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Setting priorities in the information overload

    Can you remember what you had for lunch last week Tuesday? Probably not. Our brains are masters at forgetting information we don’t regularly repeat. But what can we do about it? I, like many others, had to painstakingly learn the art of learning as I went through college. Here are some of my tips for successful learning.
    To help me focus my learning on what is important, I have come to greatly appreciate the Eisenhower Principle. Developed by a president and general, it asks two questions: how important and how urgent is a task? For our case of learning, it yields four possibilities: A question that is important and urgent, I look up immediately. A question that is important but not urgent, I write down to look up another time. There are always questions that don’t belong to the topic at all. Courageously put these in the wastebasket. What remains are things that are urgent but not important. Something that does not belong to learning at all can fall into this category. For example, cooking and housework can be shared with a roommate during exam time. The Eisenhower principle can thus also be applied to everyday things.