Here is a brief excerpt from an interview of Daniel J. Levitin conducted by Yael Grauer for contentedy.com. To read the complete interview and check out other resources, please click
Daniel J. Levitin’s new book, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, provides a blueprint for juggling multiple activities without feeling consistently distracted and overwhelmed.here.

To learn more about contentedly.com, please click here.

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Levitin, a wearer of many hats, could never be accused of being singularly focused. He’s a musician, a professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, and an an award-winning author. At Changing Hands bookstore in Phoenix, Ariz., we spoke with him about how to avoid checking email all day, writing for The New York Times, daydreaming, and the little-known concept of “satisficing.”

In your book, you discussed the negative effects of constantly checking email over and over again and how even simply knowing you have unchecked emails can be incredibly distracting. If you’re a freelancer on assignment and things are constantly changing, how do you avoid checking your email every five minutes?

Here’s the problem. In the old days, 20 years ago, when you got communication from somebody, it was either by phone or paper mail. The great thing about paper mail was that you could tell by looking at it—not in every case, but in many cases—what it was. Bills had a different look than personal letters, which tended to have different kinds of envelopes and they’d be hand addressed, and that had a different look than junk mail. And the mail only came once a day.

Now, the mail comes continuously. That constant ping doesn’t differentiate whether it’s spam or your romantic partner or your boss or a video of a cat playing the piano or an invitation from a Nigerian prince to inherit 10 million dollars. It becomes a distraction.

There are a couple of jobs, like a journalist or a social media publicist, where you really have to have email on all the time. What I’d recommend then is that you set up a system of different email addresses. If you’re going to be buying stuff online, or communicating with anybody else about personal or social matters that are separate from your work, that should go to one email account. And then if you’re chasing leads for a story or you’ve got three or four people in your life who you want to be able to reach you right away, set up a separate email account and only give your email to those people. Then you turn off the big email account that’s getting all that other stuff, and only check it three or four times a day.

You also discussed something that’s relevant to freelancers and creatives—the importance of daydreaming. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

I think what happens in this overcaffeinated age where there’s so much happening is that we feel like we can’t even stop for a minute or two because it’s all we can do to keep up. “If I stop work for five minutes, I’m not going to be able to get as much done” is the way we think, but it’s an illusion.

The fact is that if you take time out from your work just to ponder and to daydream, at the end of the day—according to studies, to research—you’ll get more done and the quality of your work will be better.

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Yael Grauer is an investigative journalist at heart who writes about world-changing tech startups, online privacy, and cutting-edge fitness and nutrition research. She covers controversies and movements “with nuance and depth.”

Her work has appeared in Experience Life, Men’s Journal, TakePart.com, Slate’s Future Tense blog, the Freelancer, the Content Strategist, and many other publications and websites. To learn more about her and her work, please click here.