Have you ever had something to do but you'd been neglecting doing it and therefore your consciousness reminded you about it constantly and perhaps in the worst possible moment? Do you often feel overwhelmed by the number and complexity of your assignments? If your answer to any of those questions is yes then keep on reading as I'm going to reveal some information about why it happens and how the brain handles multiple activities.

I've been always infatuated with how the human brain works, but since it's such a complex organ there're numerous small findings I've been discovering since I started drilling down into this topic. The thing that I've gotten familiar with recently, by exploring the book "Getting Things Done", is the way our brain handles tasks, or perhaps I should have written fails to handle them as it seems that the process is inefficient and a little bit clumsy.

The human brain works similarly to the RAM (random access memory) in a computer and therefore it keeps all unfinished tasks open until you finish them or at least do something about them to deceive your subconsciousness. Be sure that every single thing you committed to do or were assigned to do will be kept as an open loop in your brain. The more commitments you have the more you clutter your personal RAM and as a result, your brain works inefficiently. These things decrease your performance, distract you and prevent you from being fully focused on whatever you're doing at present. Your brain thinks that everything you said you will do you should be doing now. Unfortunately, we aren't capable of doing two things at the same time, so there's really no point to keep more assignments in progress at a time. We can even say that having two open tasks at once is some kind of failure. You should avoid this kind of situations as since you can't handle it you make it only worse by increasing tension and stress levels. You're worried about something you can't do anything about and therefore you feel anxious, overwhelmed, and helpless.

Another big issue is that our brain keeps reminding us of things even when we can't do anything about them. Let's say you need to do laundry as you run out of clean shirts. Even though that task is open as a loop and subconsciously you feel anxious about it, your mind will remind you about it only when you'll need a clean shirt. It doesn't make sense to be reminded about it once it's already too late to handle it. What's the point of having that activity constantly open and not doing anything with that information until it's untractable? I'm pretty sure that while reading this post some of your open tasks crossed your mind at least for a moment. Since most of us don't know much about the brain and the way it processes information we walk around with our RAM bursting at the seams. We think that things will be sorted out somehow on their own, but it appears that the brain isn't that smart and it requires some external help to improve its performance.

Luckily, there are some methods to drastically improve your productivity and become less stressed about multiple tasks. The keyword here is organization. You need to manage all your assignments in a way that deceives your mind, so it thinks that some of them might be closed (at least for a moment) since you either made decisions about them or organized them outside of your brain. If you're interested in how to stay organized and increase your overall performance then stay tuned as the next part describing some useful techniques is coming soon.