How to get organized and stay focused in a modern world?

Getting organized used to be a whole lot easier.

As nomadic hunter-gatherers, we only had to keep track of the things we could carry because that was all we owned. As members of a tribe of extended family members, we could lean upon others for assistance with day-to-day tasks and trust they had equal skin in the game. We didn’t have to shoulder everything ourselves, and the responsibilities necessary for survival were simpler. The accessible world was much smaller, the breadth of available knowledge limited by location. You knew all about the lives and goings-on of your immediate community members and which plants were edible in a 20-mile radius and where to get water and when the antelope grazed and the leopard prowled. But what happened 50 miles away was a total mystery, and a thousand miles away might well have been infinitely vast. Important info was recorded through oral traditions—stories and songs. Anecdote and analogy and parable carry weight to this day because for millennia, they were all we had to go on.

Then agriculture happened, followed by urbanization and markets and trade routes and, suddenly, we had a lot more information to process. So we created a system for organizing and externalizing information: writing. Physical writing soon gave way to telecommunication traveling along physical wires and, later, invisible data streams shooting and bouncing across the atmosphere.

Today, we are roving islands of responsibilities, duties, obligations, tasks, schedules, and information hyperconsumers. We have more “freedom” and everything’s amazing and there’s an app for that and that and that. But that just means we have more things to squeeze in and organize our lives around. It used to be if you wanted to go to Hawaii, you told a travel agent and they booked the plane, the hotel, and the rental car. Now we have the freedom to hunt for the best deal ourselves and travel-hack our way into credit rewards for extra miles and scour AirBNB for an amazing pad on the beach. There are benefits, clearly. We have more opportunities and more options, but we’re busier than ever before with fewer people to help shoulder the load. And unless you turn off notifications, your phone’s always alerting you to the existence of something else to cram into your brain.

That’s the rub: on top of the physical world we’ve laid an entirely novel world of digital information that demands even more of our attention. All those tweets, status updates, texts, emails, and snapchats need to be organized alongside our houses, spouses, closets, jobs, bills, cars, and yards. How can our pre-industrial brains stay organized and focus on the things that matter? Here are a few tips to help.

View source here: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/how-to-get-organized-and-stay-focused-in-a-modern-world/