Most office supply stores sell high-lighters. The idea is pretty good. You high-light important text in yellow or pink to make it easy to find again. So if you are reading a book or report, you simply high-light the important parts of the text.
Obviously this can help you find information more quickly in the future, but it isn’t really the most productive method. Instead of using a high-lighter use a black magic marker and simply cover up all the text that isn’t important. That way it won’t be around to distract you when you come back looking for the important stuff.
This is particularly helpful if you are working with legal contracts.
We don’t need to cover the text that isn’t important. Why not just change the fonts color of the unimportant part?
Cony – well the post was an April Fools Day joke, but your idea is a good one. There was a company in the early 90s that was doing exactly what you described. They would produce books where some of the words were bold and some were normal. If you read just the bold words, the text made sense. You could read all the words and the text would read as originally written. I don’t know how many books they actually did this way, I saw a Bible that was written like that.
The company was called QuickScan if I remember correctly, but I can’t seem to find any record of them online.