This will make you smarter: Outsource the little stuff

The nature of this assignment is such that my response will not be a traditional research

paper; rather, I will try to connect several disparate ideas to reveal a way in which I believe we will

have the opportunity to become smarter in the near future. Here’s the executive

summary/roadmap to help the reader get oriented:

We have a limited amount of cognitive capacity – working and short term memory – to use

at any given time, and much of it is spent on just getting through the day [go there]

We use cognitive technologies – like number words – to help us complete complex cognitive

tasks more easily [go there]

Some external technologies may serve a similar purpose [go there]

As literal technologies – electronics and computing devices and applications, many of which

are math/algorithm based – become more sophisticated, we may be able to externalize

more tasks, resulting in greater accuracy and efficiency [go there]

If less cognitive capacity is spent on tedium, it will be available for more meaningful,

satisfying, and revolutionary endeavors [go there]

Getting Things Done

I began using Davis Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system for managing tasks and productivity

almost 15 years ago, and the result of using it has been a level of personal efficiency that has

transformed my former cynicism about such programs.

As the ubiquity of technology has increased, an

interesting paradox has emerged in which people feel

more busy than before; there seems to be more to do

and less time to get it done. In brief (for more see

Appendix A or click the diagram) the GTD system is

based on the premise that all the “stuff” one needs to

accomplish consumes much of the cognitive capacity

available at any given time – the book is not a psych text

and does not go into this point, but I resolve it by

imagining the mechanism to be short term storage and

processing abilities at capacity with thoughts of daily

tasks and scheduling. Allen suggests that the traditional

“to-do” list does not relieve this in any way, as people

tend to populate them with too large and vaguely

defined tasks that cannot possibly be accomplished – for

example, write paper for Pro-Sem – so that the lists

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themselves become an additional source of anxiety and timesap. The GTD system alters this by

prescribing the following:

Gather all your stuff together in some sort of Inbox for the initial round of processing and

determining all the open loops (projects) in your life

Using this information, create a master list of projects and decide whether they are

actionable at this time

o If no, never – get rid of it

o If no, not now, but maybe someday – put in a file that you will review periodically

o If no, not actionable, but potentially useful as information – put it into a reference

system that requires no further action until you need the information. With the

internet and ease of finding information, this repository should be small

o If yes, it is actionable and currently important, it moves forward

For those that are actionable and current, decide what single next action would move the

project forward

o If the action would take less than 2 minutes to do, do it now

o If not, it goes on a list of next actions

The list of next actions becomes your new to do list, with the advantage of being specific

and actionable, and is further enhanced by the consideration of context, energy and time

available, location, etc, so that your action items take advantage of your relative strengths

at any given time to get them done

Getting Things Done has changed with the times, and has a massive user population who

continuously develop tools for implementing it for niche applications – there are spreadsheets,

calendars, to do apps, website, discussion forums available to customize the system (see Appendix

B for more information).

On the one hand, I could say that simply mastering GTD or a similar system for personal

productivity would be a great addition to everyone’s cognitive toolkit. But why stop there? This idea

gets a lot bigger. The heart of this system is the idea that little stuff gets in the way of the more

important, more meaningful, more satisfying, more revolutionary thinking that is possible with a

clear mind (and inbox). Managing little stuff could go a lot further than task management. And

maybe managing little stuff could be outsourced altogether.

Cognitive Technologies

Most of us were together in the Psycholinguistics seminar where we talked about the Pirahã

and numbers – or their lack thereof. The upshot is that it is necessary to have words for specific

numbers of things to be able to conceptualize and reproduce them them (for a more thorough

explanation see my excerpt in Appendix C). Mike Frank calls this a cognitive technology and defines

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it like this: “Rather than altering underlying representations, languages instead help their speakers

accomplish difficult or intractable cognitive tasks by providing abstractions which allow for the

efficient storage and processing of information.”Helen de Cruz, in her discussion of this research,

suggests that language is only one example of such a technology, and that external media such a

counting on fingers actually create a hybrid cognitive process with internal number representations.

I found these concepts fascinating and began to consider other ways our reliance on external media

may habituate us to a different way of thinking. I say habituate, because I don’t mean to say that we

are no longer able to think in the old way, but that by virtue of our privilege as citizens of our time

we have many small luxuries available to us so that we don’t have to. Calculators, for example, have

relieved me of the awful task of long division by hand. The internet has made it unnecessary to

memorize. Best of all, in the past ten years or so, for almost anything I want to do…there’s an app

for that.

The advent of Systems and Apps for externalizing your stuff

Some ideas are good, but require so much time at the front-end that they will never

become popular. In the 1970’s my mother was a professional homemaker, and she started using a

system called Sidetracked Home Executives (SHE) to keep our home.

It involved writing down every task required for cleaning and

maintaining a home on color coded index cards that were stored

behind 43 tabs – one for every month, one for each day of the

month. Besides the usual daily dust and vacuum, there were monthly

cards to remind you to bleach the trash can, annual cards to remind

you to clean the gutters, and twelve “this month” cards to help you

remember on November 25 that you should dust off the Advent Calendar. Complicated and time

consuming to set up, for all but the super-est of supermoms it eventually resulted in a pile of cards

stacked in the defer bin before the whole thing got thrown in the trash. But for those who made it

past the difficult set up, housekeeping was a breeze. Marla Cilley recognized that most homes have

a similar set of cleaning requirements. She improved the SHE system by setting up a default system,

which required only customizing. Today, she runs the Flylady website which will send ambitious

housekeepers a text message or email every morning letting them know which tasks are due. In less

than twenty minutes a day, your home can stay sparkling and company ready.

The point is that there are two important groups of allies in this battle – a developer group

that is focused on creating systems for managing things, and a hacker group that is focused on

identifying the good systems and making them easier to use. Systems and applications get better

over time. If you try something and it doesn’t work for you, don’t be afraid to return to it later to

see if it’s gotten better. If you try something and it doesn’t work for you, don’t be afraid to try

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something similar to see if it works better. Technology is in a constant state of development and

improvement. It works better and is easier to use as time passes.

There was a time when people had a choice about being interested in

technology, and could avoid using it for the most part. When I carried around a

Handspring PDA in the late 90’s people laughed at me when I tapped my

appointments in with a stylus – who’s laughing now? Increasingly, those who

refuse to learn and adopt new technology are at risk of being completely

excluded from many aspects of our culture, and cannot hope to remain viable in

any competitive environment. Stop waiting for things to become so widespread

that you can’t avoid them – make it your habit to try out everything new. It doesn’t matter that it

will be obsolete in a couple of years. A quote I have seen attributed to Big Thinker Alvin Toffler says:

“The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but

those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” In my quest to identify the apps that will improve my

life, I’ve tried hundreds of them. A few have contributed so much to my life that I consider the time

invested in all the ones that didn’t pan out well-spent. For more information about the apps I think

are worth it, see Appendix D.

Making the Leap to Externalization

In the next few years I predict a sea change from simply using apps to letting apps tell you

what to do. This will require a conscious decision on the part of users to take advantage of personal

data mining and the aggregate decisions of similar users to allow technology to figure out your best

next action so you don’t have to. You can spend two hours looking for the perfect Christmas gift for

your nephew, or you can let Amazon just tell you, based on what you usually spend and what

everyone else is buying for kids the same age with the same interests. You can try to figure out

what to have for dinner tonight, or you can let DrGourmet give you a menu for the whole week

(complete with grocery list!) based on how many calories you eat, your nutrition goals, and what

you do and don’t like eating. You can send 7 emails back and forth trying to schedule an

appointment with a colleague, or you can let your Gcal find a time you both have open and auto-

accept an invitation to that slot. Increasingly, apps have access to a vast history of your choices,

behaviors, and preferences. You can spend all your time deleting cookies and worrying about your

privacy, or you can take advantage of it to allow your experience to be simple and customized. This

isn’t easy. We like to control things, or we think we do. But in the history of humankind we’ve never

had as many choices as we do today. Some people, like Barry Schwartz, think that having so many

choices makes us anxious and unhappy. Whether or not that’s true, it takes a lot of our time to

decide on things which essentially make very little difference in the grand scheme of things.

Just remember that technology is constantly in flux, and is improving. As it gets better, so do

our lives. Some of the ways things have changed for the better:

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Making sure I had everything I needed used to make me late. Now all my files are in cloud-

based storage, so as long as I have internet access, I have access to all my documents,

articles, and many of my books. I have access to the internet on my phone, ipad, laptop, and

desktops at home and school. This will get better as: internet access is available in more

places, synchronization improves, devices get smaller and more powerful, more books,

documents, and files are available electronically

I was less efficient if I didn’t have a piece of information in hand. Now, I can find phone

numbers, view my calendar, access my files, look up an address or business hours, find my

lists of things I need to buy, do, or otherwise handle almost any time, even if I didn’t think to

bring that information with me. This will get better as: synch improves, online portals

improve

Going places used to consume more time. Now, I don’t need to spend time getting direction

from people, writing them down, having them, using them…I have a navigator in my car that

can find most anything given an address, or even using a search

function (‘nearest pharmacy’). Often, it isn’t even necessary to

go to places anymore, because more can be done online. This

will get better as: more things can be done online, and as people

become more comfortable using online meeting technologies

(like Skype) and as these technologies improve

I used to spend time writing down things I wanted to track –

calories consumed, how many minutes I exercised, when my

favorite shows were on tv, who I needed to send a birthday card

to this month. Now, I don’t have to look up how many calories

are in a banana or when my best friend got married. Now I can

scan a bar code with my phone when I eat something and it’s in a log. The log turns yellow

when I’m at 80% of my calories and nutrition and reminds me to slow down. Facebook

reminds me of upcoming occasions, and links to me to a card I can send online. This will get

better as: technologies become smaller, wearable, more integrated with one another,

better at making predictions from past or planned behavior

Research/texts/information have changed. When I was in college (the first time) I went to

the library to search for key terms in card catalogues, located the articles in bound journals

on shelves, and photocopied them for ten cents a page. I was bound by access, time,

availability, and money. Now, searching for information is easy, instant, and powerful. I can

find many books, most articles, and at least something about all topics in less than a minute.

I can often find a community of people interested in the topic to interact with, some with an

expert level of knowledge, and they will often answer a question or point me in the right

direction within a couple of hours. When I type “Ne” into my Google search bar, it can

predict I am looking for Neil deGrasse Tyson and point to his Twitter, blog, and articles

faster than I can finish typing the name. Things are available and connected at an incredible

level. This will get even better.

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Shopping doesn’t take up as much time as it once did. Instead of rifling through Consumer

Digest, companies like Amazon.com have millions of user reviews that are boiled down into

the simplest of indicators – five stars. Google shopping can tell you where to get it for the

least money, and retailmenot.com will tell you if there’s an active coupon. Throw in free

shipping, and you don’t even need to leave the house for most purchases. For repeated

local shopping – like groceries – many stores do “click and pull” which means the most

effort required is that you drive by to pick up your checked and bagged purchases. This will

get better as more smaller stores get on board, people adopt the “repeated scheduled

delivery” option, appliances begin to generate their own lists of things you need (new

refrigerators will email you to let you know you’re out of milk)

The killer hack that will initiate the sea change I predicted above

is integration, or at least synchronization. Interoperability. Currently,

this only happens some of the time. My RTM task list can talk to my

Google Calendar. My PI project list can talk to my GPS to find out if

I’m near a place where I need to do something. But they can’t all talk

to each other, and I still have to check them separately. When apps

work seamlessly with one another to use the information I’ve made

available, they can truly begin to make decisions for me that I would otherwise have to make

myself. When they can do this efficiently, and are available to me on a dependable device, I will be

able to release that cognitive capacity to a higher purpose!

Taking Advantage of Found Time/Cognitive Capacity

Given extra time and less stress, more of my time could be spent on satisfying work like

reading, writing, and connecting with others. Technology makes this easier, too. Online

communities and search functions make it easier to connect with people who share interests and

do similar work. Broader communities expose us to big ideas and new directions. And tools like

Pomodoro and 750words.com can help us become better writers. Overall, I think we can be more

effective and productive with some of our extra time. Certainly, though, a more appealing use for

extra time is that we will have more capacity for avocation. Leisure time – remember that? A

Branch discussion I’m reading has focused on “Disconnect Saturdays” – a whole day with as little

screen time as possible. For all the hope I’ve placed in high tech solutions to modern problem, what

I really want is some time away from it.

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Appendix A: Getting Things Done

Summary from http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/08/getting-started-with-getting-things-done

The Problem with “stuff”

Getting Things Done succeeds because it first addresses a critical barrier to completing the atomic tasks

that we want to accomplish in a given day. That’s “stuff.” Amorphous, unactionable, flop-sweat-inducing

stuff. David says:

Here’s how I define “stuff:” anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that

doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next

action step. [pg. 17]

Stuff is bouncing around in our heads and causing untold stress and anxiety. Evaluation meetings, bar

mitzvahs, empty rolls of toilet paper, broken lawn mowers, college applications, your big gut, tooth

decay, dirty underwear and imminent jury duty all compete for prime attention in our poor, addled brains.

Stuff has no “home” and, consequently, no place to go, so it just keeps rattling around.

Worst off, we’re too neurotic to stop thinking about it, and we certainly don’t have time to actually do

everything in one day. Jeez Louise, what the hell am I, Superman?

So you sprint from fire to fire, praying you haven’t forgotten anything, sapped of anything like creativity

or even the basic human flexibility to adapt your own schedule to the needs of your friends, your family

or yourself. Your “stuff” has taken over your brain like a virus now, dragging down every process it

touches and rendering you spent and virtually useless. Sound familiar?

So how does GTD work?

This is a really summarized version, but here it is, PowerPoint-style:

1. identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (close all open loops)

2. get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now

3. create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values

4. put your stuff in the right place, consistently

5. do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment

6. iterate and refactor mercilessly

So, basically, you make your stuff into real, actionable items or things you can just get rid of. Everything

you keep has a clear reason for being in your life at any given moment—both now and well into the

future. This gives you an amazing kind of confidence that a) nothing gets lost and b) you always

understand what’s on or off your plate.

Also built-in to the system are an ongoing series of reviews, in which you periodically re-examine your

now-organized stuff from various levels of granularity to make sure your vertical focus (individual

projects and their tasks) is working in concert with your horizontal focus (side to side scanning of all

incoming channels for new stuff). It’s actually sort of fun and oddly satisfying.

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Appendix B: GTD Companion Materials

Websites that have great GTD strategies, tools, and communities

http://www.43folders.com/

http://www.thesecretweapon.org/media/Manifesto/The-Secret-Weapon-Manifesto.pdf

http://lifehacker.com/5520573/turn-remember-the-milk-into-a-getting-things-done-platform

Appendix C: excerpt from psychling paper

If only one domain were chosen on which to focus this paper, numbers may provide the most

compelling argument for the influence of language on cognitive processes. Folk logic may lead us to

believe that color and direction names seem like something that would impact thinking – but numerical

knowledge is not such an easy leap. Number concepts don’t feel inherently verbal, to the layperson.

In at least one way, this seems to be true. The ability to use number concepts to match small sets

is a cognitive ability that is not verbal; that is, when asked to perform a task that can be performed using a

one-to-one correspondence, actors are successful even when their language does not have a word for

“one” (Frank, Everett, et al., 2008). The Pirahã are an Amazonian tribe which have a number word

vocabulary limited to three words (Everett, 2008). In an interesting set of experiments, Frank et al. (2008)

asked Pirahã subjects to complete numerical tasks. First, in an effort to understand the meanings of their

number words, Pirahã were asked to describe a number of spools as they were presented in an increasing

and decreasing amount. Three vocabulary items were used to describe the spools, however, the way that

Pirahã used the words varied – Pirahã speakers used number words in an approximate way, to mean

something like “roughly one” (but nothing meaning exactly one), “roughly two,” and “few” (Frank,

Everett, et

Figure reproduced from:

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al., 2008, p. 820). Next, the Pirahã were given matching tasks that included hidden, uneven, orthogonal,

and one-to-one matching tasks, as well as a task called nuts-in-a-can, which involved placing spools into

an opaque container one by one (See Fig. 1 reproduced from Frank, Fedorenko, Lai, Saxe, & Gibson,

2012, p. 78). The investigators found that the Pirahã did very well at completing the simple task of

matching a number of objects to given objects with one-to-one correspondence and, to a lesser extent,

with objects that were not lined up but unevenly presented. These tasks required “no memory for the

exact cardinality of a set” indicating that the Pirahã were able to “appreciate the necessity of matching the

quantity of objects exactly rather than approximately” (Frank, Everett, et al., 2008, p. 822). In the

remaining tasks – orthogonal, hidden, and nuts-in-a-can – Pirahã performance decreased significantly.

With no words to represent the exact number of spools across time and space, the Pirahã subjects were

unable to complete these tasks reliably when they could not match objects one-to-one.

When English speakers were asked to complete the set of tasks previously presented to the

Pirahã, of course they were able to complete all of them easily. However, when Frank, Fedorenko, &

Gibson (2008) introduced a condition which interfered with their subjects’ ability to count, they stumbled.

During the same matching tasks administered to the Pirahã subjects, English speakers were additionally

given a shadowing task which required them to listen to, and then repeat back, spoken clips. When the

subjects were unable to use a verbal method – counting – their performance followed a similar pattern to

the Pirahã. This demonstrates the two ways in which we can process information about numbers. The first

is a nonlinguistic cognitive ability that works in the case of matching in a one-to-one correspondence –

“core abilities of object individuation and magnitude estimation” (Frank et al., 2012, p. 89). The second is

using language – words that represent exact numbers. This second way has also been called a cognitive

technology: “Rather than altering underlying representations, languages instead help their speakers

accomplish difficult or intractable cognitive tasks by providing abstractions which allow for the efficient

storage and processing of information” (Frank, Fedorenko, et al., 2008).

Interestingly, De Cruz (2011) takes this idea even further, citing not only the linguistic strategy of

using number words but also the external technologies of body parts, tallies and tokens, numerical

notation systems, and gesture as important to number sense (p. 115). She argues that “external media

form a hybrid cognitive process with the internal cognitive processes involved in number” and that this

hybrid process could conceivably alter underlying cognitive architecture:

In particular, the enduring use of external media results in structural changes in the brain: the

cognitive scaffolding we use to accurately represent cardinalities (number words, body parts,

tokens, numerical notation systems and gestures) is recruited in numerical cognition alongside the

number-sensitive neurons. For instance, body-part recognition (finger counting) is recruited for

solving numerical tasks involving Arabic digits. Natural number representation is only possible

when we supplement the internal cognitive architecture involved in numerical processing. (De

Cruz, 2011, p. 128)

The mechanism by which De Cruz imagines this could occur is long-term synaptic potentiation (2011, p.

116), or, Hebb’s Law (“neurons that fire together, wire together”):

Let us assume then that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or “trace”) tends

to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability. The assumption can be precisely stated

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as follows: When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently

takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells

such that A’s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased. (Hebb, 1949, p. 62)

To summarize, the position De Cruz takes is that the use of cognitive technologies, including language for

number words, do more than support thinking, altering the way the brain works as a result of their use.

Appendix D: Stuff I Use

School and Work PocketInformant is my go-to calendar for intense project organization. Uses GTD style project

and task planning RememberTheMilk is a to-do/tasklist system – also GTD friendly – that syncs with lots of other

systems to make getting things on the list easy The Pomodoro Technique is a powerful framework for increasing your productivity (especially

writing) by committing to brief periods of intense focus OneNote is the thing in your Microsoft Office suite that you’ve probably never clicked on. I like it

for dropping work-in-progress stuff that I don’t feel like attending to but think is useful Dropbox is the cloud storage I use for all my school stuff – as backup, and so I can access it easily

from any computer 750Words is a site that motivates you to write something every day – with reminders and

interesting stats about everything you’ve put in there. Great tool for honing your ability to just write something

Findings syncs with Kindle to not only save and organize your highlights, but to link you to other people who’ve read and highlighted the same things. Love it for connecting with other related text

PhinisheD is my community of other doc students who do joint goals setting and accountability (and just talking about life as a student). Great when you are working alone

I use Zotero instead of Endote for citation management, it’s free and does everything I need – integrates nicely with word and firefox, making organizing massive libraries of journal citations simple

I barely use ResearchGate and Academia to network and build my reputation with other scholars, but I hope they get better in the future

Self/Personal FatSecret to track my nutrition, calories, food intake – I also input my exercise Wii Fit to keep a long-term eye on my weight. I have been using mine for almost four years so I

can see how my seasonal habit changes impact my weight. It’s also useful for a simple activity break, and the simple interface keeps me from getting “hooked” into an hours long gaming session

SuperBetter is a simple game that reminds me to attend to all the aspects of health that are important, and motivates me to remember by supporters and the long-term effects of loving myself

43Things is a place where I keep really broad goals for self-improvement and occasionally journal my progress

Amazon Wishlists are awesome for keeping up with things I want for me, for home, for gift giving…they now have made them universal so that you can add anything from any site, even if it isn’t sold by Amazon. I also like the Subscribe feature for a few things that I always need and are sometimes a pain to get

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Mindmeister for planning, brainstorming, synthesizing what I know or want to know about something. Use this equally for self stuff and school stuff

Healthmonth is a way to gamify health related goals, and reminds me what I am trying to prioritize in terms of wellness

Tumblr is a blog I keep just to keep track of web stuff I want to remember and use later Delicious is how I keep up with bookmarks for its awesome tagging system for great

organization Shareaholic lets me clip and post to anything from the web I store/backup personal type stuff I want to keep up with – documents, receipts, photos,

invitations on GDrive and Evernote Home

Cozi keeps family schedules synchronized, and integrates beautifully with Flylady for chores. FlyLady has customizable calendars for keeping my house company ready at all times. Based on

the idea that doing a little bit every day and having routines makes light work of home stuff Manilla keeps all my bill paying in one place, and sends reminders so that I’m never late Regimends is good for once-in-a-while reminders of things I want to do but don’t necessarily

belong on the calendar – like calling my mom, sending a birthday card, getting my oil changed

One more thing – to boost continuity and integration across sites and tools, I have been using the same

web alias since 1990, and I use it across everyplace on the web. If you google “spratlas” you will find me,

and if you find “spratlas” you will always know it’s me.

Appendix E: Mindmeister Map of this Paper

Link to large copy: http://www.mindmeister.com/205214501/cognition