First, I want to apologize.
I like being consistent but this week I failed myself. Generally, if you notice, I send my newsletter on every other Monday. My only excuse to not have sent on time is this: writer’s block. The topic we explore in this letter is pretty dense and required looking at and comparing notes from various sources. Although I’m happy with the way it turned out, I hope you’ll forgive my lapse.

If the human mind were a four-story house at the beginning of time, evolution is akin to the Super who attends to the problems that the house faced over the span of 2.5 million odd years. Instead of overhauling the entire house every time a storm hit or the temperature dropped too low, the Super resorted to a band-aid style approach and patched the areas that needed attention. With time, many of the rooms in the houses weren’t needed as much as others, but it stayed on.
Memory is no exception here.
Several representational systems built up during evolution, with each new system adding to those inherited from earlier ancestors. These systems arose for the same fundamental reason: to transcend problems and exploit opportunities encountered by specific ancestors at particular times and places in the distant past. In effect, modern memory emerged via evolutionary accretion. — Oxford University Press
When discussing memory, a question that pops up often in our minds is our brain’s capacity. Scientific American released an article in 2010 where a number was assigned to this capacity: 2.5 petabytes. For those who don’t work with bytes everyday, it goes kilobytes → megabytes → gigabytes → terabytes, and then, → petabytes. To put that in perspective, back in the days when Yahoo served over 500 million monthly website visitors, their data-warehouse capacity was 2 petabytes, 20% lesser still than the capacity we hold in our three-pound jelly of a brain. It’s also worth refreshing your memory of the fact that the computer on-board the Apollo spacecraft had an operating system with a memory of 64 kilobytes. So, can we ever justify the statement, my brain is full?
A limited capacity working (short-term) memory is a central concept in cognitive psychology. Nevertheless, capacity limitations only apply when dealing with new, not old information. When dealing with previously learned material, the only discernible limit on working memory is the amount that has been learned and stored in long-term memory. — Psychology of Learning and Motivation
So, basically we can consider our long-term memory to be limitless for all purposes. A natural question you might then have is: with a limitless long-term memory, why am I not able to retrieve information as I please? Answer: Retrieval failure. This is where we differ most from a computer. While we beat the machine when it comes to making associations, the machines crush us in retrieving information flawlessly. The damn things.
In this part II of the three-part series, I talk about the foibles of the human mind and how technology steps in to aid us (I even talk about gorillas at one point).
Help me. My inbox is killing me. 📧
I realized one area I hadn’t focused much on was my inbox. Sure, I unsubscribed from services that didn’t interest me, but didn’t go beyond that. And then, I came across this article by a solopreneur. He had a simple strategy to keep his life organized. The following paragraph intrigued me:

Although I removed email notifications from my phone, I still spend most of my day near my laptop, having constant access to it. So I thought, why not ensure that I check my email only at certain times in a day?
But then.. I didn’t want to create reminders just to check email. So I did the opposite: I made sure emails landed in my inbox only at certain times in a day. Enter Boomerang: an app that lets you take control of when you send and receive emails.

As you can see above, I have three times during the day to receive emails. So even when I check, I won’t be able to see new ones in my inbox until that time. Note: If you still want to see the emails but just not in your inbox, you can create a separate label for that.
Finally, although this worked for me, I don’t expect the same to work for you. My whole philosophy when it comes to productivity is about experimentation. I just want to give you actionable ideas to stimulate your brain and hope one of it works! But don’t stop searching.
Are you enjoying this so far? Fantastic. Why not tag me in an Instagram story and tell me what you’d like to read about next?
Brain food from the internet 🍜
Design: Human readable guide to design in iOS:
Maybe you’ve never designed an iPhone app, and have no idea where to begin. Maybe you’ve designed a dozen, but still want one place to reference best practices. Heaven knows Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines are awful to try and read. But Erik is here to the rescue with this 5000 word guideline on designing covering everything from layouts to typography to screen sizes. Read more➡️
Productivity: Enhance your email experience (contd. from above)
On an average day, John get around 50–80 messages. When he mentions his email problems to other techie friends, they tend to suggest technology-based solutions: “Have you tried Tempo?” they ask. “Spark? Newton? Superhuman? Mailbox? Boomerang?” But having worked at Google for over 10 years, John has tried them all. In the end, what worked is something much simpler. Read more➡️
Neuroscience: You say memory fails with age? I say nope.
Short-term memory contains the contents of your thoughts right now, including what you intend to do in the next few seconds. Our ability to automatically restore the contents of the short-term memory declines slightly with every decade after 30. But age is not the major factor so commonly assumed, says Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and professor at McGill University. Read more➡️
Technology: A teardown of Stripe’s $35 billion valuation
Today, less than 8% of global commerce happens online. Stripe is intent on growing that number. As businesses and consumers become more comfortable using credit cards online, the proportion of US commerce that takes place online has steadily increased over the last 20 years. This growth has created major opportunities in the payments space, and companies like Stripe — the payments unicorn valued at a masive $35B — are hungry to capitalize on them. Read more➡️

Book that’s keeping me company 📗
The Organized Mind by Daniel Levitin: If you read my article above, you would have noticed that I reference his book. I began this about a week ago and am glued to every page. By now you know I love knowledge management and keeping things organized. Dan touches upon all the fun topics: memory, attention, brain-architecture. It’s a delight to read if you care about your content diet. Also, did I mention Dan is a neuroscientist, author, and musician? Good for him.
Hi there! If you’re feeling generous, can you like this post on Substack? It would greatly improve the visibility. You can follow me on Instagram for fun life stories and LinkedIn for not-so-fun life stories. Email ask@bsoundarya.com for questions.
Aaand.. you’re awesome. Don’t forget that. :)