Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life (2 page)

Still, at least, Malcolm Smith and the British union official weren't behind the wheel of a car. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at least 25 percent of all auto crashes involve some sort of driver distraction—and there are those who believe this number is steadily climbing as those distractions multiply with the addition of each new mobile communications device, every cell phone feature, every new satellite radio station, every new sign on the road.

But are the signs, the phones and the stations themselves really the problem? Once again, no.

The problem is that we can't deal with them. The problem is that we can't focus. The problem is that we're overwhelmed and disorganized, and the net effect of the Distraction Crisis can be felt in the workplace, at home and in our individual health.

Some other distressing distraction-related statistics:

• Forty-three percent of Americans categorize themselves as disorganized, and 21 percent have missed vital work deadlines. Nearly half say disorganization causes them to work late at least two times each week.
  ¹
  
• A lack of time management and discipline while working toward [financial] planners' professional goals contributes to 63 percent of those surveyed facing obstacles regarding their health. There is a direct correlation between too much stress, deteriorating health and poor practice management.
  ²
  
• Forty-eight percent of Americans feel that their lives have become more stressful in the past five years. About one-half of Americans say that stress has a negative impact on both their
  personal and professional lives. About one-third (31 percent) of employed adults have difficulty managing work and family responsibilities. And over one third (35 percent) cite jobs interfering with their family or personal time as a significant source of stress.
  ³
  
• In a Gallup poll, 80 percent of workers said they feel stress on the job, nearly half said they need help in learning how to manage stress and 42 percent said their coworkers need help coping with stress. Job stress can lead to several problems, including illness and injury for employees, as well as higher insurance costs and lost productivity for employers.
  ⁴
  
• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 80 percent of our medical expenditures are now stress-related.
  ⁵
  
• Seventy percent of employees work beyond scheduled time and on weekends; more than half cited “self-imposed pressure” as the reason.
  ⁶
  

One specific category of disorganization or, to be precise, distraction has come to symbolize an era of divided attention: distracted driving. The Department of Transportation (DOT) has a special website dedicated to this problem (distraction.gov), in which readers are reminded about the perils of distracted driving, which is often thought of as just texting but also includes driving while talking on a cell phone, watching a video, reading a map or other behaviors that involve taking your eyes off the road or away from the safe operation of your vehicle.

The scope, effects and consequences of distracted driving are sobering, according to statistics compiled by DOT:

• Using a cell phone while driving, whether it's hand-held or hands-free, delays a driver's reactions as much as having a blood alcohol concentration at the legal limit of .08 percent.
  ⁷
  
• Driving while using a cell phone reduces the amount of brain activity associated with driving by 37 percent.
  ⁸
  
• Nearly six thousand people died in 2008 in crashes involving a distracted driver and more than half a million were injured.
  ⁹
  
• The younger, inexperienced drivers under twenty years old have the highest proportion of distraction-related fatal crashes.
  
• Drivers who use hand-held devices are four times as likely to get into crashes serious enough to injure themselves.
  ¹⁰
  

Lest we assume, as many seem to do, that distracted driving is purely a problem of the young; teenagers and young adults who are checking their friends' Facebook status while doing ninety miles per hour on the interstate, think again: almost half of adults who send text messages have sent them while driving, according to a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center (the same study found that about one-third of sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds admitted that they had done the same). According to distraction.gov, half of all people in the United States admit to cell phone use while driving; one in every seven admit to sending cell phone text messages while driving. These are also folks who should know better: 65 percent of drivers with a higher education text or talk while driving.

All in all, the distracted driving crisis—part of that larger Distraction Epidemic—seems to some a part of an even greater problem, suggesting that the human race has reached a point of information overload—or at least a point where we feel so overwhelmed by the demands of our lives that we would risk our lives for one more text or phone call. In 2010,
The New York Times
published a series of articles about the supposedly dire effects of technology on our brain. In a
USA TODAY
story on the issue, one researcher concluded gloomily that “people are multi-tasking probably beyond our cognitive limits.”

A DISTRACTED FACT OF LIFE?

Some say there's little that can be done about all of this. The pace of life is increasing and the distractions multiplying. Get used to it. You're powerless. To which we say, baloney! While we may not be able to slow down technological change or the speed with which life unfolds around us—and in some cases, why would we want to?—we very definitely can find a way to better manage ourselves, in order to not only deal with change and complexity but also thrive amidst it. This book is designed to show you how.

Remember: for every driver driven to distraction and for every stressed-out person who has lost an assignment, a job or a vital piece of information because he or she was disorganized and distracted, there are people on the opposite end of the spectrum. These are individuals who know how to use their brain's abilities to organize their lives, to stay focused on the tasks at hand and to enjoy greater productivity—and pleasure!—at work and at home.

Some of them you probably know: athletes such as Derek Jeter or Tom Brady, famous for their ability to block out distraction and focus on the little white ball or the white line on the field ahead, public servants such as General David Petraeus, making life-and-death decisions in the midst of a foreign country exploding in religious civil war; Steve Jobs, a visionary who manages one of the world's largest and most influential corporations; Hillary Clinton, patiently mastering the minutiae and intricacies of a seemingly intractable conflict as she engages Palestinians and Israelis at the bargaining table. And the ranks of the super-organized are not limited to government, big business or the pressure cooker of professional sports: how about J.K. Rowling, whose disciplined imagination enabled her to create the Harry Potter world? (Imagine how organized she had to
be to keep track of, much less create, the Hogwarts faculty and their complex histories.)

There are numerous examples of famous people whose achievements lie, at least to some degree, in their ability to stay calm, focused and organized, especially in the midst of crisis. There are many other very successful people whose names might not make headlines but who have, through both innate and learned skills, managed to harness their cognitive powers in a way that makes them extraordinarily productive, both on the job and at home.

Let's meet two of them.

ORGANIZED MINDS AT WORK AND PLAY

By 8:30 am most mornings, Rob Shmerling has already exercised for an hour, has caught up on world and national news, and is well into responding to his e-mails.

For two hours, he exchanges messages with colleagues and scours various websites for the latest medical news. Dr. Shmerling is a physician and the clinical chief of the division of rheumatology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

It's a big administrative job at one of the country's leading hospitals—but it's not all that he does. Shmerling, fifty-four, also writes and does research—he has authored a total of forty-one journal articles, book chapters or reviews, as well as numerous web stories for nonexpert audiences. He also teaches and mentors medical students and residents. He is a husband and a father of two daughters. He volunteers at a women's shelter once a week. He and his wife belong to a book club (Janice Y.K. Lee's
The Piano Teacher
and Kathryn Stockett's
The Help
are two recent novels they've enjoyed). He also “hacks away” at the piano, is an
amateur photographer and, on weekends, enjoys long bike rides in the Massachusetts countryside.

Oh, and he washes and folds socks, too.

“I'm the laundry guy,” he says proudly. “Everybody in our house has their job, and that one's mine.”

Actually it's one of many jobs, as you can see.

How does Shmerling cram it all into one day, one week, one
life,
and make it look easy?

He admits that he is a creature of habit and was always fairly structured. “I can recall organizing the crayons by color in those sixty-four-Crayola packs as a little kid,” he says with a laugh. But, he's quick to add, a lot of the skills that help keep him organized he learned because he
had
to. And he's still learning. “I've gotten better at ignoring things,” he said. For example, “We have this e-mail system where a quick preview of the e-mail comes up on your screen, and at first it was distracting. Now I've gotten better at sticking with the matter at hand. If it's a really important message, I can attend to it, but I don't let them distract me as they pop up.”

In the hospital, things come at Dr. Shmerling fast and furious. A patient's condition might change. An administrative problem may arise. A resident or a nurse or a colleague may need an immediate answer. And sometimes the decisions really are a matter of life and death. “I used to get more easily flustered when several things were coming at me,” he says. “Now I've learned how to deal with it. Now I can shift pretty quickly from one thing to another and prioritize.”

The problems that do come up are often complex ones—what course of action to prescribe to someone with arthritis, lupus or osteoporosis; dealing with patient complaints or concerns; helping to mediate or referee internal problems that arise, whether with staff or fellow physicians. He knows how to act, but he also knows how to think
before
he acts.
“I try to imagine the range of options for a given situation and figure out fairly quickly if this is something I've seen before,” he explains. “If not, if it's something better done by someone else, or if I'm going to need someone else's help solving this, I mentally file it away, putting it aside for later.”

Putting his attention on and pulling it off, deftly and smoothly, as the need arises—that's a sign, as we'll see, of an organized mind. Dr. Shmerling does it with a range of tools, some high-tech, some not. “If I have to jump off something, I'll bookmark what I was working on,” he says. “Either with a mental or actual Post-it note so I can return to the right place quickly later on.” He also has a nice trick for keeping track of his reading (and in his job, he does a lot of it—reports, memos, articles). If he's reading a Word document on the computer, “I'll yellow-highlight the line I'm on so I can get right back to the page and the line I was on, without wasting time scanning through the document, going ‘where was I?'”

Shmerling uses a PalmPilot to keep track of appointments and to have other important information at a glance when he needs it, even though, he admits, “I'm regularly laughed at for using a device so ancient.” And while you might think someone being held up as an exemplar of efficient organization would have an empty, ordered desk at the end of each day, it's not the case. Dr. Shmerling's offices at home and at the hospital are filled with stacks of books and papers—but, he says, “While it might not look organized to you, I know exactly where everything is.”

The efficiency allows him some simple pleasures during the work day. People who feel overworked often claim they have no time to read anything but e-mails or work-related documents. Shmerling not only finds time to read
The Boston Globe
every morning online, he spends an extra few minutes doing the popular Sudoku numbers puzzle; and is a
diligent fan of
Doonesbury
and
Dilbert
(“Another efficient office guy!” he jokes). Indeed, while he is a hard-working professional and leads a busy life, Dr. Shmerling is not some obsessed workaholic, constantly looking to squeeze another hour out of his life to devote to work. He likes to have fun, he likes to laugh, he has a rich and satisfying personal life and, oh yes, some of that time he manages to save by being efficient and organized, he likes to waste.

Here's an example: “I like to stop sometimes on my way to work and have Starbucks. If I was really trying to be a time management-efficiency nut, I could save a few minutes by making the coffee at home or grabbing it at the hospital cafeteria. But I like stopping at the coffee shop. It makes the ride more pleasant. Nothing wrong with a little down time.”

A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Shmerling is obviously a smart guy. But he is quick to point out that his academic pedigree has nothing whatsoever to do with his ability to be efficient. “There's nothing I learned at Harvard or anywhere else specifically that taught me any of this,” he says. “None of it requires any particular advanced degree. The measures I take to keep organized could certainly be adopted by others.”