Structure learning programs based on memory and attention management rather than time management.

Is your “internal librarian” overwhelmed? That may be the case if you are juggling too much while trying to learn. On Sunday morning, Consciously Digital founder Anastasia Dedyukhina spoke to a packed room of ATD23 attendees about why people become distracted and how to unburden our “internal librarians.”

Dedyukhina, author of Homo Distractus: Fight for Your Choices and Identity in the Digital Age, emphasized that learning is an active process, not a passive one.

“We learn by putting whatever we learn into action,” she explains.

Dedyukhina used the librarian metaphor to discuss how cluttered our minds become while distracted. Are our librarians putting the right books on the correct shelves in our minds?

There are four steps to learning, says Dedyukhina:

• Noticing change (sensory memory)

• Focusing (short-term and working memory)

• Memorizing (understand, process, and integrate into long-term memory)

• Putting learning into practice (integration and information retrieval)

Technological devices obviously change how we learn. Research (presented by Dedyukhina) shows that people switched activities on screen every 44 to 50 seconds between 2016 and 2021. In 2004, that number was every two and a half minutes. “That’s what people in all professions do, so good luck creating a learning program,” Dedyukhina joked.

Nevertheless, memory is much more than just storage space. Among other uses, it creates associations and generates ideas by recalling mental material stored by your brain years ago; memory is related to the ability to stay focused, shapes our sense of self, and helps us plan into the future.

To help shape our minds and memories and create a better environment for learning, Dedyukhina suggests creating online learning programs for humans instead of robots. Because we have so many distractions bombarding us, she suggests forgetting about time management and focusing on attention management. It’s important to remember that it’s OK for learning to be hard. But we should also be mindful of not making it more complicated than it needs to be with unnecessary distractions.