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)
Oddly enough, I became a bit better at finding things after reading a series of Sherlock Holmes stories. I took more time to deduce things based on known facts and quickly eliminate red herrings, just as Sherlock Holmes would do. Still probably no help when children lose keys, but another good read.
» Comment by Seth on April 7, 2008 @ 11:46 amI agree, treating a lost item search like a detective case helps because it makes you more methodical. Maybe if the kids left some clues…
» Comment by Dan on April 7, 2008 @ 1:13 pm