9

EVERYTHING ELSE

The Power of the Junk Drawer

To many people, being organized means “a place for everything and everything in its place.” This is an important principle for organizing files, tools, objects in the home and office, and so on. But it’s equally important for our organizational systems and infrastructure to allow for fuzzy categories, for things that fall through the cracks—the miscellaneous folder in your filing system, the junk drawer in your kitchen. As Doug Merrill says, organization gives us the freedom to be a bit disorganized. A typical American kitchen junk drawer holds pens, matches, slips of paper, maybe a hammer, chopsticks, a tape measure, picture hooks. There are certain design constraints at work that legitimize a catchall drawer: You’re not going to redesign the kitchen just to have a small drawer or cubby for chopsticks and another for matches. The junk drawer is a place where things collect until you have time to organize them, or because there is no better place for them. Sometimes what looks like a mess may not have to be physically reorganized at all, if you can slow down and observe the organization in the thicket of details.

As I’ve emphasized throughout this book, the most fundamental principle of organization, the one that is most critical to keeping us from forgetting or losing things, is this: Shift the burden of organizing from our brains to the external world. If we can take some or all of the process out of our brains and put it into the physical world, we are less likely to make mistakes. But the organized mind enables you to do much more than merely avoid mistakes. It enables you to do things and go places you might not otherwise imagine. Externalizing information doesn’t always involve writing it down or encoding it in some external medium. Often it has already been done for you. You just have to know how to read the signs.

Take the numbering of the U.S. Interstate Highway System. On the surface, it may look like a mess, but in fact it’s a hightly organized system. It was initiated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and construction began in 1956. Today, it comprises nearly 50,000 miles of roadway. The numbering of interstate highways follows a set of simple rules. If you know the rules, it is easier to figure out where you are (and harder to get lost) because the rules off-load information from your memory and put it into a system that is out-there-in-the-world. In other words, you don’t need to memorize a set of seemingly arbitrary facts such as Highway 5 runs north-south or Highway 20 runs east-west in the southern part of the country. Instead, you learn a set of rules that applies to all the numbers, and then the highway numbers themselves tell you how they run:

  1. One- and two-digit highway numbers less than 100 identify major routes (e.g., 1, 5, 70, 93) that cross state lines.
  2. Even numbers are east-west routes, odd numbers are north-south.
  3. Even numbers increase as they move from south to north; odd numbers increase as they move from west to east.
  4. Route numbers that are multiples of 5 are major arteries that extend over long distances. For example, I-5 is the westernmost major artery carrying north-south traffic between Canada and Mexico; I-95 is the easternmost major artery carrying north-south traffic between Canada and Florida. I-10 is the southernmost major artery carrying west-east traffic from California to Florida, and I-90 is the northernmost, carrying west-east traffic from Washington State to New York State.
  5. Three-digit numbers identify loops, or auxiliary, supplementary routes in or around a city. If the first digit is even, it is a route through or around a city that breaks off of and eventually rejoins the main route. If the first digit is odd, it is a spur into or out of a city and does not rejoin the main route (if you’re afraid of getting lost, the auxiliary highways with an even-numbered first digit are thus always a safer bet). Generally, the second and third digits refer to the principal interstate served by the three-digit route. For example, if you are in Northern California and you find yourself on something called I-580, you can deduce the following:

It is a supplement to route I-80.

It is running east-west (even number).

It is a spur into the city (first digit odd) and will not rejoin route I-80.

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In New York State, I-87 is a principal north-south highway. It’s not a multiple of 5, so it is not considered a major route like the nearby parallel highway I-95. Up near Albany, I-87 joins I-787, which splits off to bring drivers right into the city. The system of rules is slightly difficult to memorize, but it is logical and structured, and far easier to memorize than the direction and nature of all the different highways in the country.

The periodic table of the elements makes apparent the relationships and certain regularities latent in the world that might otherwise be missed. From left to right, elements are presented in increasing order of their atomic number (the number of protons in the nucleus). Elements with the same core or nuclear charge, as determined by the number of electrons in the outermost shell, appear in the same column and have similar properties; moving from top to bottom, the number of electron shells increases. Moving from left to right along a row, each element adds one proton and one electron, and becomes less metallic. Elements with similar physical properties tend to be grouped together, with metals in the lower left and nonmetals in the upper right; elements with intermediate properties (such as semiconductors) fall between them.

One of the unanticipated and exciting consequences of constructing the periodic table was that, as scientists placed elements within this structure, they discovered gaps in the chart where they assumed elements should go—elements with one more proton than the one to the left of it and one less than the one to the right of it—but no known elements fit that description. This led scientists to search for the missing elements, and in every case, they found them, either in nature or through laboratory synthesis.

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The elegance of the periodic table is difficult to duplicate but worth trying, even in rather mundane settings. A machine shop that organizes taps and dies, or nuts and bolts, along two dimensions of length and width can easily find gaps in the collection where items are missing. The systematic organization also makes it easy to notice misfiled items.

The fundamental principle of externalizing information applies universally. Airline pilots formerly had two controls that looked strikingly similar but performed different functions for the flaps and the landing gear. After a series of accidents, human-factors engineers came up with the idea of externalizing the information about the actions of those controls: The flap control was made to look like a miniature flap, and the landing gear control was made into a round wheel, resembling the landing gear. Rather than the pilots having to rely on their memories of which control was where, the control itself reminded them of what it was for, and pilots made fewer errors as a result.

But what happens when you can’t externalize the information—for example, when meeting new people? Surely there’s a way to remember their names better. It happens to all of us: You meet someone, you get into a truly interesting conversation, make lots of eye contact, exchange some personal confidences, only to realize you’ve forgotten their name. Now it’s too embarrassing to ask, so you wander off sheepishly, not sure what to do next.

Why is it so difficult? Because of the way memory works: We encode new information only if we pay attention to it, and we aren’t always paying attention at the moment we’re introduced. In that instant of meeting a new person, many of us become preoccupied with the impression we’re making on them—we think about how we’re dressed or whether our breath stinks, or we try to read their body language to see how they’re sizing us up. This makes encoding any new information, such as a name, impossible. And for the self-assured, task-oriented person meeting someone new, thoughts may turn to “Who is this person, what important information might I glean from this conversation?” and a whole internal dialogue is off to the races, not paying attention to that brief 500 milliseconds when the name is said once.

To remember a new name, you need to allow yourself time for encoding; five seconds or so is usually about right. Rehearse the name silently to yourself over and over. While you’re doing that, look at the person’s face, and concentrate on associating the name to the face. Remember, you’ve (probably) heard the name before, so you’re not having to learn a new name, you just need to associate a familiar name with a new face. If you’re lucky, the person’s face will remind you of someone else you know with that name. If not the whole face, maybe a feature will. Maybe this new Gary you’re meeting has eyes like another friend Gary, or this new Alyssa has the same high cheekbones of your high school friend Alyssa. If you can’t make an associative connection like these, try to superimpose someone you know with that name on the current person’s face, creating a chimera. This will help it become memorable.

What if the person says his name and then goes silent? Five seconds is a lot of dead air hanging out there. If that happens, ask your new acquaintance a question about where he’s from or what he does—but you’re not really interested in paying attention to that; you’re giving yourself that buffer to encode his name (don’t worry, the ancillary information usually gets encoded, too).

If you meet someone who has a name you’ve never heard, it’s only slightly more complicated. The encoding time is the key here. Ask her to spell the name and then spell it back to her, and say the name again back to her. During this whole exchange, you’re repeating the name to yourself, and gaining valuable rehearsal time. Simultaneously, try to create in your mind a vivid picture of something that reminds you of the name and imagine the person in that picture. For example, if you meet a man named Adiel (pronounced “a deal”), you might think of that old television game show Let’s Make a Deal. If you picture Adiel as a contestant on the game show during your five seconds of encoding (saying “Adiel, Adiel, Adiel, Adiel, Adiel” to yourself while picturing the stage), it will be easier to remember him later. If you meet someone named Ye-Sho, you might picture an old English street corner act, with your new acquaintance holding a sign that reads YE OLDE SHOW. These gimmicky techniques work. The more absurd or distinctive the mental image you create, the more memorable will be the name. To further instantiate the name, once you’ve learned it, use it! If you’re at a party, you can introduce your new acquaintance to others, giving you more opportunities to practice the name. Or start a sentence with it: “Courtney—let me ask you this . . .”

Externalizing information organizes the mind and allows it to be more creative. The history of science and culture is filled with stories of how many of the greatest scientific and artistic discoveries occurred while the creator was not thinking about what he was working on, not consciously anyway—the daydreaming mode solved the problem for him, and the answer appeared suddenly as a stroke of insight. John Lennon recalled in an interview how he wrote “Nowhere Man.” After working five hours trying to come up with something, he gave up. “Then, ‘Nowhere Man’ came, words and music, the whole damn thing as I lay down.” James Watson uncovered the structure of DNA, and Elias Howe the automatic sewing machine, in their dreams. Salvador Dali, Paul McCartney, and Billy Joel created some of their most loved works from dreams. Mozart’s, Einstein’s, and Wordsworth’s own descriptions of their creative process emphasize the role of the daydreaming mode in supporting their insights. The three books of Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche were composed in three separate ten-day bursts of inspiration. As Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Marilynne Robinson observes:

Every writer wonders where fictional ideas come from. The best of them often appear very abruptly after a period of imaginative drought. And, mysteriously, they really are good ideas, much superior to the contrivances of conscious invention.

Many creative artists and scientists report that they don’t know where their best ideas came from and that they feel like mere copyists, transcribing the idea. When Haydn heard the first public performance of his oratorio The Creation, he reportedly burst into tears and cried, “I have not written this.” In the see-saw of attention, Western culture overvalues the central executive mode, and undervalues the daydreaming mode. The central executive approach to problem solving is often diagnostic, analytic, and impatient, whereas the daydreaming approach is playful, intuitive, and relaxed.

Browsing and Serendipity

Microsoft senior research fellow Malcolm Slaney and Cambridge University professor Jason Rentfrow advocated (in Chapter 7) dispensing with physical copies of documents and mail, and all the filing, sorting, and locating that they entail. Computer-based digital archives are more efficient in terms of storage space, and generally quicker in terms of retrieval.

But many of us still find something soothing and satisfying about handling physical objects. Memory is multidimensional, and our memories for objects are based on multiple attributes. Think back to your experience with file folders, the physical kind. You might have had an old beat-up one that didn’t look like the others and that—quite apart from what was inside it or written on it—evoked your memories of what was in it. Physical objects tend to look different from one another in a way that computer files don’t. All bits are created equal. The same 0s and 1s on your computer that render junk mail also render the sublime beauty of Mahler’s fifth symphony, Monet’s Water Lilies, or a video of a Boston terrier wearing reindeer antlers. There is nothing in the medium itself that carries a clue to the message. So much so that if you looked at the digital representation of any of these—or this paragraph, for example—you would not even know that those zeros and ones were representing images rather than text or music. Information has thus become separated from meaning.

We don’t have a system in the computer world that mimics the satisfying real-world experience that worked so well for us. More than ten years ago, software applications allowed people to personalize their file and folder icons, but the idea never really caught on, probably because the lack of a physical folder object, with all its nuanced variations, made all the computer icons still look too heterogeneous or just plain silly. This is one of the objections many older people have to MP3 files—they all look alike. There is nothing to distinguish them other than their names. LPs and CDs had the additional cue of color and size to help remind us what was inside. Apple introduced Album Art to help, but many people feel it’s not the same as holding a physical object. The procedural and cognitive trade-off at stake concerns searchability (with digital files) versus the viscerally and aesthetically satisfying act of employing the kinds of visual and tactile cues our species evolved to use. Technology writer Nicholas Carr writes, “The medium does matter. As a technology, a book focuses our attention, isolates us from the myriad distractions that fill our everyday lives. A networked computer does precisely the opposite.” Faster is not always desirable, and going straight to what you want is not always better.

There is a peculiar irony in all of this: Small libraries are far more useful than large ones. The Library of Congress may have one copy of every book ever published, but it is very unlikely that you will serendipitously find a book you did not know about and that will delight you. There is just too much there. A small library, carefully curated and tended by a librarian, will have made some deliberate choices about what books to include. When you reach for a copy of one book, you’ll see books adjacent on the shelf that may spark your interest, or you may find your eye caught by a title in a completely separate, unrelated section of the library and start browsing there. No one browses the Library of Congress—it is too massive, too complete. As Augustus De Morgan said of the libraries at the British Museum, if a work is wanted, “it can be asked for; but to be wanted, it must be known.” And what chance has any single work to be known to be there? Minuscule. Historian James Gleick notes, “too much information, and so much of it lost.”

Many people today report that they discovered some of their favorite music and books by browsing the (limited) collections of friends. If instead you were to spin the roulette wheel of the great jukebox in the sky to randomly choose a song or book from the millions that exist in the cloud, it’s unlikely you’d find something appealing.

Gleick, in his thorough history The Information, observes, “There is a whiff of nostalgia in this sort of warning, along with an undeniable truth: that in the pursuit of knowledge, slower can be better. Exploring the crowded stacks of musty libraries has its own rewards. Reading—even browsing—an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search.” It is perhaps fitting that I stumbled upon this paragraph by accident in the library at Auburn College, where I was looking for something else entirely, and the spine of Gleick’s book caught my eye. Many scientific careers were fueled by ideas that came to researchers by stumbling upon articles that captured their attention while searching for something else that turned out to be far more boring and less useful. Many students today do not know the pleasure of serendipity that comes from browsing through stacks of old academic journals, turning past “irrelevant” articles on the way to the one they’re looking for, finding their brain attracted to a particularly interesting graph or title. Instead, they insert the name of the journal article they want and the computer delivers it to them with surgical precision, effortlessly. Efficient, yes. Inspiring, and capable of unlocking creative potential, not so much.

Some computer engineers have noted this and taken steps to address it. StumbleUpon is one of several websites that allow people to discover content (new websites, photos, videos, music) through recommendations of other users with similar patterns of interests and tastes, a form of collaborative filtering. Wikipedia has a random-article button, and the MoodLogic music recommendation service used to have a surprise-me button. But these are too broad in their scope and don’t respect the organizational systems that sentient, cognitive humans have imposed on materials. When we stumble upon an article in a journal, it is nearby the article we were looking for because an editor deemed the two articles to be similar along some dimension, of broad relevance to the same kinds of people. In the library, either the Dewey Decimal cataloguing system or the Library of Congress system place books in the same section that have, at least in the minds of their creators, overlapping themes. Librarians in small libraries across North America are now experimenting with “modified Dewey” shelving so as to better serve browsers walking through their particular library space rather than flipping through a card catalogue or online search engine. The electronic serendipity buttons so far are too unconstrained to be helpful. Wikipedia could and should know your history of browsing topics so that the random-article button takes you to something that might be at least broadly construed as within your interests. Instead, it treats all topics equally—all bits are equal—and you’re just as likely to get an article on the tributary to a small river in Southern Madagascar as you are to get one on the prefrontal cortex.

Another thing that has been lost with digitization and free information is an appreciation for the objects in a collection. A person’s music library was once, not so long ago, a collection to admire, possibly envy, and a way to learn something about its owner. Because record albums had to be purchased one by one, because they were relatively expensive and took up space, music lovers compiled such libraries deliberately, with thought and planning. We educated ourselves about musical artists so that we could become more careful consumers. The costs of making a mistake encouraged us to think carefully before adding a clunker to the collection. High school and college students would look at a new friend’s record collection and wander through it, allowing themselves a glimpse of their new friend’s musical tastes and the musical paths that he or she presumably crossed to acquire this particular collection of music. Now we download songs we’ve never heard of, and might not enjoy, if iTunes happens to stumble upon them in shuffle mode, but the cost of making a mistake has been rendered negligible. Gleick conceptualizes the issue this way: There used to be a line between what one possessed and what one did not. This distinction no longer exists. When the sum total of every song ever recorded is available—every version, every outtake, every subtle variation—the problem of acquisition becomes irrelevant, but the problem of selection becomes impossible. How will I decide what to listen to? And of course this is a global information problem not confined to music. How do I decide what film to watch, what book to read, what news to keep up with? The twenty-first century’s information problem is one of selection.

There are really only two strategies for selection in the face of this—searching and filtering. Together these can be more parsimoniously thought of as one strategy, filtering, and the only variable is who does the filtering, you or someone else. When you search for something, you start out with an idea of what you want, and you go out and try to find it. In the Internet age, “go out” may not be more than typing a few keystrokes on your laptop while you sit propped up in bed with your slippers on, but you are effectively going out into the digital world to find what you’re looking for. (Computer scientists call this pull because you are pulling information from the Internet, as opposed to push, where the Internet automatically sends information to you.) You or your search engine filter and prioritize the results, and if all goes well, you have what you’re looking for instantly. We tend not to keep a copy of it, virtual or physical, because we know it will be there later for us when we need it. No curating, no collecting, and no serendipity.

This is a downside to digital organization, and it makes opportunities to daydream perhaps more important than ever. “The greatest scientists are artists as well,” said Albert Einstein. Einstein’s own creativity arrived as sudden insight following daydreaming, intuition, and inspiration. “When I examine myself and my methods of thought,” he said, “I come close to the conclusion that the gift of imagination has meant more to me than any talent for absorbing absolute knowledge. . . . All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in intuition and inspiration. . . . At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.” The importance of creativity to Einstein was encapsulated in his motto, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Many of the world’s problems—cancer, genocide, repression, poverty, violence, gross inequities in the distribution of resources and wealth, climate change—will require great creativity to solve. Recognizing the value of nonlinear thinking and the daydreaming mode, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) sponsored a brainstorming session with artists, scientists, and other creative people in Cold Spring Harbor during a few days in 2012. The NCI acknowledged that after decades of research costing billions of dollars, a cure for cancer was still very far off. They handpicked people who had no knowledge or expertise in cancer research and paired them with some of the leading cancer researchers in the world. The brainstorming session asked the nonexperts to simply generate ideas, no matter how wild. Several of the ideas generated were deemed brilliant by the experts, and collaborations are currently under way to implement them.

As with Einstein, the key to the NCI initiative is that nonlinear, creative thinking be tethered to rational, linear thinking in order to implement it in the most robust and rigorous way possible—the dreams of men and women paired with the vast resources of computers. Paul Otellini, the recently retired CEO of Intel, puts it this way:

When I arrived at Intel, the possibility that computers would shape all these aspects of our lives was science fiction. . . . Can technology solve our problems? Think what the world would be like if Moore’s law, the equation that characterizes the tremendous growth of the computing industry, were applied to any other industry. Take the auto industry. Cars would get half a million miles per gallon, go 300,000 mph, and it would be cheaper to throw away a Rolls Royce than to park it.

We already see technology doing things that seemed like science fiction not so long ago. UPS trucks have sensors that detect malfunctions before they occur. To have your own personal genome sequenced used to cost $100K, now it’s less than $1,000. By the end of this decade, the equivalent of the human brain, 100 billion neurons, will fit on a single computer chip. Can technology solve our problems? The fascinating, brilliant, curious and diverse individuals who create the technology seem to think so.

Where art, technology, or science alone cannot solve problems, the combination of the three is perhaps the most powerful of all. The ability of technology, when properly guided, to solve intractable global problems has never been higher. The message I take from Otellini is that we are aiming for rewards that we cannot yet even fully imagine.

In doing research for a book idea I had some years ago, What Your Junk Drawer Says about You, I looked at dozens of people’s junk drawers. They were publicists, authors, composers, attorneys, motivational speakers, homemakers, teachers, engineers, scientists, and artists. I asked each of them to take photographs of their open drawers, then take everything out and arrange it on a table, putting similar things next to each other. I asked them to take another photograph before organizing, re-sorting, refiling the objects, and finally placing them back in what ended up being a much neater and better-organized drawer.

I did the same thing with my own junk drawer. While I meticulously separated the rubble into categories, it occurred to me that our junk drawers provide a perfect metaphor for how we live our lives. How had I accumulated notepads of old friends’ shopping lists and broken door handles from my great aunt’s rental apartment? Why did I feel the need to hoard five pairs of scissors, three hammers, and two extra dog collars? Was it a strategic decision I made to stockpile various tape brands in the kitchen? Did I use Thomas Goetz’s decision tree in deciding to place the NyQuil next to the crescent wrench, or was it an unconscious memory association between the NyQuil (bedtime) and the wrench (crescent moon in the nighttime sky)?

I think not. One’s junk drawer, like one’s life, undergoes a natural sort of entropy. Every so often, we should perhaps take time out and ask ourselves the following questions:

I found something in my intellectual junk drawer the other day while trying to keep it as ordered as I can. It is from a post on Reddit—a font of information and opinion in the age of information overload—and it is about mathematics, the queen of the sciences and emperor of abstract organization.

Sometimes, in your mathematics career, you find that your slow progress, and careful accumulation of tools and ideas, has suddenly allowed you to do a bunch of new things that you couldn’t possibly do before. Even though you were learning things that were useless by themselves, when they’ve all become second nature, a whole new world of possibility appears. You have “leveled up,” if you will. Something clicks, but now there are new challenges, and now, things you were barely able to think about before suddenly become critically important.

It’s usually obvious when you’re talking to somebody a level above you, because they see lots of things instantly when those things take considerable work for you to figure out. These are good people to learn from, because they remember what it’s like to struggle in the place where you’re struggling, but the things they do still make sense from your perspective (you just couldn’t do them yourself).

Talking to somebody two or more levels above you is a different story. They’re barely speaking the same language, and it’s almost impossible to imagine that you could ever know what they know. You can still learn from them, if you don’t get discouraged, but the things they want to teach you seem really philosophical, and you don’t think they’ll help you—but for some reason, they do.

Somebody three levels above is actually speaking a different language. They probably seem less impressive to you than the person two levels above, because most of what they’re thinking about is completely invisible to you. From where you are, it is not possible to imagine what they think about, or why. You might think you can, but this is only because they know how to tell entertaining stories. Any one of these stories probably contains enough wisdom to get you halfway to your next level if you put in enough time thinking about it.

Getting organized can bring us all to the next level in our lives.

It’s the human condition to fall prey to old habits. We must consciously look at areas of our lives that need cleaning up, and then methodically and proactively do so. And then keep doing it.

Every so often, the universe has a way of doing this for us. We unexpectedly lose a friend, a beloved pet, a business deal, or an entire global economy collapses. The best way to improve upon the brains that nature gave us is to learn to adjust agreeably to new circumstances. My own experience is that when I’ve lost something I thought was irreplaceable, it’s usually replaced with something much better. The key to change is having faith that when we get rid of the old, something or someone even more magnificent will take its place.