F·08
Focus & Deep Work
Four Things, Not Seven
Working memory holds about four items. Everything past that is being dropped while you believe you are still holding it.
- Evidence
- proven
- Topic
- Focus
- Things to do
- 3
- Read
- 1 min
provenHow strong is the evidence?
Tested again and again, by different people, and it keeps coming out the same. You can lean on this.
- Cowan, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2001 — the ‘magical number 4’
- revising Miller’s 7±2 of 1956
Why it works
Miller’s famous seven described chunks in immediate recall under favourable conditions. Once rehearsal and chunking are controlled out, real capacity is three to five.
What to do about it
- Write everything down the moment it arrives. Paper is not a crutch, it is the correct peripheral for a four-slot system.
- Put three options in front of a decision, not eight.
- When explaining something, give three points. The fourth is where the first one falls out.
Where people go wrong
Holding a phone number, a task, a question and an argument at once, then blaming your memory when one vanishes. It was never held.
Read next
- Four Hours Is the CeilingNobody sustains more than three to four hours of genuinely hard cognitive work a day. The rest of the day is a different kind of work.solid
- Retrieval Beats ReviewTrying to recall something strengthens memory far more than reading it again. Rereading mostly builds confidence.proven
- SpacingThe same total study time, spread out, produces far more durable memory than massed together.proven
- Sleep Is Part of the Study SessionMemory is consolidated during sleep. What you learn before sleeping survives; what you lose sleep to learn does not.proven