The Cluttered Mind

06/19/2014

When I was growing up I always wanted to be someone. Now I realize I should have been more specific.
Lily Tomlin

"Your mind will keep working on anything that's still in an undecided state. But there's a limit to how much unresolved 'stuff' it can contain before it blows a fuse," writes David Allen in Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity:

"The short-term memory of your mind — the part that tends to hold all of those incomplete, undecided, and unorganized 'stuff' — functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term memory space. And as with RAM, there's limited capacity; there's only so much 'stuff' you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They're constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload....

"The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can't do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you need to do something, and store it in your RAM, there's a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the time."

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