Jan 29

highlighter.jpg“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.

takeaway 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.

6 Responses to “If you have highlighted everything…”

  1. Tim Peter says:

    Perfect, Sean. A good review of the literature recommends somewhere around 3-5 key priorities as the cutoff. I once worked in a place where folks often referred to “our top 15 priorities.” Needless to say, nothing got done. To restate your premise, when everything is a priority, nothing is.

  2. noah kagan says:

    Awesome point! I have been spending a LOT of time lately on effective copy and such…

  3. CWW says:

    Sean, don’t you know that those people you saw mass-highlighting in college are now the fat cat execs in client meetings who look at a proof and say, “this is okay, but can we make the whole bottom paragraph bigger and in bold text? And instead of just our name being in red, why not make all the contact info in red too? We want to make sure people see it.” The inability to understand visual prioritizing, as you and the commentors have pointed out, is one that is prevalent in many different aspects of life. Nothin’ you can do but sit back and laugh, my friend.

  4. […] I wrote a little while ago about this concept of “if you’ve highlighted everything…” and why it’s good to keep your main list of current assaults lean. I wanted to explain the concept of urgency vs. importance that I mentioned in that post and then propose a simple addition to the 4 mechanisms for managing scattered todo’s that I proposed. […]

  5. Mass-highlighting and excessive ‘priority’ items seem to me to be the classic case of confusing what important with what is urgent.

    One of the worst examples of mis-managment I’ve experienced used to encourage this behavior – make everything urgent and we’ll be more successful he seemed to be saying.

    The main result of his approach was stress and employee turnover!

  6. Mass-highlighting and excessive 'priority' items seem to me to be the classic case of confusing what important with what is urgent.

    One of the worst examples of mis-managment I've experienced used to encourage this behavior – make everything urgent and we'll be more successful he seemed to be saying.

    The main result of his approach was stress and employee turnover!

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