Organized mind

Sometimes it makes me think how much information XXI century human being can intake with intellectual hiccup. It’s a fairly known fact that as we move forward with medicine, science and human knowledge in general nowadays, the knowledge of past generations starts to be available at our fingertips.

My detour to “Organized Mind” was in hope to figure out how other people deal with information overload in modern times. I struggle with a amount of data you can intake from interviews, audiobooks and podcasts. Other people I know struggle from task and priority management. When I think about this, one can open Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages on a 27-inch screen and with several screen scroll you can spot, analyze, classify and consume content (let’s skip the usefulness or the value derived from these sources) and act upon it. How to apply the same methods to all information which flows in your direction? Is there a system?

The main problem with this title is that it’s ultimately oversized. Author, regardless of well and competent in domains such as math, statistics and probability, kept wandering on and off topics which were supposed to be covered. This book was less painful in the audiobook form, and I feel like I managed to finish it just because of that. Had it been a paper, for sure I’d have dropped it somewhere after first 50 pages.

Example?

Probability and statistics reminder was interesting, but once started, it seem to never end. To some extent it’s a paradox that “Organized mind” isn’t actually clear, precise and more concise.

Some chapters reminded me organization systems presented by Allen in

Getting Things Done

I feel like Allen’s book beats this one, as it’s manageable and provides 90% of answers to most of the issues which might have driven you to picking this book on the first place.

One of the great pieces of content, maybe even better than respective chapter in “Programming Pearls” was an introductions and detailed explanation of the back of the envelope calculations and reasons why people still use them for interview questions. “Programming pearls” seems to be one of the first books where quizing with fairly open-ended question was done during the interviews.