."In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel—and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time."
Howard Rheingold's insight:
I've not read this book yet, but I've ordered it. I enjoyed Levitin's previous book, "This Is Your Brain on Music," and although I am skeptical of what has been called "neurobollocks," I suspect this will be a good addition to my small infotention library.
As our lives are becoming increasingly technical, it is not surprising that research into media multitasking is becoming more widespread. This article is particularly authoritative as it has curated relevant university studies. It notes that "people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They're basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking." This comment alone is enough to inspire me to both research this subject matter more, ans strive towards mindfulness myself!!
"This post is the second in series on how I’ve automated augmenting my memory, the first post covered how I create a diary which is my most important and frequently referenced memory aid. This post covers how I automate the creation of my personal knowledge management archive. This archive has been with me for many years now, although it’s expanding at a rapid rate, which makes retrieval one of my primary concerns. In the same way that I’ve found consolidating my diary into a single app, in that case Momento, I consolidate all personal knowledge management information into Evernote which I have on all my devices and the web. Although I started collecting most of this information manually, I’ve found over the years that I don’t have the discipline to do this for anything but the most valuable of information, so it’s almost all automated now. "
Howard Rheingold's insight:
This fellow is an infotention superstar. He understands that the tools he uses are means of augmenting his memory, an he knows how to connect tools such as IFTTT, Instapaper, and Evernote. I'm going to start adopting some of the methods Steve recommends.
I don’t think that tools alone can do it alone. I think we need also what Howard Rheingold calls “Infotention Skills or training our attention and developing productivity habits in a networked age should go hand-in-hand with the use of these tools. Here are some of the tools that can help make better habits or break bad ones. - See more at: http://www.bethkanter.org/conscious-apps/#sthash.h6NzutVk.dpuf
Howard Rheingold's insight:
I have not tried these apps yet, but I have a great deal of confidence in Beth Kanter (obviously, the feeling is mutual). Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's book is worth a look by anybody interested in infotention, as well.
"You haven’t taken a deep breath in 30 minutes”. This is the smartest thing a wearable has ever told me. Most fitness trackers just pump out near-meaningless numbers. But Spirecould actually make you healthier, happier, and more productive. Just clip the subtle little stone-looking device to your belt or bra, and it measures and visualizes your breathing in real-time on its companion app.
Spire can let you know if you’ve been sitting still too long or need to relax because your breaths are shallow."
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Howard Rheingold's insight:
I have not tried this myself yet, but I have followed Neema's work at Stanford for years and we've talked about infotention and mindfulness many times. I can guarantee that it's not BS.
"Selective attention" is the concept from cognitive psychology that forms the elementary building block of infotention -- enlisting existing mechanisms that our brains already use to filter incoming information. The research on this goes back to the 1950s. This is a good description in lay language about research into attentional bottlenecks and filters.
Interesting cognitive psychology information regarding how our brains absorb information. Interesting to consider how our brains filter what we pay attention to, before we discuss what they pay attention to. Not necessarily directly linked to infotention, but an important source of background information.
"It’s nearly impossible for me to cover every evolving nook and cranny of Evernote, let alone the cornucopia of features and specifics tailored exclusively for the differing platforms it runs on. That being the case, we’ve outlined a few general tips and tricks below for making the most of Evernote regardless of your device. I doubt they’ll make you an note-taking expert right off the bat, but consider them the second level of Evernote once you’ve mastered the basics of creating, tagging, organizing and sharing your notes."
Howard Rheingold's insight:
I avoided Evernote for a long time, but it has become increasingly useful for my information handling and remembering routines. I can post my passwords and encrypt the entry. I can forward emails to specific notebooks. This article goes from the elements of getting started to advanced tips and tricks.
"As I have added Evernote back into my routine, I find myself using it every day.
From the quick capture of ideas and notes, to the collection of reference material and documents, Evernote is my main information library.
The ability to access my notes from anywhere is a powerful capability that saves time and makes me more productive.
If you have moved away from Evernote or haven’t explored its full potential, I recommend trying these tips today."
Howard Rheingold's insight:
On the info-tools side of infotention, I resisted Evernote for years, but now find it indispensible. I keep mailing lists, info on my classes, clip items for my hobbies, forward emails confirming online orders (email to evernote is most useful if you add your evernote email address to your address book)
I've been using Evernote as part of my daily routine for the past 3 years, and couldn't do without it. Apart from the 12 (excellent) tips in the article, I've found the scheduler very useful for prompting actions - e.g. to write a blog post on a note I've written or a webclip that I've captured; the iPad version allows me to scan-in business cards, where the contact name is auto-checked against LinkedIn, and I've configured the Evernote options such that any Google Search I perform automatically displays results from my Evernote notebooks next to the Google search results.
If you've never used Evernote - give it a try and follow some of the 12 tips given in this article.
Evernote is the bomb. I used the free version for years but use it so much that I decided to support them with my $$. I love the way it synchronizes my notes between devices. Easy sharing also.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman shot to fame with his groundbreaking bestseller Emotional Intelligence. The premise of the book, now widely accepted, is that raw intelligence alone is not a sure predictor of success in life. A greater role is played by 'softer' skills such as self-control, self-motivation, empathy and good interpersonal relationships.
Now Goleman comes to Intelligence Squared for an exclusive talk on the themes of his latest book, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. Attention, he will argue, is an underrated asset for high achievers in any field. Incorporating findings from neuroscience, Goleman will show why we need three kinds of focus: inner, for self-awareness; other, for the empathy that builds effective relationships; and outer, for understanding the larger systems in which organisations operate. Those who excel rely on Smart Practices such as mindfulness meditation, focused preparation and positive emotions that help improve habits, add new skills, and sustain excellence."
Howard Rheingold's insight:
I've been following Goleman's work for decades. As I've mentioned before, infotention involves both practice of the inner skills of attention control (Goleman focuses on focus, which is one important -- but not the only -- attentional aspect that can be trained) and knowledge of how to use information tools. This one hour and 18 minute video lecture concentrates on the three kinds of focus.
I liked JP Rangaswami's series on filtering so much, I decided to filter it.
Howard Rheingold's insight:
JP Rangaswami's thoughtful series of blog posts on the why and how of filtering online info-flows is a fundamental infotention text. Instead of Scooping all seven, I've Scooped this blog post by Jon Reed that summarizes and links to all seven parts.
"At the TiDaL Shift workshops we build on the principles offered by Pang, Rheingold and others. By examining our current relationship with technology we create practices that lead to a new relationship with technology; one that is based in self-awareness and conscious choice, leading to more spaciousness and freedom in our lives with and beyond technology."
Spritz is a startup that wants to change how people read on small screens. The startup has created an app that feeds texts to readers one word at a time, arranged so that their eyes are not "forc[ed]…to spend time moving around the page." You can see a demonstration in this video.
Howard Rheingold's insight:
I have not tried this, but it's definitely on my list. This article is critical of the technique, calling it "reading to get it over with," but I can think of several categories of reading that I could do a quick once-over before drilling down on specific parts: how-to manuals and documents where I know a lot of it but need to dig out specific parts and concentrate on them more slowly; texts that I am considering adding to a list to read more carefully (perhaps for Scooping), finding my place in a printed text that I am listening to as an audiobook, etc.
focus@will combines neuroscience + music to boost productivity and tune out distractions!
Howard Rheingold's insight:
Apps like this are best approached with an open-minded skepticism. Open-minded because we're just beginning to see work on attention tools; skeptical because any mention of "neuroscience" raises the possibility of what has been called "neurobullocks" -- knowledge about the relationship between neural and attentional processes is very often nowhere near as precise as promoters would have us believe. Nevertheless, this is on my list to try out. I'll welcome feedback, both positive and negative, from anyone who tries this.
I concur with Howard Rheingold's advice that consumers be wary of claims to boost attention and productivity. At the same time ,improving attention is a very useful skill in these daze of distraction. We are just learning more about what works. Share your review of this and other such apps with Howard.
How much time do you spend each day getting better organized? Cut it in half.
When it comes to investing time, thought and effort into productively organizing oneself, less is more. In fact, not only is less more, research suggests it may be faster, better and cheaper.
IBM researchers observed that email users who “searched” rather than set up files and folders for their correspondence typically found what they were looking for faster and with fewer errors. Time and overhead associated with creating and managing email folders were, effectively, a waste.
By combining threading with search, technology makes an economic virtue of virtual disorganization. The personal productivity issue knowledge workers and effective executives need to ponder is whether habits of efficiency that once improved performance have decayed into mindless ruts that delay or undermine desired outcomes. Are folders and filing systems worth fifteen to twenty-five minutes a day of contemplative classification and sort for serious managers?"
Howard Rheingold's insight:
I'm an inveterate organizer of information into folders and folders within folders. I did that for years before search came along. Old habits die hard. But really -- why organize when you can tag and search? Social bookmarking alerted me to the usefulness of tag-and-search (what links did I tag with BOTH "curation" and "infotention"?) and now I ask myself, when I start to folder-within-folder, whether tag-and-search might be more efficient. h/t Sahil Gupta
Few month ago I began to tag every pdf/doc file I download. For every file I think about 3 key words and I add them to the file name. It makes searching for pdf files a much easier task.
"On one hand we gather information from all corners of the planet - network. But all this gathering requires intention, filtering and sorting. While we have intentions to understand and become more expert with particular knowledge, we also have intentions for how we want to organize and/or distribute what we have learned. On top of that we have publics (people we respect, trust and follow and people who are interested in what we have to say). Since we are the center of this universe (dream) it makes sense to optimize our this process by taking care of our minds and bodies, developing good habits. "
Howard Rheingold's insight:
David McGavock, one of the co-learners in my Introduction to Mind Amplifiers course, made this mindmap, useful in conceptualizing the tool and attention skills that make up infotention
We’re all connected to a vast sea of information: twitter, email, news and social networking sites, blogs and corporate portals …But with all this information at our fingertips it begs the question: are we getting smarter with all this data or just bogged down?
With TheBrain you can create large networks of information that match your style of thought, finally putting you in control of the deluge of information, instead of it controlling you.
In this must see webinar we’ll cover strategies to master information overload so you can actually leverage relevant information sources and capture your best knowledge.
Learn how to:
• Develop guidelines and “Rules of Engagement” for your data sources • Setup a visual workflow of relevancy and urgency for projects and information • Create a single point of access that leverages key information relationships • Organize and link organic knowledge hubs • Integrate files, Web and intranet pages in a way that reflects your work style • Track files, capture new ideas and version documents • Setup reminders and review Thoughts to better control and manage information
Howard Rheingold's insight:
I use Personal Brain intermittently. It's a deep and powerful information and knowledge management tool that I recommend for those interested in serious personal knowledge management. It's also a useful infotention aid. I've attended many of these seminars and recommend them.
"In 1956, American psychologist George Miller published a paper in the influential journalPsychological Review arguing the mind could cope with a maximum of only seven chunks of information.
The paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information," has since become one of the most highly cited psychology articles and has been judged by the Psychological Review as its most influential paper of all time.
But UNSW professor of psychiatry Gordon Parker says a re-analysis of the experiments used by Miller shows he missed the correct number by a wide mark.
Writing in the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, Scientia Professor Parker says a closer look at the evidence shows the human mind copes with a maximum of four 'chunks' of information, not seven.
"So to remember a seven numeral phone number, say 6458937, we need to break it into four chunks: 64. 58. 93. 7. Basically four is the limit to our perception."
Howard Rheingold's insight:
The attentional window for short-term memory might be smaller than previously thought. Chunking information is one key strategy that can be exapted to infotentional practice.
This is advanced, but if you find RSS useful for tuning your incoming information streams about particular subjects and you are ready to use power-tools, OPML is the next step. After reading through the descriptive material and how-tos, note the list of OPML services that can generate OPML for you.
I started writing stories this year – short fiction and a couple of novellas so far – and I’ve found I need to make a lot of notes. The i
Howard Rheingold's insight:
I use Evernote, Scrivener and IFTTT and have a dozen old Mokeskin notebooks but have not yet tried this combination. I know that I use Evernote a couple dozen times a day and wouldn't think of writing a long article or book without Scrivener.
The key to cutting information overload is to more efficiently find the data that you want among the data that you don’t care about. I wanted to share some of the techniques that I use to hack and filter my RSS feed to prioritize relevant information.
Howard Rheingold's insight:
Since Google ditched Google Reader, RSS has receded from many people's awareness. Yet RSS and versatile RSS readers such as NetVibes continue to exist, and if you want to learn information skills to support attention skills, you can do no better than Dawn Foster, who can tell you simply and step-by-step how to arrange for the information you want to come to you, and to filter out the information you don't want.
Attention is only partly about what we focus on, but also about what we manage to ignore.
Howard Rheingold's insight:
Empirical research on the neural correlates of attention is revealing a multi-functional system by which we balance the center of attention with the periphery, focus and scanning, allowing and suppressing attention to input. For students and those who are beginning to train their online infotention, it begins with strengthening the ability to ignore distractions. However, experts are also good at paying attention to perceptions on the periphery that might be important now or later (think of an expert aviator, scanning the horizon.)
"Members of Desimone’s lab are now studying how the brain shifts its focus between different types of sensory input, such as vision and hearing. They are also investigating whether it might be possible to train people to better focus their attention by controlling the brain interactions involved in this process.
“You have to identify the basic neural mechanisms and do basic research studies, which sometimes generate ideas for things that could be of practical benefit,” Desimone says. “It’s too early to say whether this training is even going to work at all, but it’s something that we’re actively pursuing.”
Studies such as Nass et. al.'s "Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers" have demonstrated on a general level that media multitaskers are actually rapidly task-switching and that the attentional costs of switching focus degrades efficiency in accomplishing individual tasks. But that research is just the beginning. Important to infotention is what is not yet known about how effective attentional training can be.
"Our brains, neuroscientists warn, are developing new circuits with a big impact on non-digital reading."
“We can’t turn back,” [Doctor Maryanne] Wolf said. “We should be simultaneously reading to children from books, giving them print, helping them learn this slower mode, and at the same time steadily increasing their immersion into the technological, digital age. It’s both. We have to ask the question: What do we want to preserve?”
Wolf is training her own brain to be bi-literate. She went back to the Hesse novel the next night, giving herself distance, both in time and space, from her screens.
“I put everything aside. I said to myself, ‘I have to do this,’ ” she said. “It was really hard the second night. It was really hard the third night. It took me two weeks, but by the end of the second week I had pretty much recovered myself so I could enjoy and finish the book.”
Howard Rheingold's insight:
I am wary enough about "reading online is rewiring our brains" stories to check the research sources cited in the articles and see what their findings actua;ly say. This story about the way reading online makes it difficult to read longform texts that don't afford clicking away to another site in a few seconds caught my attention because it quotes Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid. Wolf is a careful scientist who started studying reading disorders because her son had one. I like her call to teach and learn -- yes, reading hypertext all day does make it more difficult to read traditional longform non-interactive texts, but Wolf claims that not only can we teach our brains to be "bi-literate," but that we should incorporate bi-literacy into education.
Are we becoming Twitter brains? We are losing the ability to read long texts if we don't preserve the analogue reading and writing. Our brain adapts to the digital way of skimming through texts, thereby losing the 'deep' comprehension created by offline reading
We see a moment coming when the collection of endless streams of data is commonplace. As this transition accelerates it is becoming increasingly apparent that our existing toolset for dealing with streams of data is lacking.
Howard Rheingold's insight:
I haven't tried this yet, but it looks like it could be an effective advanced infotention tool for constructing custom radars and filters.
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I've not read this book yet, but I've ordered it. I enjoyed Levitin's previous book, "This Is Your Brain on Music," and although I am skeptical of what has been called "neurobollocks," I suspect this will be a good addition to my small infotention library.