Editor’s Note:  Dr. O’Connor is an occasional contributor to GTD Times.  Her bio is here.  She sent me an email about this book and I was so intrigued and felt that other GTDtimes readers would be similarly interested that I asked Dr. O’Connor if she could share her thoughts with the rest of us.  Thanks Lynn!

I’ve been reading a fascinating book, Spark, by John J. Ratey. It’s a quick easy read, a popular book, describing the role of exercise in neurogenesis, cognition and learning. It describes a pilot program in a school district in Naperville Illinois. They discovered that strenuous physical exercise led to participating schools raising their scores in all the national tests measuring children and adolescent’s academic achievement.   One year they had 97% of their 8th graders take the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), an international test of science knowledge/skills. Their young adolescents scored first, just ahead of Singapore. They have found that kids who participate in the program (they changed the name from PE to Fitness) end up with dramatic changes in their learning, concentration, memorization skills, cognitive flexibility, etc.

The kids are all given heart rate monitors and instead of competing with each other as they do in more traditional sports, they each are expected to keep their heart rates at 80% of capacity for an hour –therefore they are going for their own personal best. The effect on learning is remarkable. They found that the kids who arrive at school at 6:30AM to do their exercise are more able to learn in the classes that follow. Other research (on mice for example) is described, demonstrating the mechanics of this, with physical exercise leading to significant increases in BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) and other growth hormones which directly lead to neurogenesis –making new neurons affecting the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus (maybe other brain areas also, I don’t know yet, still reading the book).

This is not the emphasis in article below, but it is related. It made me want to resume going to the gym, and not just doing kundalini yoga although that probably works too –but I get the impression that the more strenuous exercise has a bigger impact. The children and adolescents are given a big choice of activities to choose from –running, cycling, climbing an elaborate wall, doing that computer generated dance activity (I don’t remember the name), etc. Ratey points out that in more traditional school sports, kids spend a great deal of time just waiting around, and some kids who are not “athletic” get left out altogether. Not so with the fitness emphasis, it’s a whole new endeavor.

I knew that exercise promoted better mood and countered stress. What I didn’t know was that exercise has profound effect on cognitive function. I recommend the book for anyone who wants to get inspired to engage in more regular strenuous exercise, while strengthening cognitive apparatus.

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Back in college I, like so many students, took an introductory psychology course.  Unlike most students, however, I still remember exactly what the professor said first in the first lecture of that course.  He said:

“Psychology is unique amongst the sciences for one particular reason.  That which we strive to comprehend - the brain, and that which we use to comprehend it - the brain, are of equal complexity.”

Perhaps to other students this revelation was less insightful or more stupefying or perhaps I was the only one in the hall insufficiently hungover to have failed to grasp what was said, but regardless of the reason, this simple opening statement made an indelible impression upon my brain such that two decades later I can conjure up in my minds eye nearly every detail imaginable about this moment in time.  I may never know why those words said at that precise moment had such an impact on me, but for the first time I have a clearer idea of what was happening in my head to make such a recollection possible.

That is the beauty of John Medina’s Brain Rules, a work of such scope and clarity that I believe you’ll feel, as I do now, that for the first time ever I’ve had a glimpse into the inner workings of my own mind and gained a new level of understanding for much of what is happening inside my thick skull.  Even for those of us that don’t have a science background this work is exceptionally accessible.  Medina brushes aside the typically incomprehensible words and the dozens of insider acronyms common to the language of neurologists, molecular biologists and other learned individuals with lots of letters after their names.  Medina synthesizes the jargon and the science and brings it down to a level where it is understandable to the layman.  More importantly, from this information he distills  practical concepts that can be put to use to help us maximize our individual intellectual capabilities.

To say I enjoyed this book is to put it mildly.  The truth is that I lost all feeling in both feet I was so wrapped up in reading I didn’t notice that the way I was seated was cutting off the circulation to my lower extremities for the better part of 200 pages!  (which I am certain will form an indelible memory of its own)

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If you happen to have an iPhone I have a treat for you. Ambient composer and artist Brian Eno in conjunction with Peter Chilvers and application developer Opal Limited have just released an application for your device that truly demonstrates what happens when a prodigious creative talent like Eno is given a blank slate I’m imbued with the capabilities native to Apple’s evolutionary hand held platform.

Bloom is part do it yourself composing tool, part ambient sound generator, part relaxation and meditation and a complete pleasure to use for personal entertainment.  Bloom is, in my humble opinion anyway, the most creative use of the iPhone to date. Without question worth the $3.99 price tag from the iPhone App Store.

Eno and Chilvers call this unique combination of composition and machine iteration Generative Music.  Although it is quite simple actually in terms of functions it is nevertheless capable of nearly infinite variation making for a piece of software that can entertain and at the sane time provide some health benefits for as long as you have your phone.The application provides a combination of aural and visual stimulus incorporating pastel circles that appear atop a contrasting but also pastel background. The circles are produced in response to the touch of your fingers upon the screen and will vary in size and persistence based upon how long your touch lasts and apparently also to how much pressure you apply.  The tones generated vary in pitch depending where upon the screen you place your fingers.

The result is a tonal and visual composition of your own creation that can be saved if pleasing or deleted with a quick shake if less than sonorous. What’s more there is even a setting that allows the application to take your original piece and if left idle will evolve your work over time. In addition to the creative mode you can also select a passive listening mode where the program will randomly create ambient music that is pleasant to hear combined with colors peaceful to regard.

The one complaint I do have about Eno’s creation is simply that it intuitively begs to do even more. One wants to explore beyond the simple touch / tap interface into other more complex movements; to smear one’s fingers, one, two, three at a time -to drag out certain notes or stifle others. Those with a good ear will long for the ability to move beyond pitch and gain more complete tonal control while visual artists will undoubtedly wish for the ability to change color, to alter hue, depth, intensity and luminosity.Don’t let that dissuade you from purchasing this delightful little application though; after all this is only V-1.0 and knowing Eno he craves the added functionality worse than anyone meaning the application will likely evolve just like the compositions you make with it do.

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David Allen says

“You’d probably find yourself  with a much larger list of things you had taken on to get done as a result of  feeling so great from getting the existing stuff done”  (paraphrased)

You author concurs, but has an additional thought:

You might learn something about  ‘completion’: “the calm amidst  storm”

You see when I ask people in a seminar what they would feel like were I to wave a wand over their heads and complete everything that needs to get-to-done in their worlds, they seem to have a visceral experience from the inside out right before my eyes.

They seem to experience the joy, the peace, the rest of completion without actually having completed anything (unless some of them can travel at Star Trek or Star Wars speeds at an individual level and like the comic book hero the Flash, can move faster than my eyes can see).

Thus I conclude that this feeling of completion could be experienced at will from the inside out on demand.

One of the subtleties of framing desired outcomes as completion statements is that the statement itself moves one’s focus into pre-experiencing completion.  In fact for those who truly articulate the completion they are intent on achieving, they literally experience the benefits of completion every time they look at the list of projects needing completion.

Is this how your to-do list makes you feel?

It could…
Simply script your projects  and even your next action statements in the completed past tense with any  necessary descriptive bells and whistles embedded.
Then watch how they begin to  allow you to experience completion before completion has been realized.
Further, if your next actions are crafted  in an attractive enough manner, they actually begin to entice you to engage  with the incomplete items as soon as time presents itself.  Often this emerges  out of a desire to actually experience the reality of completion on the  physical versus just the psychological plane (which beats the fear of  deadline approach any day in my book).

The feeling this produces is my definition of the “calm amidst the storm”.

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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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We all feel shy at times.  Some of us find groups intimidating, others feel self conscious one on one, still others can’t stand to be the focus of attention for fear that people will see something wrong with them.  The truth is that everyone has insecurities and everyone has faults.  While we’re busy worrying that everyone else is secretly noticing how badly we suck at something, chances are they are really worrying about everyone noticing how badly they suck at exactly the same thing.  For all but the truly exceptionally self-assurred among us a few tips on how to feel less shy would probably come in very handy.

If you agree, check out  ThinkSImpleNow.com .  They got as a great article on how to overcome shyness as well as a ton of other content that will lift your spirits, improve your self esteem and help you remember that everyone is unique and special and also that we’re all just human. I’ll be that our two resident cognitive scientists, Jennifer George and Lynn O’Connor have even more helpful tools and enlightened commentary on shyness and how to fight it.  Perhaps one of them will weigh in on this post?

As a bonus you might want to check out another article from  ThinkSImpleNow.com that covers all the stuff we collect and some helpful methods for getting it under control.  Do you have any tips on decluttering your life that you’d like to share?  Please do in the comments.

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I’m one of those unfortunate people who loves trying out new software for my GTD system. So far, I’ve always gone back to the online, tried and true, Vitalist (www.vitalist.com  ) for contexts/next action lists (projects too if needed).  But that hasn’t stopped me from doing that experimenting or “tweaking” as some optimists call the time I waste fooling around with new organization/GTD programs. I’ve made this lame excuse: “Every time I enter my next action data into a new program it allows me to review everything in greater detail than I do in a weekly review.” That was as far as I got in explaining my sneaky kind of procrastination behavior. It began to feel even shameful to wile away a whole afternoon exploring some new program.

I felt a lot better about my “try new software”  habit when I read a report from the latest issue of Neuron, as described in New Scientist. In an experiment, researchers demonstrated that our love of adventure and novel objects, is based upon our hard wiring, we could say on our basic nature.  It seems that every time we explore, investigate, try out or learn something new, the reward center of our brain starts firing, much as it would if we were expecting to win a lottery, a card game, a horse race  or any kind of competition. My guess is trying out new GTD software is yet another way I flood my restless brain with dopamine.

This fact about how we’re naturally wired is long known in business and advertising. It’s why companies may put out a product with absolutely no changes, except for the packaging. People buy the new, even if it is more expensive and less convenient. We all fall for something novel. So now, maybe I can get off my case about trying out every new GTD program.

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Editor’s Note:  This article which originally appeared in New Scientist was forwarded to my attention by Dr. Lynn O’Connor, one of our contributor’s.  I felt that it would be of interest to GTD times readers - after all, who doesn’t benefit when you can get someone else to get things done - for you…

Eight ways to get exactly what you want
07 May 2008
Dan Jones
Alison Motluk

Lifting the lid on the science of persuasion
Cajole your boss into giving you a raise, win someone round to your point of view, or persuade your partner it’s their turn to put out the trash - getting people to do what you want can be very handy. Persuasion is a key element of all human interaction, from politics to marketing to everyday dealings with friends, family and colleagues. “Persuasion is a basic form of social interaction,” says Eric Knowles, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. “It is the way we build consensus and a common purpose.”
Unfortunately persuasion is both notoriously difficult to pull off and almost impossible to resist when done well. Psychologists have long been fascinated by persuasion - why some people are more persuasive than others and why some strategies work where others fail. Over the next six pages we bring together some recent insights into the science of persuasion.

For those who don’t want to be persuaded, there are lessons here too. Knowing the strategies charmers and advertisers adopt can help you resist their guile.

[Read more →]

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Just came across this announcement from O’Reilly Media for a book I imagine will be of interest to quite a few GTDtimes readers: “Your Brain: the Missing Manual“.

From O’Reilly’s dexcription of the book:

Description
Your Brain: The Missing Manual is a practical look at how to get the most out of your brain — not just how the brain works, but how you can use it more effectively. What makes this book different than the average self-help guide is that it’s grounded in current neuroscience. You get a quick tour of several aspects of the brain, complete with useful advice you can apply to everyday situations.

And don’t miss the Gallery of Illustrations from Your Brain: The Missing Manual.

For more detail on what this book contains, the table of contents is also available online.

Editor’s Note: If you have authored a book that you think would be relevant to the GTD Community, please make us aware of the publication. Likewise, if you are aware of any books that you feel other GTD’ers would like and wish to share a review, feel free to submit it to GTDtimes care of: Editor at GTDtimes dot com.

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Editor’s Note: this is the first piece from another new addition to the amazing team of GTDtimes contributors, Lynn O’Connor, Ph.D.. Dr. O’Connor is a clinical and social psychologist, a researcher, educator and consultant. She is a professor at the Wright Institute, Berkeley, teaching doctoral students in clinical psychology. Her lab, the Emotion, Personality and Altruism Research Group (EPARG ) housed at the Wright Institute, is focused on studies of personality and psychopathology, with an emphasis on our fundamentally altruistic nature. She has been studying empathy-based guilt for almost two decades. In addition, she has a small private practice where she works with individuals as a consultant and psychotherapist. Dr. O’Conner will be writing articles on various aspects of the social and psychological aspects of GTD and things related.

Research on intelligence is also finding psychological components to levels of performance. When children are taught that intelligence is fixed, heritable, and set for life, many of them back off and put little effort into academics. Only those who have already been labeled as “high IQ” are off to high performance. When however, intelligence is reformulated and children (or adults) are introduced to the idea that intelligence is expandable, and grows with effort, many not initially labeled high IQ come out of the woodwork and become high performers. We have been thinking incorrectly about the concept of IQ. Intelligence is expandable. We can improve performance if we understand that how we do on a task is a function of our effort. Carol Dweck from Stanford has been studying what is being called the “effort effect.” A great summary of her work is found in an article written by Marina Krakovsky.

When I read Dwecks work I began to think about organizing in the same way. I always thought being well organized was a function of genes, heritable, you either had it or you didn’t. I didn’t, and I thought it was hopeless, I would never be organized. Understanding expandable intelligence led me to reconsider my organizational problem, and that led me right to David Allen and GTD. I jumped on the GTD wagon, finally getting that like intelligence, the ability to be organized was a function of effort and experience. I’m a big believer in understanding and accepting our genetic limits, but our limits as members of our species make us far more changeable than we imagine. That’s a quality of being human, the ability to learn entirely new skills and adapt to new environments.

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