Suman Saha's Key Ideas from The Organized Mind
by Daniel Levitin

Multitasking is - “the ultimate empty-caloried brain candy.”

According to Levitin - “When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.”

• No distraction when you are in "Focused Work Mode"
• Limit the interruptions.

In our chronically sleep-deprived society, sleep deficit is a performance killer. Studies have found that productivity goes up when the number of hours per week of work goes down, strongly suggesting that adequate leisure and refueling time pays off for employers and for workers. 

• A ten-minute nap can be equivalent to an extra hour and a half of sleep at night.
• A calm, well-rested mind is a fruitful mind. Don’t overlook sleep, rest, and vacation as stress busters.

One of the most important principle is “offloading the information from your brain and into the environment” so you can “use the environment itself to remind you of what needs to be done.”

• You should put things away in their designated places, because there’s a special part of our brain dedicated to remembering the spatial location of things.

“The fact that our brains are inherently good at creating categories is a powerful lever for organizing our lives.” Further, “productivity and efficiency depend on systems that help us organize through categorization.”

• Most decisions can be reduced to a choice of four simple actions: drop it, do it, delegate it, or defer it.
• If something can be done in two minutes or less, just do it.

Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don’t know it.

A spiritual composure is good for the mental organization. Practicing Zen-like mindfulness not only relieves the anxiety that comes with worries over undone tasks and unease over future uncertainties but also allot more of your limited attention to the present moment.

• Instead of seeking to cope with information overload and travel at warp speed, focus on the things you can do to put yourself on the right path to better wellbeing—one thought, one bite, one task, one project, and one breath at a time.