The Simplest System

Yellow Alert

I tell people I bought the giant yellow Yeti to fix two forms of memory loss. It reminds me to drink the water. And when I misplace it, it’s easy to spot.

Both of those are real. Here’s how it happened.

It started with water, back in September of 2022. I was making a concerted effort to drink enough of it, and I was doing it with a standard Yeti tumbler in basic black. That meant refilling constantly and losing count of how many I’d had. And the bottle itself kept going missing. Black blends into every conference table and kitchen counter it touches. It traveled everywhere with me, so it got left behind in a lot of spots. Part of most days went to a search party of one, a low-grade alert humming in the background.

I leave things places. My whole life.

So I fixed both problems with one purchase. I bought a Yeti big enough that three fills covers the whole day. Morning. Midday. Evening. A rhythm I can’t miscount. And I bought it in the loudest color they sell, because if I was going to keep abandoning this bottle, I wanted it visible from across the room.

It works better than I hoped. Earlier this year I left it in a hotel lobby in Blacksburg on a trip to visit my daughter at college. I called the front desk. “Did you see a big yellow Yeti?” “Yeah, we got it.” That was the whole search. Somebody who has never met me found my stuff, because the description takes three words.

The color spread from there, one item at a time. Two years after the bottle, I put my AirPods in a bright yellow case. I considered getting my name printed on the case instead, and the reason I didn’t holds the whole idea in one line: you can’t read a name from across a room. A name identifies your things after they’re already in someone’s hand. A color identifies them before you finish scanning the lobby. I also don’t put my name on anything I might sell one day. But mostly it’s the distance.

Somewhere in there I noticed what phones do around my own house. A dark phone disappears against dark furniture and blankets. Yellow rarely blends into anything.

In March of 2025 I was getting ready to travel for RLF Southeast, the leadership program where this newsletter accidentally got its name. Regular travel meant regular chances to lose bigger things, so the carry-on went yellow, and so did the backpack. A side benefit I hadn’t planned on: nobody grabs my suitcase by mistake. I’ve been watching luggage carousels ever since. You almost never see a yellow one.

Then it paid off in Charlotte. Small plane, the kind where they gate-check the carry-ons and set them out on the ramp when you land. I got off, walked up the jet bridge, and made it all the way into the terminal before it hit me: my suitcase was still out there. I told the gate agent. She said I could wait for it to come around with the rest of the bags. Then she paused.

“Or I can go grab it, if you know what it looks like.”

“Very easy. Bright yellow.”

She walked down the ramp and came back with the suitcase. No panic on my end, no lost afternoon. When she offered, I smiled, because that was the exact moment I knew the whole thing had paid for itself. I handed the search to a stranger and it worked.

The notebook came in the same March batch. Same reason. In a conference room full of black notebooks, nobody ever has to guess.

Here’s why I’m telling you about a water bottle. I build systems for a living. A few stories back I wrote about a memory problem I solved with a database. But the one that saves me most often costs nothing and has no moving parts. The simplest of them all is a color.

Look at what it deletes. I don’t try to remember where I set things down. I don’t keep a running inventory in my head at every gate and every counter. Half the time I don’t even do my own searching, because the search transfers: “bright yellow” is a complete set of instructions, handed to anyone, that works in any airport or hotel on earth. The load doesn’t get managed. It gets removed.

Most people attack this problem with attention. Be more careful. Do a pocket check. Try harder. A permanent yellow alert. I went the other way and made all of it unnecessary. Attention costs you something every single day. A color was one decision. I made it once, and it’s still working.

Find the thing you keep losing, the thing you have to remember, the thing that quietly eats a slice of your day. Don’t promise to watch it closer. Change it so it can’t hide. Choose a rhythm you can’t miscount. Give it a place it always lives. Get a color you can see across a room.

Just don’t pick yellow. That’s mine.

Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.