Older Bolder Foundations: Unclutter Your Brain and Lower Stress

One of the most indelible learning moments for me during my medical school years happened during a lecture by a charismatic, stand-up-comedian-level-funny, uber-intelligent and articulate child psychiatrist (whose name unfortunately escapes me as a pen this) as he taught us basic concepts about the neurobiology and neurophysiology of memory.

[He happened to be an enormous man, claiming he weighed “well north of 300 pounds”, had a precocious three year old child he affectionately referred to as “the monster”, and to our loss, was the only African-American lecturer we enjoyed that entire term.]

Your Brain, Short Term Memory, and the Seven Marbles

His premise during this particular series of lectures was that as humans at this stage of historical development, most us of can grasp no more than seven “items” in our active short term memory.

He likened the concept functionally to having a cardboard toilet paper tube positioned between our ears, long enough and of sufficient diameter to hold seven fairly large marbles, each marble representing a nugget of information that is actively stored in our short term memory.

Add another marble (nugget of short term information to remember) into one end, and yet another marble on the other end is pushed from the tube, and unless effectively captured and stored away, just might be lost forever.

He went on to walk us through the fairly complex theories underlying the conversion of short term brain storage to longer term or permanent brain storage, but offered we budding medical students a challenge, a challenge that remains pertinent to this day for just about everyone walking the planet.

The challenge (he riffed on the Mission Impossible theme of “your challenge should you decide to accept it”): continually sort through the huge amount of noise we encounter during a given day or week, pick out the items/nuggets/thoughts/concepts worthy of keeping, and “file” them in either short or long term memory so that we can act upon them intentionally, at the right time, and in the right place.

Far easier said than done; and this was back in the day before email, smart phones (hey, it was the early 80s so there weren’t even any cell phones on hand), PDAs, or really even personal computers.

Chasing Those Marbles and Other Exercises in Futility

As many of you have, I spent parts of the next twenty years utilizing some of the best and most accepted tools of the day chasing those marbles, valiantly trying not to lose any despite what seemed to be an increasingly complex and faster moving world.

I’ve personally been at various times a very devoted list maker, user of various organizers modeled along the classic Day Timer (in fact, there’s one sitting on a nearby office shelf right now), various PDA devices, and (allegedly) smarter phones with bells and whistles designed to make life organization a snap.

As many of you, I’ve found some of these systems to be quite useful but none fully accomplished a critical primary objective – that being a system to capture all those thoughts and ideas, some of which are damned fleeting, popping up and vanishing in a flash, to be dealt with at a later (more expedient or appropriate) time.

Finally, I found that running a very busy spine-focused medical practice and two other family businesses at the same time was simply beginning to overwhelm my abilities to track “all the marbles”, and often those marbles were rattling around in my head at night, interfering with rest and recovery, and occasionally an important marble would fall out, roll away, and be lost forever (or at least until some deadline popped up I’d forgotten about…).

It doesn’t matter what stage of life you’re in, what you do for a living, what your educational background is, or whether you’re a young parent of a growing family (probably the hardest job in the world by the way) or the CEO of a multinational conglomerate – at some point you’ve had too many marbles banging around in your head too.

Collect Those Marbles, Get Them Organized, and Manage Your Stress

Ironically it wasn’t until over 20 years later than two different mentors, at pretty much the same time, introduced me to a concept that has allowed me (along with thousands of others) to collect those marbles, get them more or less organized, and even more importantly, decide which ones need attention now and which can wait until later.

To really work, something like this must have a provision to allow you to capture everything floating around in your head, on your desk (whether you a have a literal or digital inbox), in your email queue, and/or wherever else you happen to have items piling up that need your attention.

There are several approaches out there that provide the structure to accomplish this somewhat tall order, and they’re quite good at getting it done.

My mentors happened to walk me through the concepts espoused by David Allen of Getting Things Done fame; if you’ve not found a structure to use that allows you to clear your head (or desk, or inbox, etc), organize and prioritize the (likely) big list, and then assign a task or action (prioritized of course) to start actually getting done what needs to get done – then give it a look. (One thing I love about GTD is it’s not built around a software program you need to buy, and can be implemented using a wide variety of approaches. I happen to use a very good multi-platform software tool designed by a third party – OmniFocus – but it’s not essential to the process.)

The key point is this: life is busy, and there’s a lot of noise in terms of distractions and demands on your time. If you don’t have the best tools, and (of course) choose to use them, you’ll find yourself distracted, discouraged, unproductive, and unfocused. Collect those marbles, prioritize and sort the actions they demand, and you’ll find yourself energized, sleeping better, and living with more intention and focus.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to find the system that works for you.

More to come, and keep chasing those marbles.