A guy by the name of Professor Solomon wrote a partially tongue-in-cheek book called How to Find Lost Objects. You can download it for free here (5MB PDF).

It’s entertaining in parts, and the instructions to make your own thinking cap are amusing enough. The 67 pages have quite a bit of fluff. I found the tips (the meat of the book) sensible but unsatisfying. I was hoping for something more ingenious than things like retracing your steps or looking where the item belongs. An average person could have come up with those steps if they’d sat down to think it over for a few minutes.

An additional weakness is that his steps don’t apply if a child has misplaced your belongings. There’s a set of keys my wife still hasn’t been able to find after hours of searching, and I the book didn’t address such a scenario.

In any event, it can serve as a reminder on how to find lost items and for the price of nothing, you can’t lose anything but time.

(via lifehacker)