When you streamline you thoughts, you increase your ability to be productive. So, how can you streamline your thoughts more.
You can streamline your thoughts by reducing energy you spend on your mental projection, and rearranging the attributes on your mental projection. This will allow you to use that energy on creating more combinations and formulas, so you have a higher quantity and quality of thoughts in a shorter time.
For a more detailed break down, let’s get right into it.
Why Do I Struggle To Organize My Thoughts?
We often struggle to organize our thoughts because our mental projection and sorting of our thoughts is disrupted by some sort of distraction like a strong emotion. This makes it hard to maintain the mental projection and thus hard to sort and organize our thoughts.
Psychologist Piaget has something known as Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.
Here, he discuss how the mind of a human develops from infancy to adulthood. One of these stages is the concrete operational stage.
The concrete operational stage is the stage where children gain an understanding of concrete concepts and ideas. Things such as the physical attributes of elements, their reversibility and the operating on the attributes.
This development happens due to children learning to have a mental projection where they can store said attributes. “Thinking” is the process of rearranging these attributes to reach a certain conclusion.
You can’t imagine how proud I feel about how smart I am sounding now. Anyway, let me give an example of what I mean by mental projection.
When children count, they use their fingers. They also use their fingers to do calculations, so that they can see the attributes. So 3 fingers, and 2 fingers in another hand may be the observed attributes. The rearranging of these attributes could be taking away 2 from on hand, which leaves one finger up. So they know 3 minus 2 is 1.
A mental projection is when you use your mind to imagine the 3, and the 2. Then, you rearrange these attributes mentally, and end up with 1. This is all without using your fingers.
Explanation
However, this is what makes thinking hard.
When you are having a rough day, or some sort of emotional impulse such as fear, or excitement, your mind wants to daydream and think of those things. It does not want to mentally project boring things.
This leads to you not being able to organize your thoughts.
It’s even worse when the attributes you are trying to arrange are the direct cause of those emotional turmoil. For example, you may be thinking of speaking to a pretty girl. You end up complicating the exchange due to your own emotional impulse
What Does Streamline My Thoughts Mean?
To streamline your thoughts means to simplify your thoughts so that they become more efficient and profitable.
Basically, the word streamline means removing resistance in a system, whether that is a water flow or organization, so that things can flow faster and more efficiently. The same then goes for streamlining your thoughts.
You need to remove resistances so that you thoughts can be a bit more efficient. So streamlining your thoughts means removing resistances so that you can think more efficiently, you can calculate quicker, you can have clearer ideas, and you can improve your intelligent comprehension of topics.
So how can you do this process?
How To Streamline Your Thoughts?
1. Acquire Knowledge and Information
The first thing that you need to do if you want to streamline your thoughts is streamlining your knowledge acquisition process.
There is no point of having good processing skills if the knowledge you are processing is tainted. Tainted information will only deceive you and make you reach wrong conclusions, which will complicate your life.
For example, imagine if you are told that you need to go pick up your family member from the airport. Meanwhile, you have a task to do at home around 2 am. So you have to do the task, and pick up your family member. If you are given the wrong airport, or the wrong closing time for the task you must do, you will not be able to come up with a proper plan of action.
You need information that is not tainted. So what makes information to not be tainted?
It can be tainted in 2 ways.
Firstly, it could be inaccurate. This is the one that I covered in that example. It could be that the information you are getting is not an accurate representation of the situation. Or as we called it early, accurate “attributes”.
In order to avoid this, make sure you only get information from trustworthy sources. What I mean by this is that you need to make sure that the information you are getting is coming from a trustworthy source. So if you are told that the due time is 2 pm by your friend, make it a point to go online and check if that is true. It is better to go get the information at the source. Always.
Secondly, it could be limited. It could be that the information you are getting is not enough, and you cannot get more information when you want. Imagine you are trying to figure out how to bake a cake, but the instructions you read from name tools that you do not have.
In order to beat this one, you need to have a means of figuring out where you can get the proper information. This means things like google, or cookbooks. Basically, always make sure that you have multiple streams of information for whatever information you are about to work on, so that you can easily use another when the one you use is not to your satisfaction.
2. Sort The Information You Learn
The second thing that you will need to streamline your thinking is actively listening to the information that is relevant so you can sort it all accordingly, and appropriately.
This one is fairly simple. It is all about active listening, and paying attention to what you need to learn, then ignoring what you do not need to know.
Once you have a reliable source of information, the next part is to make sure that you do not bug your mind down with irrelevant information. Pay attention to the specific things that are necessary.
If you have ever written a test at school, you know what I mean with this.
School tests tend to have long questions with only a select few keywords. These words are either the adjectives, nouns, or the verbs. To get the answer write, you must pay attention these.
The same is true when you are listening.
Pay attention to the verbs, the nouns and the adjectives. This will allow you to build a more productive strategy, and course of action.
3. Thinking In Terms Of Systems
You should start to think more in terms of broad rules, and laws, then in the specific singular component arrangements.
This is basically memorization.
You need to try and break down concepts to their most basic system structure. Systems all have an input (attribute), an output (attribute) and a process (rearrangement). Memorizing the basic parts of the system will allow you to figure out other parts of the system.
For example, you could say 3 plus 5 is 8. The inputs are 3 and 5. The output is 8. Then the process is plus/addition. If someone did not know how the process of addition worked, they could figure it out by looking 3 and 5, then at 8. They will then see that 8 is the putting together of those two and will know how this process works.
All things, such as human behavior, political systems, and matter have a systemic appearance.
Behavior (humiliation-input, violence-output, process-attempt to protect from further hurt, and discourage further self harm), democracy (input-people, output-one leader, process-vote), Roman architecture (Durability of Roman buildings-input, self healing building-output, process- some sort of self healing concrete? Not even scientists have figured out how that works yet).
The point is once you arrange things in this step, you can easier assess the situation, and ask more appropriate questions. This system decreases the need for a rearrangement process (thinking), Instead, you are merely laying all the facts before you, and looking at where they connect, and where they disconnect, leaving you to focus only on mental projection.
Just like…
4. Find the Etymology
The other way that you could easily improve your understand of a situation, and thus your ability to think, is to try and find the etymology of what you are attempting to use.
This is again a system technique. When you find the etymology of something, you usually figure out the system input of that situation.
So when you have a situation before you, (human behavior, or anything that needs you to think about it), you could just go and retrieve the information about this specific thing. Then you will find the word that describes the process.
Then, go online and search the etymology of the word you are trying to do. The etymology will give you the first way that the world was used, thus giving you an idea of what the main concept is.
For example, republic comes from republica, which means for the people/public. You can then put this in the system. (input-people need to be ruled, output-all people get benefits, and process-republic).
This can help you then build your idea about how things should work, what you can do to improve them and why they work the way they do.
5. You Could Try To Use Conservation Systems
The other way of streamlining your thinking is trying to find the constant in the situations that you observe.
I knew a person who used to say ‘Intelligence is the ability to find similarities and differences’. I kind of agree with them.
If I were to ask what are the similarities between a cat and dog, many people could get it right. They both walk on all fours, and are domesticated animals, for example. But what if i were to ask what is the similarity between a horse and a tree? Well, they both cast shadows, they are both solid matter, and as a result they both have similar looking cells.
Do you see how the second one requires you to have deep observation skills?
Now you could ask what are the similarities between behaviors? Look at someone who is yelling and punching, and someone who is crying. What could the similarities be? They both started because the people were agitated.
This allows you to have a wider range of approaches to the situation.
Rather than fighting the angry person, and being aggressive to them, you can be calm, strict, but also welcoming, and inviting. You could make them feel safe.
The point here is that this also fits into the input, output, and process system. By finding similarities in the knowledge that you acquired about a situation, you are able to have a deeper understanding of the system.
This eliminates the need for a mental projection
6. Eliminate Unnecessary Thought Stages
You could try to minimize the rearrangement stage or you could try to minimize the projection stage.
The reason why the last advices I gave you work is because they decrease the energy you have to spend on rearrangement, and allow you to focus completely on projection. Thus you can spend your whole energy on that stage.
However, there are other ways that you could improve your thinking.
There maybe other ways to eliminate your rearranging phases that I have not thought of. However, there are definitely many ways of eliminating your projection stage.
When you get that right, you will be able to think more accurately about the problem and get to the heart of the issue.
7. Eliminate The Projection Stage
You could eliminate your projection stage by bringing physical representations of the things that you are thinking about.
Instead of speaking to yourself in your head, you can write down what you are thinking. Also, you could use colors to code similar concepts by coloring them the same color. To be honest, I never use colors. Instead, I use underlining. This allows me to gather the key concepts and not be distracted by the colors.
You could also use drawing. I draw arrows and lines on my writing, connecting sentences with other lines.
Speaking out loud is also another way of reducing projection. Muttering to yourself, and then pointing with your hands will help with this.
The use of physical objects helps to. You could take your pillows, and table then use them to represent the input. Then test out the process and place them down in a way that represents the output.
You could look out at the world, around you, and find something that is similar in concept to what you are trying to see. When you are reading a passage, and the other mentions some vague concept as being a bigger threat and a danger to the lesser threat, picture a lion standing next to a dinosaur. It sounds infantile, but it works wonders in helping you understand complicated things.
8. Eliminate The rearrangement Stage
You can decrease rearrangement phase by using words that are easier for you to understand.
You can eliminate interpretation by using your own words. Look at what words they are using, then write the words that explain it simpler for you. Then explain the process using your own preferred words.
This is best for people who speak English as a second language.
Words are a representation of what is out there in the world. Apple does describe the red sometimes green fruit with black seeds inside. But since you are you, and you will know what you mean when you speak, do not hesitate to call it Goblin Head. Or any word from your language
As long as you can interpret it easier, it works.
For example instead of using multiply, or addition, you can use put together, take away, and other words for mathematics. The concept remains the same, but the interpretation is easier because you do not have to think what does addition mean. Instead, you spend your thinking power on thinking, and soon you’ll be mastering mastery quicker.