tabs, you can left-click
on the tile and drag it to another tab.

I’ve simplified mine down to two key ones:
My Areas of Focus
Nice to Know

Or, you could take it the other direction and create more Workspace Pages and group them further into Departments, Areas of Interest, Reference vs. Discussion etc.

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As many of you know, I was not a GTD’er prior to accepting the position of Executive Editor here at GTDtimes.  I had read David’s book and my best friend was widely known in our technology community as a long time practitioner and unquestioned authority on GTD but I had remained unconvinced that I myself needed to employ such a rigorous methodology to my own day to day life.  As I’ve mentioned, the event that caused me to decide to open up to GTD was attending one of David Allen’s RoadMap Seminars and seeing the connections between his “Horizons of Focus” and the periodized approach towards training a world class athlete with which I was familiar.

As you might imagine, in order to take on editing GTDtimes with any degree of credibility it was essential that I practice GTD and moreover that I also become a student of the practice so that I could effectively edit this online publication in a way that other GTD practitioners could see was genuine and not merely giving lip-service to the principles and techniques that David has developed.  Over the past five months I have learned a great deal about GTD and even a few things about myself. However one thing that I didn’t learn from GTD was how important coaching is when trying to quickly acquire a new skill or when one is attempting to perfect a skill that is complicated or difficult to master.  I already knew this from my career as an athlete.

Thus, when I got the opportunity to have some coaching to help me apply GTD to my life I jumped at the chance.  I’ve been fortunate in my life to have worked with some truly excellent coaches and as a result I know a few things about being coached that are very important if you wish to derive the maximum benefit from the coaching you receive.  Before I talk about my GTD coaching experience let me briefly share what it is that I’ve learned is essential if you want your coaching experience to really make a difference:

[Read more →]

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GTD asks us to do a lot of of writing. It encourages us to write as we brainstorm, even on a cocktail napkin if necessary. It suggests we identify next actions in writing, and it even recommends we carry around something to capture thoughts and To Do ideas (next actions & projects) with everywhere we go. If we’re going to do all this writing it might be worth reflecting a moment on why it’s so worthwhile to do.

The Limit

There’s a reason we have blackboards in classrooms, white boards in conference rooms and why I will go to great lengths to make sure I have a white board in any consulting room where I do coaching or therapy. You’ve likely heard of the famous 7 plus or minus 2  chunks of information that we’re able to hold in working memory at any one time. Because of the upper-limit to our cognitive capacities, our speaking and auditory capabilities top out at roughly one thread at a time. That’s it. One. That one thread can move more or less quickly, but we can’t speak in several parallel threads at once. We also can’t listen accurately to several conversations at once. We can switch back and forth among them rapidly and catch the gist of them, but it is rapid switching rather than really doing more that one at a time. Our limited working memory also sets the boundaries of the complexity of thoughts that we can hold in mind. That is unless we cheat a bit. Here are two major ways we can cheat and feel good about it:

Parallel Processing

Here is where the writing comes in. Writing acts as extra-somatic memory—memory that resides outside the body. Let’s say I have a client that is trying to figure out what might be causing her child’s tantrums. So I ask her to tell me about a specific instance, which is where we usually start. As she tells me about the tantrum I begin sketching out a diagram of what she’s describing up on the whiteboard. It might start out with the phrase “Zoo Tantrum” in the middle, circled. As she cites possible contributing factors, several lines begin jutting out, each with a another phrase, such as “overstimulated”; “low on food”; “feeling jealous” about what his sibling ordered for lunch that he wished he’d ordered; and even reasons like the child having a “temperament” that makes him more prone to irritability in stressful circumstances.

With the diagram on the board, my client is able to shuttle back and forth from each of those ideas to represent all of them mentally, sometimes side by side, sometimes one after another, creating a sort of parallel processing—representing several ideas virtually at once. Or at least quickly enough that they can all be juggled in rapid succession to make comparisons that it would not be possible to make nearly as quickly if we were limited only to talking about those same ideas. My clients often find looking at a diagram of their problem so compelling that they jump out of their seat, needing no invitation, and start adding to the diagram. It is almost as if they can’t stay seated because the power of the ideas being generated is just too much to merely talk about. So writing things down has an effect that is a lot like adding a giant chunk of RAM to your computer, and very inexpensive RAM at that, which enables a powerful kind of parallel processing.

Freeing up RAM, by Using Your Hard Drive for Storage

The next piece is more widely known, but still well worth looking our attention. Our 3 x 5 notecard, our Outlook plugin, or the note we take on our phone, all function as extra-somatic memory in a another important way. This sort of memory is a bit more like computer storage, such as your hard drive on your PC, or the storage space on your mp3 player. David Allen has made the following metaphor a centerpiece of GTD: Offload information from your mental RAM so that it is freed up for other tasks like creativity and flexible thinking. That notepad or hipster PDA  you’ve got in your purse is functioning as a hard drive. If you get the info out of your RAM and onto your hard drive, you don’t have to keep using up your valuable, much less available RAM space, your working memory, to keep the ideas represented. So if writing to enhance thinking was like artificially extending (remember we’re cheating here) your RAM capacity—how much brute RAM you have to work with; this storage idea is more like making sure not to clutter whatever capacity of RAM you have in the first place with information that could easily be kept somewhere else.

Well why can’t we just jot things down once we get home or just do so every once in a while? That is the brilliance of GTD’s admonition to practice “ubiquitous capture”, always having some way to record those thoughts immediately, by the bedside, in the car, at the grocery store. One of the first authors whose work I fell in love with used to practice exactly this skill of ubiquitous capture. John Steinbeck used to carry a small notepad with him everywhere he went, and furiously jotted down notes in all kinds of circumstances. He had even been known to interrupt a romantic interlude, yes, that’s what I mean, to jot down a thought or image that he didn’t want to lose. Now I don’t think you have to make ubiquitous capture quite that ubiquitous, but the sheer dedication that Steinbeck had to capturing valuable thoughts, I think, makes a memorable example. I’m sure his lover at the time found it memorable too. This is also a reminder that being really smart doesn’t obviate having to write things down. Brilliant people like Steinbeck know the value of cheating, and it actually enabled his brilliance to flower as it did.

So all those little ideas that you’ve got zipping around like so many gnats add up and clog up your RAM. Of course the actual functioning of the brain is more complex than our RAM analogy. The miscellaneous To Dos and responsibilities aren’t just taking up RAM, they actually require using up additional cognitive resources, for instance executive function, which Oliver Starr previously posted about, to shift our attention around like a spotlight onto what we’re trying to keep track of. But for our purposes, offloading those ideas and images immediately leaves you with only the single idea, “check my ‘trusted system’” to keep track of, rather than the myriad details we would have buzzing around otherwise.

Finally it is worth giving a nod to how much writing  has affected the lot of humankind. Most of the conveniences we have today would not be around if it weren’t for this special bit of extra-somatic memory, which science, much of art, and so many of our greatest achievements rest upon—and which we usually take for granted. And now that we’ve got access to this ability to cheat, not just with pen and ink, but with an array of digital devices as well; when we choose not to write it down, voice note it, etc we’re choosing to toss away a giant chunk of our exceedingly valuable RAM. So next time you do a little paper and pencil brainstorming, send yourself an email, or draw a diagram so you can understand something better; take a second to remember what those little tools are doing for you. That extra RAM is there for the taking. Grab extra RAM more often. It’s darn close to free.

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