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- [00:09]
A
Hi, everybody. I'm David Allen. As you, many of you probably already know, I am so thrilled to have phase two of a conversation with a guy I ran across. Time flies. But when I read his book, the Organized Mind, Daniel Levitin went, oh, my God, this guy gets it. And not only did he get it, but he's got a whole scientific and research and cognitive science consciousness base to validate sort of what I sort of discovered on the street about 35 years ago, that your head's just a crappy office. Anyway, so, Daniel, I became a huge champion. As a matter of fact, when I do any kind of seminars and keynote speeches, I put the Organized Mind on one of my last screens. It says, guys, if you guys want any validation of anything I've been talking about, read this book. Very cool. Like, put stuff in front of the door so you're smart the night before, knowing you're going to be dumb in the morning, so you put stuff somewhere in the right context so when you spin around to it, you do smart stuff, but don't have to be that smart to do it.
- [01:18]
B
Anyway, story of my life.
- [01:20]
A
Oh, my God, Mine too, Daniel. Anyway, so, Daniel Levton, delighted to have you back in conversation with me. And so I just gave you.
- [01:30]
B
It's an interesting observation you made about the book. I'd just like to elaborate for our listeners and viewers.
- [01:36]
A
Sure, yeah.
- [01:38]
B
When I wrote my first book, this Is yous Brain on Music, I had recently come off of working 15 years as a recording engineer and mixer and producer before I became an academic. And in becoming an academic, wanted to understand how it is that musicians and producers do what they do. And my mentor. There's a parallel story to you here, I think. My mentor, Don DeVito at Columbia Records, who was a vice president and who was in charge of Bob Dylan and Billy Joel, among others, so said when he read the book. Oh, he said, I had to figure all this out on my own. But now you've sort of shown the scientific basis for all this stuff that I did and came up with just from the street. And it was a similar process for me in writing the Organized Mind, which is that I was a huge fan of your work. And in parallel to reading your advice about how to be more productive and creative, which are two things I always wanted to have more of, having started out with so little of each, I started finding within neuroscience these explanations for how this stuff that you painstakingly figured out really works. And it provided a neural, a neuroscientific basis for what you came up with which, you know, now, in retrospect, it strikes me as especially brilliant and insightful, given that you had to figure it out from first principles rather than from science.
- [03:20]
A
Yeah, but I have to go. Mea culpa. I had a mentor, a guy named Dean Acheson. I attribute him in my book.
- [03:25]
B
Oh, Dean, Yeah, yeah.
- [03:26]
A
And Dean had uncovered the fact that if you're trying to make an organization move somewhere new in the future, the barnacles on the ship, the old business, the incompletions, the things people had still hanging in their psyche, was actually preventing their ability to be truly inspired, inspirational, intuitive about where they need to go, and motivated. And so he figured out, dump the stuff out of everybody's head. Let's just accumulate all the old business, all the open loops, and then let's go through all of those and have them appropriately engage, which is my term I use now. But he didn't use that term. But he said, well, what's the next action? What is that? Is that a real thing? You're going to do something about it? What do you need to do?
- [04:12]
B
It was a flowchart approach, an algorithmic approach.
- [04:15]
A
Exactly. At least the start of that. I then wound up building sort of the more complete flowchart of what that cognitive algorithm was about. How do you get stuff off your mind and get it done?
- [04:27]
B
Well, that is so key. And it's an interesting point of intersection with my current work on the aging brain, which is that if you cut through it all, there are really two principles from the Getting Things Done program that are crucial for anybody over the age of 60 who wants to remain healthy and do things that are neuroprotective in the face of potential, although not inevitable, mental decline as we age. And those two things are externalizing your memory, which you alluded to. You hear on the weather report, it's going to rain tomorrow, take the umbrella right away and stick it around the door handle so that when you leave in the morning, you don't have to remember. The environment is reminding you, getting things out of your head, making lists on index cards and such or in notebooks. That's the one. And then the other thing is the single most important factor that swamps everything else, genetics, environment, education, socioeconomic status is conscientiousness. If you approach life in a conscientious way, and that includes a cluster of things like stick to itiveness and dependability and reliability and following rules when appropriate to do so, getting things done.
- [06:06]
A
Basically agreements, keeping agreements, defining agreements and.
- [06:10]
B
Keeping them even though agreements, you make with yourself.
- [06:14]
A
They're all agreements with yourself. Indeed. Now, okay, wait a minute. We just did a little bit of a longer preamble than I expected to, because frankly, the reason I want everybody to hear this is because this is Daniel's latest book, Successful Aging. My wife hung onto it. I couldn't get a hold of it until she finished it. She enjoyed it so much. And she's 61. Of course, I'm turning 75 this year, so I'm going, well, wait a minute, I need to see that. I need to see what that was. And then it was a page turner for me, obviously, at my age. And just of the interest and, and all the stuff that you do, it is encyclopedic. So anybody looking at this right now, before you do not pass go collect $100. As I wrote on, I think my Instagram post, if you are over 50, engage with anybody over 50 or think you're going to live over 50. This is an absolutely must read. Now. It's encyclopedic, Daniel, I have to say. 4000 research papers you curated to come up with all of this. Fascinating. So anyway, that's my ta da and why I love speaking with you again, Daniel. I have not so much, so many questions. I mean, this was so self evident in terms of a lot of things that I read in here. But to the people listening or watching this right now, why'd you write this? And what's. And what's the answer? This is the elevator pitch.
- [07:52]
C
What's the message?
- [07:54]
B
My parents turned 80 and they're now 87 and 85. But when they turned 80, I started thinking, you know, they've outlived so many of their. Well, they'd outlived the grand fathers, not the grandmothers, but in the family. But I was thinking I'd like to keep them around for a while. There must be a book I can get them that will give them some tips for how to stay healthy and particularly mentally healthy. They already had the physical health thing covered. And I looked and looked and I couldn't find a book that took the latest scientific findings and made it available to the public. And so, as with my other four books, I ended up writing the book that I wanted to read. And in this case, you know, I wanted my parents to read it too. But, you know, I turned 60 during the writing of the book. I'm 62 now. And I was thinking, you know what, I want to be around for a while longer. I want to take advantage of the latest scientific evidence, particularly from neuroscience. I'm a neuroscientist. I knew there was stuff in there, but nobody had really pulled it together systematically.
- [09:13]
A
And, you know, I look, because before we chatted, I just looked back through even just the index, and I think that was, you know, so brilliantly organized in that, you know, part one is a lot of data just about the brain and the neurology of the brain and just the biology or neurobiology of what the brain is and who, how it works and how it functions and how it ages. Your part two is what do we decide to do? What choices do we make that affect sort of that neurology or that neurobiology that we're dealing with as we age? And then your part three, the new longevity pretty close between part two and part three in terms of, okay, if you want to be cool and classy and not be a Dylan Thomas, go out yelling and screaming, but go out in a peaceful state at the end of your game, what are the things and options you can do? So I think that's a brilliant. That was a brilliant. Because I know writing a book is not easy. So trying to figure out how to frame all that appropriately, I think you did a brilliant job with that. What's my question to ask you right now, Daniel? I suppose I'm going to ask you a bizarre question right away that has nothing to do with that. But as I was reading this, I said, daniel, did you go through the same medical student syndrome that you started to experience everything you were writing about. Memory loss, you're going, oh my God, I'm writing about memory loss. And how come that. Wait a minute, I just forgot about whatever.
- [10:56]
B
That's funny. Well, I think to some degree, you know, we, most of us, not all of us, but most of us humans, have an empathy module and we can relate to others misery and misfortune and happiness and joy. And so when we read about clinical cases or diseases or just natural functions of the body and mind, we think, oh, am I like that or do I see myself in that? I'm trained to sort of read through large stacks of literature and extract common principles. And so I feel a little bit like Detective Bosch in the Bosch novels and the TV series.
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A
I don't know them. Sorry.
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B
Hieronymus Bosch is a detective in a series of novels and now a successful TV series by Michael Connelly, the writer and creator of the show. But Bosch sort of, you know, he's not like Lt. Colombo, who was sort of bungling and absent minded, but got to the point he's not like Sherlock Holmes who just knows everything. He just, he very calmly goes through all the data and doesn't form a conclusion until all the information's in. He doesn't favor one hypothesis over another. And that's really the way that we're trained or supposed to be trained as scientists. So I didn't have those syndromes. But I'll confide to you, since it's just the two of us here.
- [12:48]
A
Yeah. Or.
- [12:51]
B
One of the things I wrote about which seems really far fetched and almost made up, is something I actually have, and it's called Natalia Paresthetica. It's actually quite common. It's not rare, but it's not. It's typically under diagnosed. It's having an itch in a small area, typically in on your back, just where you can't reach it. And this is a known thing.
- [13:24]
A
I've got those. Yes.
- [13:26]
B
Yeah. And so you finally get, you know, a back scratcher or a pen or something, and you scratch it and maybe half the time you get relief, but the other half you don't because the reason you're itching is that the nerve endings are damaged and so they're sending faulty signals. But scratching it doesn't relieve it because they're not picking up the scratch.
- [13:50]
A
Okay, Now I think there is an interesting segue that I will try to create between what you just said and a lot of the conclusions, because I think the fascinating thing about your book is you've also very elegantly diagnosed what happens with biological decline, but cognitive improvement or potentially so as we age. And I think that's a brilliant sort of framing of things, especially for the boomers like me. I'm the first of the boomers at 75, that if we have another 10, 15, 20 years in our lives understanding what's denigrating that you can't stop, you can mitigate to some degree, and what are the things we could leverage that could make a difference. And you've done some wonderful sort of case study examples in the book of people that, you know, who are dynamic and on and, you know, haven't stopped by the time they're almost 100 years old or even over. And so somehow they had some sort of a key, but probably not consciously, but just did it otherwise. So I think the brilliance of your book, hopefully, and push back to me or tell me whether you think what you've shared here would actually create more of those kind of people having those kind of experiences.
- [15:23]
B
Well, that's really my aim. My aim is to It's a lofty aim, but I want to change. I aim for nothing less than changing a society wide conversation about how we view older adults and how we can make opportunities for them to contribute to daily life and society and decision making when we're accustomed to marginalizing them. A lot of the marginalization is a bias or a prejudice. It's an ism, just like racism or sex. We have ageism and as with other isms, it's rooted in stereotypes and outdated information and ignorance, not interacting with very many older adults. The fact is that with every decade after 40, your reaction time and your processing speed slows. So by the time you're 60 or 70 or 80, you may not be able to do your times tables as quickly or do long divisions in your head or find the name of that restaurant you went to last week. But a number of compensatory neural mechanisms kick in. To the extent that you've lived life even moderately, you've experienced a lot more than a younger adult. And that experience translates to better judgment, better ability to predict what the outcome of your actions will be because you've acted so much more and you've seen the consequences so much more than somebody younger. Not every adult is better at predicting, not every older adult is better at predicting consequences. Not every older adult has wisdom. But as a group, yeah, we are better at certain kinds of decision making, particularly the decisions that involve interpersonal conflict, because one of the compensatory mechanisms is that after 65 or 70, we tend to become more compassionate, more empathetic and more tolerant. So called grandparent syndrome. And so, you know, the grandparents allowing the grandkids to get away with stuff, they never would have let their own kids get away with that kind of thing. Grandparents tend to be more fun than parents.
- [17:53]
A
Yeah. And so societally it would seem though, I mean there. God, there's so many variables that are coming into play, especially now given the crazy world that we're in with the virus and so forth spreading around. We're becoming totally virtual. Nobody knows how old anybody's going to be maybe talking to you over a Zoom or a Skype over whatever. And that essentially the physical barriers are all reducing, which I assume are going to be reducing the societal barriers they've been reducing all along. But now we're kind of expanding that exponentially because of the virtuality that's now needed in the world. Since nobody can touch each other anymore only through the technology.
- [18:42]
B
I wondered if, I wonder what the effects of this are going to be, you know, a Lot of us were already virtual. Anyway, I was, I talked to, I've been using this last. So for those who are watching this later, today is March 27, 2020, and we've now been under mandatory lockdown in California, where I live, for nearly two weeks. Just three days shy of two weeks. And I've been using the time. I was on a nine week book tour that ended on March 8, just before all of this stuff. And one of the things I was saying to younger people and older people is that it's important to interact with people in person. Virtual engagement is not a substitute for being in the same room, breathing the same air. The contingencies and exigencies of having to deal with a live person right there with you and having a conversation with someone, especially someone you don't know. Well, that combination of things is about the most complex thing there is for the brain to do. It's more complicated than brain surgery, believe me. Brain surgery is not that complicated. It's basically plumbing. Don't let that leak and irrigate that. You know, it's more complicated than being an astronaut or a concert pianist just having a conversation with somebody in the room. Now that's changed in the last 12 days in many places around the world. It could stay this way for another two weeks or another nine months. It's hard to say. It depends on the so called flattening of the curve and compliance. But having said all that, David, virtual is better than nothing and I've had the opportunity.
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A
Yeah, yeah, Daniel, and sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but you know, as you were talking, I remembered a whole part of what the aspect of being able to stay young as you get older is. New stimulus.
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B
Right, right.
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A
New new pathways that you need to build into your brain. So even if you've done Scrabble, you know, since you were a kid doing Scrabble. Yeah, it's interesting now, but it's not going to keep your brain alive. You need to learn how to play Go. Or you need to.
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B
Right.
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A
You need to learn how to play the flute or you need to learn how to speak Dutch, which I'm in the middle of right now, which is. I call it Alzheimer's prevention.
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B
It is, it is.
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A
Now when I read your book, I went, I'm not kidding.
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B
How are you doing? Can you say good morning?
- [21:31]
A
Yeah. Hublogen hummorgen. Yeah. Well, if you're in, if you're in Amsterdam, there's a different dialect where they do goye is hood. So you know how to do the Dutch stuff. Okay. Anyway, so. Yes, so. Well, good news. So I'm going to keep practicing my Dutch and keep staying, you know, alive and well.
- [22:03]
B
Well, and you got to practice it with others. It's not enough to just be reciting against the tapes or the pimsleur method or whatever. You've got to be actually in a conversation. And these conversations, you and I admire you, but we don't know each other well. I mean, we've met, but we've talked before. But having conversation with somebody you don't know well is very mentally challenging. And we were talking about this social isolation. In the last week I've been catching up with friends that I hadn't talked to in a while. One of them, the songwriter, great songwriter, Rodney Crowell. I said, how are you holding up under the social isolation? Because I'm a songwriter, I'm socially isolated anyway, so I just sit in a room for hours a day with a guitar by myself. And then I checked in with Jasper Rhine, who's the head of genetics at UC Berkeley. How are you holding up, Jasper? He said, same as always. I sit at my desk working on a computer all day long all by myself. No difference there. But for many of us, like my parents and myself, who are more outgoing and extroverted, it's been an adjustment. How are you taking it?
- [23:22]
A
Well, come. I've worked out of my home since 1983, so I don't know when you were born, but you know, that was a long time ago, so. And I'm a closet introvert myself anyway, so, you know, I love being alone and doing this. And this is where I do my work, this is how I do what I do. But I understand what you're saying. We're dealing with right now an awful lot of people who are suddenly thrown out of a semi structured environment called a physical office and having to create their own worlds. So from a GDD or Getting things done perspective, I'm being asked right now to, you know, produce all kinds of little stuff about, okay guys, how do we stay sane when your world has totally changed?
- [24:08]
B
And what is your advice on that?
- [24:10]
A
Well, first of all, manage yourself. You've always had to do that. And secondly, build a context based environment where that's the work you do when you're in that environment, you know?
- [24:21]
B
Yeah, this was the advice that Oliver Sacks gave me when I started writing books.
- [24:28]
A
I'm reading his book right now. Interestingly, his last one, he said, set.
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B
Aside a desk or a computer, just some sort of space where all you do is you're writing. You're not paying your bills from that spot. You're not. It's not a multipurpose space. It's a one purpose space. And it could just be two different desks in the same room, and you pick up your laptop and you move it over. But I extended that in my own case. I use a Mac, an Apple laptop, and Apple now allows you to have multiple desktops. So what that means is I have different color. I'm talking the screen. What I'm looking at when I'm doing a zoom meeting, I have a particular backdrop, and that's a conversation screen. And then I can switch to a different desktop with different documents on it. It's a different color and pattern for when I'm writing. And then I got another one for music, and I've got another one for email and another one for the calendar. The email and the calendar are the same color and format because so much of what comes in email ends up in the calendar. But it's a little thing, but it makes a big difference.
- [25:47]
A
Well, I don't know if you've seen it. You know, two guys who were major cognitive science researchers at Free University of Brussels wrote a white paper about the science of stress reproductivity once they came across gtd. And, you know, it's deep stuff. It took me four readings of it to really understand what they were talking about.
- [26:12]
B
And they were talking about your stuff.
- [26:13]
A
They were. And they actually were using a term called stigma G. And a guy named Francis Halligan, I actually sent you a link to a last document he wrote.
- [26:24]
B
I just started reading it when we started our conversation.
- [26:27]
A
Yeah, well, Francis, interesting guy. But these guys they ran across GTD were fascinated by wow. And they dug into why does that so work? And Francis expertise was insect behavior. If you see two ants in your kitchen and then 200, how come? Well, because the worker ants are programmed to go look for food. When they find food, they're programmed to take it back to the nest. But when they take it back to the nest with food, they drop a pheromone trail. Well, that pheromone trail attracts the next worker ants to show, oh, pheromone trail, let's go. Whatever. And so they go get food and follow the pheromone trails, take it back until the food runs out, the pheromone runs out, they stop. Well, they're dumb. They have no brain, or hardly any brain, no memory, but they do very effective stuff. And so their analogy with GTD was You make smart decisions at the night, you put the umbrella on the door in the morning. You're dumb and stupid, but you do a smart thing thing because it was already programmed in. So their whole idea was building triggers that are context based so that you do smart stuff in a context based system so that with less effort you don't have to remember, remind you just put yourself in the context. You're suddenly, oh, now I'm going to do creative writing, now I'm going to do xyz. So what you were just explaining was you've created different context, at least digitally for yourself, your Mac, right? So you get in that context, it starts to format your thinking and your brain, your cognitive processes relative to that process without having to work at trying to do that or trying to remember to do that.
- [28:14]
B
Right? That's right. And I keep piles of things as you do, as topical reminders. Everything related to something is either in a folder or in a pile. So the that it's all together, not scattered. I think that an important part of GTD that shouldn't get lost here is this idea of self management. And you're right that we all manage ourselves to some degree. We manage to get up out of bed and groom ourselves and go out into the world when that was something that we did anyway. But I think a lot of people, particularly of our boomers age, resist what they see as over structuring because they want to be free and unconstrained. And of course the great irony in that is that when one sets up a self management structure, such in particular the GTD structure and rubric that you've devised, one has more freedom, more opportunities for spontaneity, more of a feeling of being at liberty. I reminded I went with Sting on part of his tour one year and his time was very tightly structured on this tour. And I asked him how he was relating as a musician, you know, somebody who you might think is just freewheeling and enjoys not making commitments. I mean that's sort of the, perhaps the image we have of the rock star. And he said, I feel I'm happily lost. He said, I don't have to keep track of where I go and what I do from hour to hour. Somebody else has structured that for me. They just put me in a place and I can be fully present and fully there. And so when he knows that he's got a rehearsal from two to four, his mind is clear, he's focused on the rehearsal at 4 o', clock, he's got two hours of meditation Time, no distractions. He out of the structure came a great freedom and a great, I think, relief of all the chatter in your head. It's another way of externalizing your brain so that when you want it, it's quiet and focused, not nagging you about, go pick up the laundry and remember to buy milk.
- [30:58]
A
No, Daniel, great example. Because, you know, people often think that GTD and this structure of structure in your life for your conscientious, you know, conscientiousness is too much structure. You go, look, you can write this pen and paper. You can write it on your arm. You could hire 12 people to follow you around and keep track of everything you think you need to do.
- [31:23]
B
At some point you can tattoo it like in memento.
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A
And trust. Yeah, and trust that they'll remind you. It doesn't matter as long as your brain has given up the necessity to remember and remind. Because it did not evolve to do that past. Four things.
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B
Exactly right.
- [31:39]
A
As you may know, Roy Baumeister came up with the conclusion that four things is the maximum your cognitive brain can hold onto before it blows the fuse and you're going to then diminish your cognitive capability.
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B
Well, I'm loathe to contradict Baumeister, but we now think that it's only two.
- [32:05]
A
I love that. Can I quote you, Daniel, on that?
- [32:08]
B
Yes, you can.
- [32:13]
C
I'd like to give a short message to those of you who've been participating and playing with GTD Connect for a while and sort of remind you that all of us with this GTD methodology and this set of practices go through cycles. You know, I still go through cycles myself initially. There's kind of the inspiration and there's a lot of material to ingest and to get familiar with. And so people oftentimes, when they first come onto Connect, are just potentially overwhelmed by how much information there is. In a way, it's just a huge library where we've been able to archive so much different information from so many different perspectives and people and points of view, and so understood that it's like walking into a library going, gee, where do I start? So that's oftentimes the initial phase of this, and many people, after a year or two, probably get on some level or some plateau where they go, well, I kind of got it now, I've got my system set up and everything's fine, and I'm fine tuning. And you may find yourself at that point also finding yourself saying, gee, I'm now becoming a resource of this methodology for people around me. You know people asking me for assistance and help in this. And we've seen in the forums a number of people now sharing ideas about how to get your teams more involved or families more involved with this information. So some of that information is in there as well. But I think you'll find yourself going through cycles of this, and you may find that much like if you've ever read a software manual. I remember when I read when I learned Microsoft Word to begin with, for instance, and I read the manual, wow, this is really cool. And I started to use the tool and didn't need the manual anymore. As a matter of fact, a good example of that right here, the manual for this camera that's taking this picture right now. Initially, I read this, got it all set up. That's really cool. And that's really fine. And so pretty much everything was onto cruise control. I didn't need to go back to my library to make this really work. And then, of course, as I started to get more sophisticated in terms of the stuff I wanted to do, got more inspired about some things I saw other people are doing. How do I do that? Went back to the manual. Oh, God, I didn't realize I could do that. I didn't realize I could do that. I remember at least two or three iterations of going back to Microsoft Word back in the days when there actually was a manual for that, as opposed to just all online and realizing, oh, my God, I didn't realize that, oh, I could do that now. I could do that now. And I think that's what you might find with Connect too, is that it's a gold mine of stuff. Well, many people have read getting things done more than three or four times, and every time they read it, they get something new out of it. So I think you may find Connect the same way and probably even easier because, hey, it doesn't take much to just click on, surf around, see what might be new or what might be of interest to you, and pay attention. There's more than meets the eye in there.