{"id":2959,"date":"2009-12-30T09:00:54","date_gmt":"2009-12-30T17:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gtdtimes.com\/?p=2959"},"modified":"2014-02-03T14:38:06","modified_gmt":"2014-02-03T22:38:06","slug":"how-much-can-the-brain-really-hold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gettingthingsdone.com\/2009\/12\/how-much-can-the-brain-really-hold\/","title":{"rendered":"How much can the brain really hold?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left\"><em>Your brain is a great place to have ideas, but a terrible place to manage them.<\/em> -David Allen<\/p>\n<p>A key principle within GTD is creating a system external to your mind&#8211;if you want the system to be seamless.\u00a0 In fact, there&#8217;s a good chance if you&#8217;re trying to hold more than about 7 things in your mind at once, you&#8217;re dropping things all the time.\u00a0 And guess what?\u00a0 Your brain doesn&#8217;t care if what you dropped was important or not important, urgent or not urgent, about buying bread on the way home from work or solving world hunger. \u00a0 If you&#8217;re trying to balance more than 7 things in there at any given time, something&#8217;s gonna drop.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Now, wait before you get riled up&#8211;this is not challenging how smart you are or how good you are at memorizing. This is <em>working <\/em>memory.\u00a0 And for most of us, there are about 7 parking spaces in working memory, plus or minus 2, at any given time.\u00a0 This phenomenon was also explored in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.davidco.com\/pdfs\/Heylighen-Vidal-GTD-Science.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Science behind GTD<\/a> article.<\/p>\n<p>NPR&#8217;s Radiolab did an interesting podcast on this topic of working memory as well.\u00a0 In fact, they cover something I hadn&#8217;t heard before, which is that when the brain is stressed at holding 7 it will make an emotional decision, not necessarily a rational one.\u00a0 You&#8217;ll choose cake over a piece of fruit under stress. Fascinating stuff, especially if you look at how this applies to what you choose to Do. [Podcast is about 20 minutes.)<\/p>\n<p>[HTML1]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Your brain is a great place to have ideas, but a terrible place to manage them. -David Allen A key principle within GTD is creating a system external to your mind&#8211;if you want the system to be seamless.\u00a0 In fact, there&#8217;s a good chance if you&#8217;re trying to hold more than about 7 things in &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/gettingthingsdone.com\/2009\/12\/how-much-can-the-brain-really-hold\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;How much can the brain really hold?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[109,213,235],"class_list":["post-2959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-productivity-tips","tag-gtd-best-practices","tag-cognitive-science","tag-psychology-and-gtd","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.8 (Yoast SEO v26.8) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>How much can the brain really hold?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"How much can the brain really hold?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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