“then you’ve highlighted nothing,” as my friend Kobe used to say.
This is going to be a visually-painful way of making this point but hopefully it makes the lesson memorable. In college when I would study in a group I would notice that other students highlighted stuff from the chapters that they had read. Nothing wrong with marking up a text book – it generally facilitates greater recall – but the problem was that they would highlight 80% of the text on a page so that when finished, the majority of the book’s verbiage was bright yellow.
The obvious problem with this practice is that it doesn’t get you anything. The more detrimental side effect though is that not only does it not enhance your ability to process and extract meaningful associations from the text while reading, it detracts from your ability to review the text later. Like the fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf, your brain eventually habituates the highlighting and stops assigning any meaningful significance- it becomes merely a distracting nuisance.
So how does this possibly relate to situations beyond highlighted textbooks? It translates directly across to how we manage our todo’s and assign priority to tasks. The main takeaway here is this:
However you express priority in your todo list, make sure that only a few items at any given time are prioritized.
I recommend the “dot-size” priority trick if you use a whiteboard or notebook. Anytime you have more than 20% of your items flagged as priority, I guarantee that your effectiveness on tackling any one item will be diluted. The mindset when assigning priority should be “what three things this week will have the greatest impact on advancing our cause?” Notice this is different than “what are the three most pressing items on my plate this week?” The latter is a reactive vs. proactive approach – you can get into reactive mode where you let your todo list drive you. Urgency is completely independent of Importance – but that’s a topic for another post…
Hopefully if you’ve ben able to tolerate the highlighting and have read this far, the message will have hit home and resonate with you. And the next time you find yourself escalating a bunch of todo items, you’ll remember the words of my friend Kobe and know that “when you’ve highlighted everything, you’ve highlighted nothing.“
When traveling alone you will at some point find yourself in a crowded airport terminal or restaurant waiting with multiple pieces of luggage. Professional thieves choose this high-commotion areas to target unsuspecting individuals because there are a lot of distractions and they can quietly snatch a bag while you are preoccupied with something else. When I’m at the gate and I know I’ve got my boarding pass and I’m good to go, I turn on the iPod and snooze before the flight. And under normal circumstances if I were to leave my bags on the ground next to me, I would become a prime target for a thief to stroll by and lift them. As simple as it sounds, here is a technique that prevents this:
Using plastic bags as carry-ons is just never a good idea if you can avoid it. Not only are they flimsy but they eventually turn your fingers into sausage links if they’re loaded with heavy stuff and you have to carry them far.
When traveling in Mexico especially, I will split both my cash and credit cards in two places so that if my wallet is stolen I still have dinero somewhere else. If you travel with a money belt I recommend putting a credit card and a few bills there and leaving the rest in your wallet. Cash is king in an emergency situation but the credit card ensures you have access to larger money if you need it.
A friend of mine, Jeff Hausman once said to me upon returning from an extended vacation in Thailand, “Why is it that I feel so depressed by all this concrete and the pace of things here in the US– what are we doing”
The trip was in every way an epic adventure. We saw terrain and people that few others will ever see. When we finally arrived in Cabo we pulled up to this beach bar called “The Office” (still fresh out of our cube farms, the irony was laughable). We promptly grabbed a metal bucket of coronas, filled the bottom 1/3rd with sand and floated out into the ocean bobbing up and down on the swells that rolled in off the Pacific. It is a gem of a memory I keep tucked away and to this day draw upon it in moments of great stress.
Like all amazing journeys though, it had to come to an end. We were there for twelve days and on the final day (once we had convinced Brad that he could not in fact smuggle the stray puppy that he had found back to the States), we guided Jeff’s Bronco onto Interstate 1 and began the long drive back up the Baja to Phoenix. We each took something different from that trip but what was consistent for all of us was the grounding effect of extracting ourselves from the rat race, transplanting to a seaside town and putting life in slo-mo for awhile.
Anyways, that’s the gist of my theory. Of course I have no scientific basis to substantiate any of this but it’s a best guess based on past personal experience and could be fairly easily tested with control groups. It would be great to see some grad student pick this up and do it as a dissertation – I will gladly volunteer to be one of the subjects if needed ;-)
