One of the small "life hacks" I tell people (like going to departures and avoiding the busy arrivals terminal at the airport, or watching television shows in the language you want to learn (very effective) to get both enjoyment and results at the same time (and make you enjoy learning), another life hack is to reread things, multiple times if necessary!
As adults we think we're infallible and not kids anymore, we don't need to reread things since we understood everything the first time. This might be true, but just being able to understand everything doesn't mean you absorb everything, and definitely doesn't mean you will remember everything. I can read a vocab list of 20 words, understand everything at the moment, and the very next day barely remember a single word out of that list of 20 words.
On a work assignment the other day, I made a mistake by not rereading a key passage of an email in Japanese and let my team down. Sadly the mistake was not caused by my inability to read Japanese (I've trained very hard to develop that skill) or that I didn't have enough time and was under a time crunch (I had plenty of time to retrace my steps!) or any other extingent factors. It was simply because my mind is trained nowadays to go through words really quickly, only look for keywords and the things I care about, and then move on once I think I've acquired those bits. The more I do this, the more it becomes a habit, and pretty soon I'm going way too quickly through the writing and don't get the main gist of the idea, lose crucial pieces and get yelled at by my boss. I find that rereading articles, as painful as it is to admit that you need one, helps to solve a lot of problems, in case you 1.) missed a key part entirely, or 2.) solidify your understanding of a portion of someone's writing in your mind so you can access it more easily later, 3.) think about the writing in a different way consider other possiblities of how to interpret. A very, very powerful tool that we don't need an app for: it's just the power of human ability and communication.
Contracts and agreements- make sure you read those again, as boring as they are. Or at least the part where it says how much money you owe, or like cancellation fees (nowadays so many hotels, airlines, and almost any kind of purchases you make have a cancellation fee attached and it's usually not in a very obvious spot, so read carefully and reread if you have to!)
Read emails a few times to make sure you haven't missed something the author of the email said, whether it's a key word here or instructions that can be interpreted multiple ways. Many times I've thought that an email was very confusing after the first time reading through only to go back and say "oh that's what he/she meant!" sometimes audibly so others could hear. The worst is to follow instructions on an email before you fully understand what the instructions, then have to retrace your steps all over later when you miss a key step.
Reread articles and fantasy sports blogs a year later! See how your perspectives and attitudes towards things have changed after reading the same article.
Reread your own diaries and works a few years after you write them! I constantly re-read and re-read blogs and am often astonished at how much of my past I've forgot, or how much I've changed.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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