Over the last week, I have been reading Daniel Levitin’s very popular The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, which has been sitting on my bookshelf for far longer than it should.
I won’t summarise the whole book here, nor do I wish to write a review for a postgraduate researcher audience. I will, however, tease out one of the points that Levitin makes about the way our brains have evolved, and in turn how they have come to cope with the information age. This concerns the tendency to categorise our sense data. We tend to lump things together in our minds. It is one of the reasons that our memories are so fallible, and so easily rewritten. They are not simply retrieved, but rather reconfigured. You are much more likely to recall something that is out of the ordinary, than to remember a precise occurrence of an activity that is similar everyday (I have this issue with e-mails that I send to the same people regularly - I honestly cannot remember what I said in those messages!).
Now, for me, one of the happy side effects of this neurological/experiential tendency is that we are good at making connections between bits of information, and that is a good thing for learning (arguably the thing), and in research, teaching and administration at a university, also pretty handy. The problem comes when we want to attend to each piece of information properly. It is difficult to handle more than about four or five tasks effectively at the same time, and very easy to simply forget one of them entirely (try staying on task when scrolling through e-mails, answering the phone and scanning Twitter).
For a long time, I have been using ‘to-do’ lists, and a lot of people swear by them. Lists, however, have a tendency to send me into a panic: they are practically never-ending in my job. With each task completed, another arrives, and my eye (and brain) immediately starts wandering to take in everything else that hasn’t been actioned. This is when index cards come in useful.
I am not ashamed to say that I used index cards to underpin my PhD. Although I used a relational database and bibliographic management software to manage much of the data in my project, the edge of my desk was always full of box after box of notes written on index cards. Practically Victorian, no?
For some reason this antiquated system worked for me. I found that I could move cards around, putting similar topics together in clusters or piles, or using dividers to separate sections in boxes. You can even pin them onto a noticeboard and look like one of those really clever television detectives. Now, you can do something similar with software like Scrivener (and I love that too), but for ease of access, a pen and a small stack of blank cards in your pocket goes a long way.
It turns out that Daniel Levitin quite likes the index card approach, and one of the reasons is that externalising those tasks that tend to cycle in our short term memory is more effective for our focus (we don’t have to attend to them constantly), plus cards play into our neurological tendency to catagorise information; we can move the information around and associate it with something else.
Today, I tried this using the Eisenhower Method of quadrants based on ‘important’ combinations ‘urgent’. Amazingly, I have found it quite liberating. There is a sense of creativity in approaching tasks and time that seems to work well for me. Try it out, and let me know if it works for your research.