This is an excerpt from my latest book Dear Hannah: 70 Methods I Used and Abused to Change Who I Am.

How I Cut My Homework Time in Half

Date: May 8, 1999

Age: 17

Location: San Diego, CA

Subject: The Memory Book

Hi Hannah. I swear, I’m trying my best to relax and just let high school wash over me. But I don’t think it’s a matter of working harder or less hard. I just need to work smarter.

I was wandering around Barnes & Nobles the other day, and I picked up this book called The Memory Book. As I was flipping through it, learning about creative mnemonics, it really struck me: I might be able to cut my homework in half because of this.

For example, we have these 30-word vocab tests in AP English, and our teacher, Mrs. Bachman always puts the answers in the same order as the assignment list. So if you just memorize the 30 words in order, you can easily get a perfect score. So today, I took a leisurely stroll to English, and I saw Chao and company already seated, facing each other, flipping frantically through flash cards. I found a chair off to the side, pulled out the assigned list, and over the next five minutes, started applying the mnemonics from The Memory Book. Mrs. Bachman then came in, handed out the quiz, and I was the first to finish. I then stared at my paper for a few minutes, so as to not be the first to hand it in (someone always breezes through these things and slams their paper on the teacher’s desk). When I handed it in, Mrs. Bachman sighed because she knew I would ace this one.

The basic principle of the book is that you will remember anything that has strange or exotic associations with it. So if you were told to remember that King Charles was followed by Oliver Cromwell, you could concoct a story about the charred (“Charles”) remains of a throne being used to cook olives (“Oliver”), and that the crumbs (“Crom-”) being thrown down a well (“-well”).

Likewise, with each of the 30 words in the vocab quiz, I create 29 stories, chaining each pair together. Whereas it used to take me 30 minutes the night before to memorize them, the process now takes 5 minutes. Now I’m saving between 1–3 hours a night studying, which is exactly the kind of efficiency gain I wanted when I pretended I was in a video game.

So not only is my homework under control, but I have time to focus on go2 and my web consultancy, and still have a life! Why isn’t everybody doing this? Instead of focusing everything on studying, everybody should devote at least 5–10% of their time on studying how to study.

- Phil

Learning mnemonics was key to freeing up my schedule in high school, which helped me lead a more balanced life. Nowadays, I just use these techniques to memorize small details like phone numbers or people’s names. It’s a nice parlor trick.