Leveraging our short-term memory

Based on the recommendation of one of my clients, I recently finished reading David Allen's book "Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity." It's a really great book for people who want to kick their organizational skills up a notch or two; I highly recommend it.

One very striking point that David makes is how inefficiently we use our short-term memory. Our short-term memory is ideally suited for focusing on a task at hand: brainstorming the right phrasing for an upcoming speech, creating and building a clay sculpture, reasoning through a logic puzzle. When focused on any aspect of our lives, our short-term memory is a formidable force to reckoned with.

But most of us use our short-term memory as a big To Do list: pay my estimated taxes by Monday, figure out who to invite to the barbeque this weekend, make sure to spell-check that memo before sending it out. Don't forget! As a result, we don't have any computational power left over for the creative tasks that really need it. And the kicker is, our short-term memory does a pretty poor job of keeping track of our To Dos. If it were smart, our memory would remind us to send in our rent checks when we are sitting by a computer, and not when we are laying in bed about to go to sleep. Or when we are in the stands at our daughters' softball game. But our short-term memory is not built to do such tasks, and as a result we have random To Dos spilling out all over the place. What a mess.

The solution, says David, is to free up our short-term memory by developing an external organizational system that captures every uncompleted task, or "open loop," so that our mind doesn't have to. And then practicing practicing practicing until we can rely on that system to capture everything that our minds normally would. In this capacity, the human mind is used as a processor that evaluates information, and stores it externally. Which is what our minds are good at, afterall.

I have been playing around with David's organizational systems for a few months, and I must say that he has a point. There is a certain sense of freedom and creativity that comes about when you have your mind at your disposal, ready to crank on whatever topic you choose.

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