The Organized Mind

Its full title is The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. It came out from Dutton on 19 August 2014 and entered the New York Times bestseller list at number two. The paperback came in 2015. The page count varies by edition: in Canada, a library record for Penguin's 2015 edition gives xxvi + 496 pages, while Penguin Random House's US paperback page says 544. I am not giving a single number. The UK edition has a different subtitle: The Science of Preventing Overload, Increasing Productivity and Restoring Your Focus.

I could not find a verified Turkish edition; I write about it under its original title.

This review relies on the book's table of contents, the publisher's description and published reviews. I describe the inside of a chapter only as far as I saw it in the sources, and where I could not see it, I say that I could not.

Who wrote it

Before becoming a scientist, Daniel Levitin worked in the music industry for a long time. He started studying applied mathematics at MIT, moved to Berklee, dropped out and played in bands. He worked in A&R at 415 Records and became the company's president in 1989, and he worked as a producer and engineer. He went back to school in his thirties: a bachelor's from Stanford (1992), a master's (1993) and a doctorate (1996) from the University of Oregon. He then became a professor of psychology, behavioral neuroscience and music at McGill, and served as the founding dean of arts and humanities at Minerva University.

This background seeps into the voice of the book. His previous book, This Is Your Brain on Music (2006), was a popular science book about music and the brain. The Organized Mind is the same author's attempt to carry brain science into the drawer, the calendar and the inbox. Then came A Field Guide to Lies (2016) and Successful Aging (2020).

The starting idea

The book's claim is this: the information age puts a load on us that evolution did not prepare us for. Our brains reached roughly their present form in Stone Age conditions, our attention evolved to focus on one thing at a time, and now it faces an endless stream of notifications, options and decisions. Kirkus sums this up well: Levitin reminds us that with every new information tool (from writing to social media) people have been warned that they will become dumber; he does not agree with this, but he accepts that our attention evolved to focus on one thing and is not suited to today's stream.

The publisher's description lists the topics from the drawer to health care to executive workflow. Its proposal comes out of this framework too: instead of straining the mind, hand the load to the outside. File, label, card, list, designated place. Everything held in the mind takes a share of attention; what goes outside does not. As someone who studied law, I know this idea very well: filing does not replace thinking, but it makes room for thinking.

The inside pages: chapter by chapter

The introduction is titled "Information and Conscientious Organization". Nine chapters follow, divided into three parts, and at the end there is an appendix on four-fold tables. I could not find the names of the parts given consistently in the sources, so I will go by the chapter titles.

Chapter one: Too Much Information, Too Many Decisions. Its subtitle is "the inside history of cognitive overload". In one summary this part is read through decision fatigue and the attentional filter: it describes how small daily decisions use up the mental energy that should be set aside for important decisions, and how the brain decides what to notice by the criteria of change and importance. One reader review reports that the chapter takes the history of overload back about five thousand years. Another review says the book reaches into the history of organizing information, such as index card boxes, filing cabinets and Dewey's demonstration at the 1893 world's fair.

Chapter two: The First Things to Get Straight. Its subtitle is "how attention and memory work". This is the neuroscience backbone of the book. According to one review, two modes of attention are described: mind-wandering (the default mode), which serves creativity and finding solutions in the background, and the central executive, which runs focused work. The site's definition of mind-wandering looks at what this split means in ADHD. It is stressed that the brain is not a machine divided into regions but a structure made of distributed networks. The memory part is unsettling: according to Kirkus, the book gives the example of the many Americans who remember seeing on television, on 11 September, the two planes hitting twenty minutes apart. Yet that footage did not exist until the next day. People resist accepting that their memory is wrong, the book says. The message that comes out of this is clear: do not trust remembering, put it in writing.

Chapter three: Organizing Our Homes. Its subtitle is "where things start to get better". According to one summary, the "designated place rule" is here: giving things a fixed address. Something unlabeled is better than something mislabeled; if a system works, do not build a new one; do not keep what you cannot use. The home chapter is the beginning of the book's most applicable half.

Chapter four: Organizing Our Social World. Its subtitle is "how humans connect now". According to one book summary, the problem here is the sheer number of people we know. The proposal is to keep a database of connections and to set up external reminders for reaching important people. I have seen this proposal only secondhand; I could not verify the rest of the chapter.

Chapter five: Organizing Our Time. Its subtitle is a question: what is the mystery? According to the sources, the energy cost of multitasking, the brain's bias toward novelty (a new stimulus pulling a person away from the task), the role of sleep in learning and finding solutions, and procrastination are here. The proposed solution for procrastination is to do the hardest task first. From the name alone, it is clear that this chapter is the book's closest stop to the reader with ADHD.

Chapter six: Organizing Information for the Hardest Decisions. Its subtitle is "when life is on the line". One summary reports that for such decisions Levitin suggests not trusting intuition and building a four-fold table instead. His reasons: the brain neglects base rates, fixates on the worst-case scenario and is strongly affected by how the problem is presented. The appendix at the end of the book also teaches you to build this table on your own. I will not go into details without reading the chapter.

Chapter seven: Organizing the Business World. Its subtitle is "how we create value". One review says this chapter is built around creating value. I could not verify the content of the business chapter from the sources.

Chapter eight: What to Teach Our Children. Its subtitle is "the future of the organized mind". According to one review, what stands out here is constructivist education, that is, the idea that learning by doing is more effective than learning by reading or listening. The flipped classroom is mentioned. The conclusion: teaching students critical thinking, problem solving and where to find information.

Chapter nine: Everything Else. Its subtitle is "The Power of the Junk Drawer". According to one review, the chapter both ties the book together and serves as a drawer that collects observations that do not fit anywhere else. At the end there are reflection questions that call on the reader to sort through the load in their own hands.

Its strongest points

Its first strength is its framework. Without insulting the reader's brain, without saying "you can't," it explains how things work and then suggests externalizing. One review sums this up as understanding how the brain works and working with it. For someone with ADHD, this tone is very precious.

Second, it connects theory to practice. The designated place rule in chapter three belongs to the same family as the article on keeping things in sight I wrote on our site. Both lean not on memory but on space.

Third, the book's scientific equipment. One reader review says the index and the notes together exceed a hundred pages; another counted more than four hundred endnotes. Kirkus writes that about a third of the book is neuroscience and the rest is practical advice, and counts the part that examines how the brain works as the book's standout side.

Weaknesses and criticisms

Scatter. Phil Simon describes the book as partly a business book, partly a decision-making book, partly neuroscience and partly self-help, and says the parts explaining how the brain works pull the reader away from the main flow. Kara Babcock also notes that, with its digressions and dense scientific language, the book is not the kind you read on the beach. To me this criticism is on point: the book is more a science essay than a guide.

Novelty. Tom Wilson, writing in the journal Information Research, says that most of its organizing suggestions are already found in other "how to get organized" books. Babcock, for her part, notes that the decision chapters overlap with Kahneman and Tversky and with How Not to Be Wrong. If you have read the site's review of Hızlı ve Yavaş Düşünme (Thinking, Fast and Slow), you will recognize this overlap.

Individualism. Wilson writes that the book focuses on the individual and never mentions how institutional cultures and habits of blame produce the overload. Another reader review strikes from the same place: the book teaches people to compete better with overload but does not ask why the overload exists. I take this criticism seriously. As someone with ADHD, I read it like this: the load is not yours, but you are the one carrying it.

Level of evidence. According to the Wikipedia summary, one of the book's core claims is this: switching tasks burns much more glucose, the brain's fuel, and brings on mental fatigue quickly. This idea is contested: the notion that self-control is depleted along with glucose was seriously questioned in the 2010s. I could not verify by looking at the page with what strength and with which source the book presents this claim. This is the place to be careful while reading.

The ADHD gap. There is no chapter devoted to ADHD in the table of contents. This is not an ADHD book and it does not claim to be. It does not offer a tested program for a reader with ADHD either. The externalizing it proposes overlaps with the core proposal of ADHD books, but I did not see the book test these proposals in groups with ADHD.

Who it is for, and who it is not for

For the reader who wants to learn how attention and memory work from a neuroscientist, who is interested in the scientific side of the question "why am I like this." For people who work in jobs with lots of documents and lots of decisions, such as law, engineering or research. For those who like organizing books but want to read them with their scientific reasoning.

If your diagnosis is new, if you are looking for the first step to take, if you want something short and direct, this book is not for you. A book of around five hundred pages is too much for that job. In that case, an organizing book written for ADHD, such as Organizing Solutions for People with ADHD, is closer.

Its place on the shelf

On the site, this book's closest relative is The Disorganized Mind. Ratey is a coach, Levitin a neuroscientist: one brings the logic of the session to the book, the other the logic of the laboratory. On the mind shelf, Derin Çalışma (Deep Work) takes the same problem one step further: if attention is a scarce resource, how should it be spent?

The account of multitasking in this book and my article on the multitasking myth arrive at the same point, while the idea of emptying the mind outward overlaps with the brain dump method. The glossary definition of cognitive load is also one of the book's main concepts.

Last word

You do not need to know neuroscience to get organized, but if you want to understand why order does not come to you on its own, this book gives a good reason. What is valuable to me is not the individual tips but its framework, which shows that externalizing is not an admission of weakness. Still, I would not feel obliged to read the whole thing. Read the attention and memory chapters, skim the home and time chapters, and open the rest as the need arises.