elisabeth's blog

Focus

Brains. Information management. PDAs. Moleskines. Getting things done. Learning new things. Where do these ideas converge? Today that's on focus. Kathy Sierra talks about focus in her post, You 2.0 — the idea is that if you want to learn something and learn it well, especially when you're older and you probably already have a job and a million other things to do each day, youreally need to focus.

How can you do that when your brain is filled with all the things you have to get done that day? Well, David Allen of Getting Things Done says you should make lists. And have inboxes that you actually use, and keep organized. So you always know what you're supposed to do next to complete any task. The idea here is to keep things OUT of your head, so you have more room to learn new things.

So, how do geeks make lists and organize ideas and thoughts? Well we've already mentioned a few things here, some high-tech and some low-tech. I'd like to add a few more that work for me, and also point you to a terrific web page I found tonight that lists a ton of great software solutions for organizing thoughts.

One of the first ways I extended my brain was with a wiki. Yeah I know, it sounds silly, but after using the wiki for a while, I really did think of it as a brain extension. I knew that if I put something in the wiki, and was really disciplined about keeping that wiki organized, I could find it later, so I wouldn't have to remember it. Wikis work so well for me, that I've used them ever since for variety of different reasons, but number one on my list is always as a memory aid. I run my own personal wiki at home, and I don't think I could function without it. I put to do lists, drafts of articles, links to web pages I want to remember, etc. etc. (Side note: if you're looking to be distracted for days on end, check out the Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia that rivals (betters?) any encyclopedia you've ever seen. I've lost days exploring the Wikipedia and I've barely made a dent.)

I did own a PDA for a while (actually more than one over the years); the one I used the most was my Palm. Primarily a brain extension and a news reader (I downloaded news articles before leaving for work and read them on the way in) as well as a duplicate of my address book. But after a while I got tired of carrying the thing around and as someone else pointed out, there's only so many gadgets one can carry around without feeling weighed down and looking kind of stupid.

On the list of really cool things that happened recently was discovering mind maps. Mind maps are awesome — they are lists or outlines, only they are drawn and they're not in any particular order (until you're done with them) so you can free associate from one idea to another, or from one idea to a completely new idea. And because you are drawing and you're not imposing a top-down, start to finish process on your idea generation, you are using both sides of your brain when you mind map. This doesn't happen when you're writing a traditional outline: then it's a
strictly logical, left-brain activity.

Two of the best books I've read about mind maps are by Tony Buzan: Head First: 10 Ways to Tap into Your Natural Genius (great name, huh?!) and The Mind Map Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain's Untapped Potential. There's quite a few mind map making software programs out there; you'll find some of them listed on this web page I linked to above. Personally, I've been using FreeMind: it works great, it's open source, it's free!, and it's written in Java. What more could you ask for? But, definitely try making mind maps on paper. Pull out those colored pencils (or borrow your kid's) and start drawing ideas. It really works and it's a ton of fun. Check out the mind map gallery at mind-map.com for ideas.

One last idea for organizing ideas: How to use Gmail as your second brain. Basically an electronic inbox that should be big enough for lots of ideas, lots of things you have to remember. Google was the first company to offer 1 gigabyte of (free!) storage space for email accounts; other companies are starting to follow. I use gmail, not as a brain extension yet (I'm still using my Wiki for that) but it's definitely nice to know that if I need to store an email (whether it's from myself or someone else) "out there" permanently (unless of course Google goes out of business or their data center gets wiped out) I can always send it to my gmail acccount. And gmail really does have some nice filters and uses colors, threading and collapse/expand effectively to make it easy for me to organize emails and find things. Kind of like having those colored tab things for your paper organizer in email.

Ok, so those are some ways to get those ideas filling up your brain, out of your brain and down on paper (or into bits). But what about other ways that you can help yourself focus? How are you going to focus when you have email (and spam) to attend to, IM chat requests popping up, your cellphone is ringing, your blackberry is buzzing... does it ever stop? This terrific article at the Seattle Times called life, interrupted talks a lot about all the distractions in our lives these days. The authors argue, and I agree, that it's not the fault of technology that we're so distracted, it's that we let the tools and, yes the benefits, of technology distract us. We have to learn that it's a choice and we can (yes, I'm actually going to type this) "just say no!"

Cliches aside, technologies bring us a ton of rewards. I can buy just about anything I want without getting my lazy butt out of the chair. That's a benefit to me (primarily because I despise real-world shopping). I can chat with friends whenever I want just by popping open an IM window, or ringing them up using an internet "phone" call. There's so many ways I can get the news, chat with my friends, go shopping, do my taxes, etc. etc., that I'm overwhelmed. A quote from the article:

"We have so many options, reward centers that we never had before," says John Ratey, who teaches at Harvard and is a psychiatrist specializing in attention deficit disorder.
"I think that's why we're seeing more of this. There are more demands on our attention and less training for us to stop and take it all in. We seem to be amazing ourselves to death."

I love that: We seem to be amazing ourselves to death.

There's so much to be amazed at we can never really sit down and focus on something long enough to really learn it. When we're distracted with too much to do, and not enough time to do it in, we get stressed, and this doesn't help either — stressed people are much less creative than happy, relaxed people. And when you're multi-tasking, things get really bad:

David Meyer, who heads the University of Michigan's Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory, has tested this practice ("task-switching") and says the results are clear: Constant nibbling from one task to another both slows and dumbs you down. It also is fatiguing and potentially harmful in terms of long-term health, and the cost of that split second you lose when you're talking on the phone and a traffic obstacle arises.

To really learn something, we need to focus on that one thing. And to focus, we're going to have to learn to turn everything else off (or at least, tune it out). In addition, as the article argues, perhaps there are some human interaction enhancements we can make to all these technology tools that will help us focus (getting rid of popups and spyware would be a good start...). As we already know, there are ways to make it easier to focus when you're reading a book — that's the kind of stuff we put into Head First books.


One of the things that struck me as I find more and more websites devoted to managing and organizing thoughts, whether that's in a moleskine, a PDA, or a Wiki, is that more and more people are devoting brain cycles to figuring out how to do this type of thing effectively. Our information-overload-21st-century lifestyle demands it, and if someone comes up with the perfect solution to organize my life, that's great.

However, along with great organizational skills we also need to learn how to make the most of the brain we have, and one of those ways is to learn to focus effectively. As I've discussed before, one of the best ways to focus is to find an activity so engaging that you get into the flow state, but this may happen primarily when you're already pretty good at something. What about those beginning stages when you're just starting to learn, and it's kind of tricky and it's making you think really hard and, oh it's just easier to put down the book and check your email? Well, if every single new thing we wanted to learn had a manual written by people who wanted to create passionate users for their product (or whatever it is you're learning) then it would be a lot easier on us users! If I want to learn Spanish, yikes that is hard. At least it seems hard when I'm just using a text book. But if I have a fun DVD to go along with it, with interesting characters, lots of visuals and audio feedback, then hey, that makes learning Spanish a lot more fun, which in turn, makes it a lot easier for me to focus.

So for all us You 2.0 wannabes, let's find cool things to learn where the people who are teaching them to us (whether that's in a book, or a piece of software, or in person) are really passionate about us — then we'll be more passionate about what we're trying to learn, and we'll be able to focus and learn it a lot faster!

Labels: brain, focus, learning, wiki