Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life

C. COMPLETELY DISORGANIZED. In fact, I’ll be lucky if I can remember where I parked my car. That’s assuming I don’t get a text or a phone call in the next two minutes, which will completely throw me off and…what was the question again?

If you answered A, B or C, this book is for you! In Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life, we share with you the six key ways in which you can use “top-down organization” to get more done in a lot less time—and feel good about it.

By “top-down organization,” we mean brain science. As you will see, there are amazing new insights gleaned about the way our brain works to organize our thoughts, actions and emotions. Through hightech brain scans, or neuroimaging, we can now “see” the response of the brain to various situations. Here’s an exciting example of what scientists have found.

THE ORGANIZED BRAIN IN ACTION

In a 2008 study, subjects were shown a series of pleasant, unpleasant and neutral pictures while they were attempting the difficult task of keeping in check their emotional reactions. Through the use of hightech brain imaging or neuroimaging, researchers were able to observe the “thinking” regions of the subjects’ brains (including areas called the prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex) managing the “emotion”-generating parts of the brain. It’s an intriguing new study that sheds light into the brain’s own built-in system of organization and regulation—one that strives for order, one that can “tamp down” (suppress) our emotions when necessary.

As we will show you, once you can better manage your emotions, you can then begin to harmonize and focus the various “thinking” parts of your brain, opening up a whole new world before you. You’re on your way to achieving a more organized, less stressful, more productive and, in many ways, more rewarding life. And—here’s the most exciting part—the features in the brain’s magnificent self-regulation system come “preloaded” in every functioning human mind; these features can be accessed, initialized and utilized to allow you to become better organized and to feel more on top of things.

You just have to know how to do it. That’s what this book will show you.

WHAT MAKES THIS ORGANIZATION BOOK DIFFERENT?

This is not a book meant to give you tips on how to rearrange your desk, to make lists or to set up a better system for keeping track of your appointments.

This is a prescriptive book that will help you better organize your life by better organizing your mind, by making some basic changes in the way you think about and deal with your work, your colleagues, your family and yourself on a day-to-day basis. As a result, you will become better focused, more attentive, less distracted and better able to adapt to new situations and changes that, in the past, might have overwhelmed you.

Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life is organized differently than most self-help books. At its core is a unique partnership between a leading Harvard clinician-researcher and a leader in coaching for health and well-being—a collaboration that serves as a model for the future and can help make a big impact on readers like yourself. In a physician-coach partnership, a new concept in personal health, a Doctor of Medicine diagnoses the problem, explains what you need to do and plants the seeds for you to make the change. Then, a certified wellness coach guides you through implementation of the change.

Here is our team:

PAUL HAMMERNESS, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Assistant Psychiatrist, Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital; and Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, Newton Wellesley Hospital. Dr. Hammerness has been involved in research on the brain and behavior for the past 10 years, with a focus on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). He has lectured on the topic locally, nationally and internationally to other physicians, mental health professionals, educators and families. In his clinical practice, Dr. Hammerness sees on a daily basis what a clinically “disorganized” mind looks like across the age spectrum, whether it’s an eight-year-old who is struggling in school due to inattention or a forty-eight-year-old professional woman whose life-long organizational problems are now affecting her work and family life. From research, and from witnessing the struggles of people with clinically “disorganized” or distracted brains, Dr. Hammerness shares his insights into what a well-ordered brain can do.

MARGARET MOORE, aka Coach Meg, is codirector of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, and a founding advisor of the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine at Spaulding Hospital, both affiliates of Harvard Medical School, founder of a leading coach training school, Wellcoaches, and co-author of a coach training textbook. Margaret and the thousands of coaches she has trained have helped guide tens of thousands of clients through important and positive changes in their health, work and personal lives.

We mentioned the preponderance of books on getting organized that are available. Maybe there are a couple right next to this one. While many of them are good, they often use a bit of an outdated model that begins with organizing your surroundings—your office, your desk, your household—rather than organizing your mind. Dr. Hammerness and Coach Meg have a new approach based on the latest scientific literature that employs a top-down (that is, starting with your brain) organizational process—achieved by first understanding six key brain concepts and then employing specific coaching strategies to integrate each of these into your daily life, with astounding results.

These concepts refer to brain or “cognitive” traits and abilities that we all have but that most don’t recognize nor know how to utilize. Think of them as embedded features in your brain, waiting to be switched on. Dr. Hammerness will show you where the switch is located and how it works, and Coach Meg will show you how to engage it. So as with the four-wheel drive in your car, you can cruise smoothly over the roughest roads into a more organized and productive future.

These cognitive features can be learned and practiced through the innovative method of self-coaching. They will help you become better organized, less distracted, more focused—with a mind poised and ready to surf the heavy waves of distraction that come rolling in on us in today’s world.

To help you become better organized, we have organized this book into a prescriptive “one-two punch” that will enable you to understand clearly the brain science behind these cognitive skills, and then help you adapt it as part of your own make-up.

It’s science, followed by solution.

COACHING: THE ORGANIZATIONAL SECRET

That solution—how we will help you to get on top of things, to tap into your “embedded” organizational abilities, improve focus and attention and better structure your life—is one of the unique features of this book. To help you learn how to better function in this distracted world, we will use the new but highly effective psychological technique known as coaching, which coauthor Margaret Moore, aka Coach Meg, will explain further in the second chapter. Defined by some as the art and science of facilitating positive change, coaching is essentially a process for developing a road map for well-being—and becoming motivated and confident in our ability to implement it.

In this book, Coach Meg approaches the reader as she would one of her clients in practice. Think of her as your coach, a collaborator, helping guide you through the journey of positive change that is the hallmark of what successful coaching is all about. We will take the journey together, and the process begins with what it is that you’re feeling—about your emotions, about your sense of organization or lack thereof, about your life.

That’s the “one-two” prescriptive punch of this book.

Dr. Hammerness identifies and explains the organizing principles (or, as we call them, our Rules of Order) that are the hallmarks of an attentive, focused brain—one that is able to shift, adapt and function at maximum effectiveness even amidst the constant bombardment of stimulus that is today’s world.

Coach Meg shows you how to make these principles your own. She helps you help yourself and guides you step by step toward a more organized mind and, more importantly, toward becoming a better functioning person, enjoying a more productive life.

While their knowledge is rooted in neuroscience, psychology and the science of change that underlines coaching theory, their prescription for you is clear, practical, motivational and—most of all—doable.

You can improve your level of organization; you can learn to tune out the distractions in your life; you can learn to ride the waves of change in a fast-changing world.

Let’s go back to that little quiz. If you answered B or C (or even A—because maybe you’re rethinking that response as you realize you forgot to reply to the guy from sales who e-mailed you the other day), you are not alone.

By all measures, we are living in a distracted, unfocused world. Call it the flip side of the digital revolution that now gives us such fast access to unlimited amounts of information and that has opened up so many new channels of instant communication. It’s great to be able to use Facebook to find your old high school friends, right? It’s so convenient to use Google or Bing to find the study you were looking for as opposed to going to a library, isn’t it? Can you imagine not being able to send an e-mail to a colleague or a client?

Of course, when all those colleagues and clients e-mail you back and, at the same time, your boss is calling you, and your kids are texting you, and your friends are instant messaging you, well, then you might be forgiven for a bit of nostalgic longing. There was a time when you weren’t always so reachable, no matter where you were, no matter the time; and when you weren’t always being bombarded by so much stimuli, whether in the form of e-mail, texts, tweets or whatever new technology may emerge…well, any minute now. “‘Information overload’ has become almost a cliché,” writes the Institute for the Future, a think-tank in Palo Alto, California, in a 2010 report on cognitive overload. “We use the phrase half-jokingly to describe the stress associated with the onslaught of media that digital technology has unleashed on us. The sobering reality is that we ain’t seen nothing yet. The suffocation of endless incoming e-mail demanding immediate response, the twinge of guilt from falling behind on your RSS feeds, dread about a TiVo hard drive full of unwatched shows—these are all just a teaser for what’s to come. No matter how many computers surround us, collecting, aggregating and delivering information, we each have only one pair of eyes and ears, and more importantly, one mind, to deal with the data.”

One mind, indeed—but that’s where the solution lies.

THE DISTRACTION EPIDEMIC

Nowhere is information overload more evident than in the United States, where some people consider this the psychological equivalent to the obesity epidemic. We even have an unofficial president of Distracted America. No, not the one in the White House but rather in Albany, New York. There, the risks of distraction and disorganization were crystallized in a single, career-flame-out moment in the summer of 2009—a now-infamous moment that made Malcolm Smith a punch line and a punching bag, as well as a cautionary tale.

Smith, a Democrat, was the New York State Senate Majority Leader who famously fiddled with his BlackBerry, checking e-mails, while billionaire Thomas Golisano, a major independent political player in New York, was trying to talk to him. Golisano, who had made a special trip to Albany to meet with Smith, was furious. “When I travel 250 miles to make a case on how to save the state a lot of money and the guy comes into his office and starts playing with his BlackBerry, I was miffed,” he told reporters.

Golisano was so miffed that he went to the Republicans and told them he’d be happy to help unseat Smith, perhaps in the hopes of having him replaced with someone who could pay attention for a few minutes. Faster than you can say “you’ve got mail,” the state Republicans engineered a coup, Smith’s party was divided, the opposition was poised to take back control of the Senate, and the majority leader was being pilloried in the news media.

“Smith Fiddles with BlackBerry While Senate Burns!” read one headline.

“Blame it on the BlackBerry!” crowed another.

Wrong—blame it on distraction. What cost Smith dearly, and plunged one of the largest states in America into one of the worst constitutional crises in its nearly 235-year history, was (besides maybe some bad manners) a lack of focus, divided attention.

The problem isn’t limited to the United States, either. One of the biggest scandals in the British tabloids in 2010—right up there with Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson’s admission that she accepted bribes to give business officials access to her influential ex-husband—involved a union official who, during emergency meeting negotiations with British Airway officials hoping to avoid a strike, sent Twitter messages—some at the rate of three or four an hour. When airline officials found out he was tweeting while they were supposed to be talking, they were furious; the negotiations broke down and the strike was on, disrupting travel plans for thousands of people on one of the world’s biggest airlines. “Twitter Blamed for Wrecking British Airway Peace Talks,” screamed London’s Daily Telegraph on its front page. Again, the wrong culprit: Twitter is not to blame. Rather, it’s a brain unable to stay focused even in a critical meeting that demonstrates an inability to put down a handheld device and look another human in the eye.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.