The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson,

and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

How to get organized and stay focused in a modern world.

Getting organized used to be a whole lot

easier. As nomadic hunter-gatherers, we only had to keep track of the things we could carry because

that was all we owned. As members of a tribe of extended family members, we could lean upon others

for assistance with day-to-day tasks and trust they had equal skin in the game.

We didn't have to shoulder everything ourselves, and the responsibilities necessary for survival were simpler.

The accessible world was much smaller, the breadth of available knowledge limited by location.

You knew all about the lives and goings-on of your immediate community

members and which plants were edible in a 20-mile radius, and where to get water, and when

the antelope grazed and the leopard prowled. But what happened 50 miles away was a total mystery,

and a thousand miles away might as well have been infinitely vast.

Important info was recorded through oral traditions, stories, and songs.

Anecdote and analogy and parable carry weight to this day because for millennia they were all

we had to go on. Then agriculture happened, followed by urbanization and markets

and trade routes, and suddenly we had a lot more information to process. So we created a system

for organizing and externalizing information, writing. Physical writing soon gave way to telecommunication

traveling along physical wires,

and later invisible data streams shooting and bouncing across the atmosphere.

Today, we are roving islands of responsibilities, duties, obligations, tasks, schedules,

and information hyperconsumers.

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