Remember a few years ago when “outsourcing” was evil? How fast things change these days!

Today, outsourcing is considered one of the best things you can do for your brain.

This outsourcing involves offloading information to “brain extenders” such as calendars, address books and smartphones with all of their apps.

By using external systems that help you pay attention and remember, you’re able to keep track of important information without undue wear, tear and stress on your brain and body, according to Daniel Levitin, author of The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.

Levitin, a professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscientist who also wrote the bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, has set up his newest book as both a primer on neuroscience and a self-help book. As a result, you learn helpful information about the brain as well as useful coping mechanisms.

In particular, he explains both how to manage excessive information in the digital age and why it’s such a special challenge for the way our brain is designed and works.

It’s not just the volume of information we now have; it’s also the digital format and our hectic lives. All three cause problems.

We’re used to categorizing and organizing physical things. When we put them in a particular place, it’s fairly easy to visualize what these objects look like in their spot.

Now contrast that to digital files and “libraries” in our computers, smartphones and other digital devices.

We no longer can associate one of these files with a specific spatial location when we’re trying to retrieve it. It’s definitely not on the top right hand bookshelf behind the turquoise Moroccan vase, or even a faceless file cabinet. Rather it’s in some electronic file. So we often have to rely on the electronic search feature, wasting precious time.

Then our brain can fail us—or more accurately, we can abuse our brain when we handle physical objects necessary for our daily life, such as our keys, phone and wallet.

We lose track of what we’re doing because we’re dividing our limited attention among multiple thoughts and actions. Then when we try to find stuff or remember, we have to rummage, which is another time suck and an exercise in frustration.

To avoid this—as well as compensate for our brain taking a nap without us knowing it—we need to be super disciplined about putting important possessions in assigned spots to ensure easy retrieval.

If these challenges aren’t enough, we also have to deal with the problem of “shadow work” —all the unpaid labor we undertake, also known as “self service.”

Levitin maintains—and who will disagree?—that that we’re doing much more work than ever before. These extra tasks include booking our own air travel, scanning the groceries we’re buying, pumping our gas, setting up our own online bill paying, etc. All of this eats into our leisure time as well as taxes our brain.

Doing these actions—especially making all the decisions required along the way—requires almost as much cognitive energy as making critical business choices, such as deciding what new product to bring to market or what new customer segment to serve.

So what’s a sensible person to do?

Take some time to learn about your brain and how to deal with the information explosion. Being knowledgeable about “meta-cognition”–the thinking that enables you to understand, analyze and control your thinking processes—will help you stay calm and carry on and even improve your performance.

By being explicit with traditionally implicit practices, you will be better equipped to make better sense of and then manage the evolving digital world around us.

Also, encourage those you work with to do the same. Recognize that the offloading and organizing solutions you settle on might be different because each person’s brain is unique.

Are you willing to invest this time in yourself and your brain?