Gtd and Reticular System vs Availability in Cognitive Psychology
FleetingIn gtd, put every single thing out of your head allows one to see the gestalt and reflect on it.
IIUC, once you take a step back, you let your system 1 make automatic connections. Also, some part of the brain called the reticular system will “calibrate” to react when outside stimuli are linked to this big picture.
This looks a lot like availability heuristic in cognitive psychology that claims we tend to be biased in favor of the last stimuli we received. This is also found in anchoring for instance.
Therefore, because we know that our brains will be more akin to identify stuff similar to the things we recently were in contact with (wysiati), let’s take advantage of this and make sure the things we recently were in contact with are our horizons of focus. This is a kind of guided serendipity method to help focus on what you are doing and let the magic of mundane stuff happen.
Of course, this does not pretend that this would be enough to make your projects happen. You also need some system 2 behavior, but that helps a lot.