Memory not vital if you have web working it out in the office

Last Wednesday, I arrived at the office to find I'd left my keys at home so could not lock up my bike. Later, I interviewed Lord Browne over lunch and afterwards couldn't find the tag I had been given for my coat. And then, on the way back, I started drafting the interview in my head and missed my stop on the tube.

All three mishaps took time out of the day and were bad for morale, but at least I did the first and last unobserved. The second was done with the former head of BP quietly watching as I squatted on the floor of the restaurant and rummaged in vain through the squalid contents of my handbag.

These small lapses took place against the background of a much bigger lapse. For hours last Wednesday (and on most other days too) I sat at my desk feeling I was hard at work, whereas what I was actually doing was e-mailing, looking up random things on Google, reading assorted blogs and talking to people. I faffed and dithered, and ended up writing what I had to write in a mad, headlong dash.

I worry about all this. I despise hopelessness and inefficiency in others, and still more in myself. There has to be a better way of getting through the day.

Checklists

In search of such a way, I turned to The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, doctor, writer and all-round renaissance man. His thesis, stated flatly, sounds feeble: that a simple list is the answer to the world's complexity. Yet Dr Gawande shows us how checklists have saved lives in intensive care, prevented buildings from collapsing and stopped planes from falling from the sky. In which case, one might have hoped that such a list could help me get off the train at the right station.

But I'm not so sure. It's all very well writing a list of tasks that must be accomplished before a plane can take off, but simple self-respect prevents me from writing a list that says: "When train arrives at your stop, get out." Instead I've compromised by writing a slightly less pathetic list of all the things I must do today, and am awaiting results. So far, I feel relief at having unpacked some of the things in my head, though there are plenty of other distracting thoughts and worries still getting in the way.

Next, I turned to Douglas Merrill, former chief information officer at Google, who has written a book (to be published next month) with the subtitle: How to get stuff out of your head, find it when you need it and get it done right.

Merrill argues our short-term memories can only cope with a few things at a time, which means we need to make our tasks simpler. Multitasking is, therefore, a recipe for inefficiency and error, unless one of the tasks is dead easy. Merrill also disapproves of frequent switching between tasks, which befuddles the brain. This may explain why I'm so unproductive at work as I check my e-mail about 16 times a minute.

So, as of now, I am trying to do things differently and am focusing on one task alone: writing a column. I am not going to check messages for an hour, when I will allow myself a look as a treat. Already I can hear my e-mail calling: check me. I don't know how long I can hold out.

Also essential to better organisation, says Merrill, is to give more thought to what we actually need to store in long-term memory.

I have come to the shockingly liberating conclusion that most of us need to remember almost nothing to do our jobs competently, because almost all information can almost always be found in one click of the mouse on the internet.

— Financial Times