Clutter Crisis

You don't need to process everything at once. Your job isn't to absorb all the information; it's to search for the key terms. Think of yourself as Ctrl+F in human form.

Grab a highlighter or a coloured pen. This is your most important tool. Your first mission is not to solve the problem, but to actively engage with the page by hunting for what matters.

Scan the problem and mark three things in three different colours (or with three different symbols):

• GREEN for GO: The actual question you need to answer (e.g., "find the area").
• BLUE for CLUES: The numbers, facts, or data points you're given.
• BLACK for NOISE: Actively cross out one piece of information that is irrelevant or distracting. This is a power move.

Every cluttered page has an anchor—the one piece of information everything else connects to. It's often the title, the axis of a graph, or the biggest number. Circle it. Everything else revolves around this.

The clutter on the page creates clutter in your head. Take a blank piece of paper. Write the anchor point at the top. Now, only transfer the green and blue information you highlighted. You have just created a clean, quiet space to think.

That voice saying "You should be able to understand all of this at once" is setting you up to fail. Tell it: "Nope. My job is to find the signal in the noise. I don't need to understand the noise."

Your vision wants to take in the whole page. Don't let it. Use your finger to physically underline one line of text or one part of a diagram at a time. This forces your brain to focus on just one thing, dramatically reducing the feeling of being swamped.

Your goal is not to be polite to the worksheet. Your goal is to conquer it. Be ruthless. Ask yourself: "Do I need this? Does this help me answer the green question?" If the answer is no, dismiss it.

If you highlight the wrong thing, it's not a mistake—it's a learning moment. It tells you, "Okay, that piece of data wasn't as important as I thought. What else could be?" This is how you train your detective skills.

The win isn't to immediately "get" the whole problem. The win is to successfully ignore 50% of the page without guilt. Confidence comes from knowing you have a strategy to cut through the chaos, every single time.