RENOTATE

Invent stable names, symbols, and legends only when the compression saves more mental effort than the decoding costs.

Your chemistry notes are drowning in repeated phrases. Every page says "the concentration of the reactant" and "the rate at which the forward reaction proceeds," spelled out longhand each time, and rereading them takes nearly as long as the lecture did. Meanwhile the textbook says the same things in six symbols. The difference isn't intelligence; it's notation.

RENOTATE means inventing stable names, symbols, and legends, but only when the compression saves more mental effort than the decoding costs. The cue: repeated prose or ambiguous labels are overloading your working memory. Create the shorthand: a fixed symbol for each recurring quantity, typed arrows for relationships (a different arrow for "causes" versus "becomes"), consistent units, and a legend in the corner defining every symbol in plain language. The test in the spec is economic: adopt notation only when compression exceeds decoding cost. A symbol you use 40 times a week earns its learning curve; one you'd use twice does not. It works when you can manipulate and compare structures with fewer errors, working a problem in symbols where prose would tangle you. The safeguards: always keep the plain-language legend, prevent one symbol from meaning two things, and never inflict jargon compression that exports the decoding cost to some future reader, including future you.