“I struggle with trying to be productive and efficient in an age when we’re being asked to do more,” said Daniel Levitin, author of the new book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. Considering his myriad accomplishments — he has been a comedian and a music producer and is currently a performing musician, best-selling author, college professor, and neuroscientist — it would seem Levitin is the epitome of productive and efficient. Regardless, he felt mired in the glut of information and never-ending tasks of today’s world and so set about studying what’s happening neurologically as we try to catalog the saturation of stimuli. His findings are presented in the fascinating, highly readable Organized Mind, which explains not only how the brain processes 21st-century data overload but also what we can do to alleviate the neurological fatigue it creates. I recently spoke with the witty and personable Levitin about the myth of multitasking, “shadow work,” and attention deficit disorder.
I thought it interesting when I saw your new book is about organization — you’ve done so many careers, you’re like 15 different people. Either you have really good skills or you are completely ADD. [Laughs.] You know, I think like many of us today, I struggle with trying to be productive and efficient, in an age when we’re being asked to do more, and there are more demands on our time ... But because of my profession I have access to some of the research literature, and because of my interest in science writing I can try to talk about it in ways that might help not just me but other people.
Did you find that in writing this book you were able to hone your own organizing, or were you already there before you wrote the book? I think all of us will admit to being organized in some parts of our lives but not others. And so I would say the same is true of me — not as organized as I’d like to be in some ways, but sufficiently organized in others. My laboratory is very organized because it has to be. It’s a government-funded facility, and we have to keep records in a certain way, things like that. But my kitchen, I can never find anything.