This article reminds me of posts about "bullet journalling" on sites like Pinterest: the optimization of the productivity process or tool (or in the case of "bullet journal" posts, the beauty of the tool) is the end itself, not a means to an end. The posts are about/by "productivity" or "journalling" enthusiasts and don't map well to people who are simply seeking a bit of an organization or productivity boost, not an extremely time-consuming new hobby.
The thing in this article that most reminded me about beauty-journalling posts was the todo list. In vanity journalling circles, the todo lists are full of meta-tasks "post to instagram; new journal layout; blog post about journalling" as well as pure vanity items like "yoga!; Breakfast: saffron avocado toast (yum!!)" Likewise, in this post his todo list includes items about writing about productivity, using other productivity tools, and other such "meta-productivity" items.
There's nothing wrong with this but it reveals that the "productivity" itself is the hobby, not just a means to an end.
I think you can go too deep into it as a form of procrastination, but I think this post is sincere. Spaced repetition is backed by science as an effective way to acquire knowledge (e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3782739/).
I'm personally more skeptical of the Zettelkasten/Roam/PKB craze as being effective, but that's only because I feel like I've had yet to find a problem where it would have been the solution. I'm constantly left feeling like it may be the solution to many problems I have related to memory and remembering thoughts, but without personal experience in it, I can't say what it's worth.
I don't think it's even possible to evaluate a productivity system without using it for a long amount of time and conducting periodic reviews on it regularly to see if it's helping with anything. I don't know what the metrics to measure are, and I don't know what a review like this would look like.
On the paper journaling thing, though, I think the answer is much more clear cut: it's more about the artistic nature of it than anything else. A paper journal is almost always impossible to search, easily damaged, easily lost, and easily customized with stickers, different pens and pencils, and other decor. It's easy to find a notebook you like with a paper you like and then justify writing in it. However, I don't think there are many practical benefits that can't be applied to an electronic system that's functionally similar, save for the effect of slowing down entry so you remember it more.
A few years ago I was looking through my last.fm scrobbles. Scrobbling is passive and it's widely supported, so I did it pretty regularly. The process of reviewing them was like tapping an area of my memory I didn't know existed. I saw the songs my daughter liked to listen to when she was three and remembered trips we took while listening to those songs, and I mean vivid memories of the drive, including the wrong turn we made that made us go through that album twice. Things no photo could ever recall for me. It was a wonderful experience that I may never have had if I wasn't keeping that record.
Going back through old notes I've made on books I've read or movies I've watched gives a similar experience, taking me back to how I thought at the time and a window into how I've changed.
I certainly don't want to study everything to death, but I wholly see the appeal of a system to contain things I've known and done.
> On the paper journaling thing, though, I think the answer is much more clear cut: it's more about the artistic nature of it than anything else
A counterexample as food for thought: I do all of my task tracking in a paper notebook. It looks boring -- there's no design and I only use one black and one red pen.
What I've found in over 5 years I've used more than a dozen task trackers for various organizations across different projects and teams. Each time, I have to learn the system and adapt my process to it. Every six months the productivity community goes nuts over some new app.
On the other hand, my notebook process is just the same. Paper has been around for over a thousand years and will be around a lot longer than that. I never have to keep up with the new hot productivity system or worry about the company that makes my favorite app going out of business. Paper will never release an update that makes me redo my whole process.
Paper let's me find a system that works and stick with it. Paper gets out of the way. I can focus on being productive instead of productivity.
My BS detector went off immediately when I read the link about Zettelkastens, and then I googled "Zettelkasten", and I skimmed through five different articles that were each pages long and talked over and over about how wonderful Zettelkastens are but didn't give any information about how they work or how to implement them practically. That's a pretty reliable indication that the service is the end, not a means to the end.
For the uninformed, a Zettelkasten is a searchable, unordered, labeled database. That's it.
I think your BS detector has a bug that may cause you to miss out on some good stuff! ;-) Sometimes there are ideas which are really good and very simple, but hard to explain because understanding them requires a shift of perspective which comes more easily from hands-on experience than from verbal explanations.
"Zettelkasten" is more of an attitude toward note-taking than a specific technique... it can be implemented in many seeingly almost unrelated ways, from Luhman's index-card box to personal wikis, etc. The defining characteristic is more in the way you integrate note-taking and note-review into your daily workflow and thinking process.
The best description I've found of it is this article: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel.... Slightly long, but it completely describes how they work and how to implement them practically (on notecards). On the other hand, the articles on https://zettelkasten.de are pretty difficult to understand for the uninitiated.
> For the uninformed, a Zettelkasten is a searchable, unordered, labeled database. That's it.
I could spin up ElasticSearch or something similar and have it crawl all the files on my computer and get an 80% solution. Kinda like Apple's "Finder" functionality.
Well, the original one isn't unordered, and isn't meant fundamentally to be "searchable" (its original "implementation" being index cards).
Here's my attempt at conciseness:
A zettelkasten is like a bunch of files in a single folder with
1. a naming schema that kinda indicates what follows what (an ordering scheme, but persnickety and optional, see https://zettelkasten.de/posts/luhmann-folgezettel-truth/), and
2. links in between the files, originally just by writing the names to be manually looked for.
Some people use 2 to be able to get rid of 1, as with an indication of PREVIOUS (link) and NEXT (link)
The point is that you have one thing on each card / file that you might want to go back to on its own.
It makes a lot of sense in academia where you want to be able to trace ideas in a referenceable way, identify your own takes on bits of other people's work, and connect different sources together when you see similarities.
My very elementary (just skimmed some blog posts about it for a few hours this morning [1]) understanding of why Zettelkasten is a game-changer is that: its a system of organizing notes in a bottom-up, atomic fashion, instead of the usual top-down categorization where the notes don't lend itself well to reviewing or linking with concepts you've previously learned. Basically, a graph (where links are bidirectional) instead of a tree. The power of such a system is that it maps closer to how knowledge is stored in our brains, and that the more you use the system, the better benefit from "network effects".
In traditional note-taking systems, the category is the most obvious first-class citizen. In ZK, the little ideas take precedence, because some little idea that belongs to category A can easily end up belonging to other categories B, C, D, ... as time goes on and you study more subjects/discipline.
I'm sure the idea I'm describing is nothing new, groundbreaking, or unique to ZK - but this is the impression that I got, and I've had the pain of having very poorly managed knowledge via Evernote/OneNote/Notion/etc. before. I also dabbled with Anki and mindmapping. I believe the optimal solution is to combine all 3, since mindmaps have the "graph" structure part down; Anki only focuses on recall, but not conceptual understanding/linkage; and traditional notes, while obviously storing more information, are usually organized in hierarchical top-down structures that don't lend themselves well to reviewing or building a deliberate map of knowledge.
Another alternative to mindmaps is something like Jerry's Brain [2], where irrelevant nodes are collapsed until you explore them. Jerry has given extremely compelling presentations because he's used it for something like 20 years.
I am aware of a bias as I write this: I simply might not have had enough discipline when using traditional note-taking systems before, and am going through a bit of a (pre) honeymoon phase with this new ZK stuff. Just my 2 grains of salt.
They are also usually todo lists of a size that... are small. I don't need to manage a todo list of 10 items. That's not the problem. How to manage 100+ items with due dates is a much more interesting question, and productivity porn is not the place to find answers to that.
(I still read it. I love that people obsess so much about it. It's like going into an office supply store, and just lovingly gaze at organizers :)
Well, that bring memories. In my other life I had o office job with generic title & over the time I became the one of the oldest employee (first joiners, oldest not by age). So I found myself managing timesheets, monies, appointments, cars, vacations of 100+ people. I started a journal & also came across Bullet Journal. Internet was like decorate, spend time on it; but mine was purely functional.
Simple basic page with To Do Title. New Day starts after a blank line. Each task is a blank square box, task text. When done, a tick in the box & done-date in right margin.
At end of the month, all pending tasks get reviewed; no-longer-needed gets a cross X in box; needed ones get moved to Big To Do page, original entry gets a arrow in the box. Once all tasks sorted, done, cancelled, moved, the big box in front of title gets ticked with today's date.
Big To Do page has a box, task original date in dd/mm format, then task.
Some specific pages like Financial, 6-Monthly, Logs etc with templated tasks prefilled with current months data, kind of checklists. 6 Month page gets tasks required not in immediate future, but sometimes in ^ months. If available, deadline date gets mentioned in task.
All pages numbered at lower right corner, in continuous series.
An Index page with Page Title and page numbers.
I was using a A5 ring binder with two holes.
It was not pretty to see. It was readable, not chicken scratches. Occasionally some tasks get red marks, or green. All completed pages gets scanned as pdf.
It was amazingly working. 4 years 9f my daily office work, keeping up with everybody's every type of requests. I miss that now, that now I am in a job where we can't take our bags/books to desk.
People have different needs and motivations. A friend was a fancy journal keeper, and the “ceremony” around planning and executing the fancy journal stuff was part of the review process of upcoming and past tasks.
I've used spaced repetition to help learn stuff in general. It's one of the most rewarding things I've done. Some general thoughts:
1. A lot of spaced repetition apps don't optimize for fast card creation. I like to make a card as soon as I come across something interesting, but the delay to get Anki started, and to create the card, etc just makes it frustrating. I wound up building my own app for this.
2. Cloze deletion is surprisingly effective. For those who don't know, cloze deletion involves taking a sentence, blanking the interesting parts out e.g. "The moon landing happened on _______", and trying to recall the blank parts. This is effective because it's a quick way to make cards, thus solving the problem of slow card creation.
3. I fared better with lots of small, one-sentence cards. My rule of thumb is that a card should fit in a tweet.
4. Subjectively speaking, using spaced repetition didn't just help me recall stuff in my cards, it also helped me recall stuff in general.
One of the issues Anki has, I find, is that if you end up taking a long break for whatever reason, there's no way to "reset".
I used Anki to study Chinese for a period of about 10 years. At some point I decided that I wanted to memorize the poker "outs" (probabilities of filling out a hand based on what had currently been dealt). Then I went through a time where I was really busy and didn't study the poker deck for a month (but I made time for Chinese). When I came back to the poker deck, the "spaced repetition" system was completely broken: I had a massive long list of cards that had expired, most of which I'd completely forgotten; but it just kept showing them to me in one giant loop, rather than focusing on a few to actually teach me. And I didn't even have a clean way of telling it, "Just pretend I haven't seen any of these cards at all". I ended up just deleting the deck; that discouraged me from doing anything else I wasn't willing to commit to doing every single day.
I've used Anki for about ten years, and I'm going to tell you a huge secret...
There's absolutely no need to "reset". Ever.
If you have only ten minutes to devote to Anki, then only spend ten minutes. If at some later point, you have more time, then spend that time.
Set the maximum reviews per day to something you can do most days -- for me, that's 250 cards. If you're behind, turn off 'new' cards. And eventually, you will catch up.
What if you don't do Anki for a month or two? You still don't need to reset. Anything you remember after that month will have a much longer time until you next see it.
Only use Anki as much as you have time for it. Let it figure out which cards to show you. Resetting messes with the algorithm for which cards to show.
There are a couple ways to do it that I've found. None of them is perfect for every situation I've encountered. I think that part of the reason why there's no clean way to do it is that there are so many specific things someone might want to do:
- If you want to just push cards to the back of the queue, but remember timings and history, there's a built-in command to do that.
- If you want to change the current interval of a card, but keep your history, there's also a built-in command for that.
- If you need to do the above in bulk, the "Reset Card Scheduling" plugin can make this a lot more convenient.
- If you really do want to completely reset a card, forget all history, etc., and treat it as a new card, there's the "Remove Card History" plugin.
Finally, when returning to old decks, I found I usually get the most mileage by leaving all that stuff alone and just suspending the whole thing, and then un-suspending them at a steady pace. I neglected my Kanji deck for months, and I used that approach to get myself back up to speed by doing the catch-up review in the original (RTK) order I originally learned them rather than based on Anki's priority.
For what it's worth, I keep everything in a single deck. I never stop reviewing stuff and "interleaving" makes learning more effective than "blocking" (studying things in blocks). Source: Bjork et al 2013 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231610455_Self-Regu...)
I'm kind of new to Anki myself (started a couple of weeks ago) so I might be wrong, but I think you can limit the amount of cards you want to review on a per-deck-basis. The default-number is quite high (200 per day I think?).
If you make that number the same as the "new cards per day"-number, that might be a work around for your issue?
I don't see that there's any difference in responding "Again" to an expired card vs reclassing that card as new. When I'm catching back up on an old deck I just turn new card off and limit my reviews until I've worked through the backlog this way.
For frictionless card-creation I have made an org-capture template for quickly adding cards to an org-mode file via a custom Emacs pop-up frame. This is accessible from everywhere with the keybinding (Super + c + a).
Exporting to Anki from Emacs is done via the anki-editor mode for Emacs.
> 3. I fared better with lots of small, one-sentence cards. My rule of thumb is that a card should fit in a tweet.
Can someone tell me if this is a crazy good idea? Social network + spaced repetition. Why should you build all your own cards? Taking a class with classmates? Create a group & create cards during lecture, review/curate cards afterwards during study session, then rate which ones were most useful after the exam (or homework).
I've head a similar idea, except not in context of a group project but of a wiki. So there's a wider audience for any particular topic and more people to create and improve the exercises: cards, cloze deletion tests, etc.
I think it's important that exercises are tightly linked to the source material, like to a specific paragraph of an article, etc. So these materials should probably be added to the system as well.
* With the same starting point it should be easier to have a proper discussion.
* A new person can read the source and understand cards more easily with context.
* Later if they've forgotten the topic completely they can reread it and hopefully remember faster.
I also had some ideas about being able to discuss and alter every paragraph in the source. Allow it to evolve to be more clear as people come and discuss confusing points.
The actual act of creating the cards is also useful to the learning process. Even if you are copying someone else's cards, copying them by hand will lead to better retention than having a computer import them.
Since you've made you're own app, and have noticed that a good card is a good tweet: I want an app that puts my cards in my twitter feed. I check twitter way too much and don't like opening Anki to review my cards. Not sure exactly how it would work, maybe I see a few tweets, and then there's a 'card' tweet, and I interact with it as usual and then get more tweets. Just an idea.
For speeding up the card creation I've recently made a CLI application [1]. It generates cards from Markdown files.
I'd recommend having its own repository with Markdown files grouped by target domain using tags for every card. It'd help to search quickly relevant cards even in the same domain.
Nice! I made a similar thing for myself, but without nearly as much polish as your project [1].
I use a custom text file format to allow creation of cloze deletions and reversible cards as well as basic cards. I also annotate text files on export so that I can export the file again without creating duplicate cards.
The big shortcoming of my script is that it generates .tsv files and Anki only allows .tsv files to contain one note type. They also do not incorporate media.
I'd like to be able to sync edits made in Anki back to the text files and vice versa. It'd be really cool to integrate a text file parser and alternative card editing mode into Anki with a plugin.
Perhaps I'll send some PR's your way instead of duplicating effort.
I have some cool decks, but I am terrible about reviewing them frequently. It just becomes another chore. Maybe I should really embrace it. I spent a few months brushing up on biology and that was really amusing but I fell out of the habit :/
Using the reminder aka notifications feature of the android app got the habit to stick for me. Total pita to figure out how to get it turned on though :)
I just...can’t relate to living this way. Maybe you have to be a special type of person, but this whole lifestyle just seems exhausting and over-managed.
I agree. In fact, what I find the most interesting part about reading is .... forgetting about it!
Basically concepts will sip thru, but learning the details is just a waste of brain cells, in my opinion.
Just leave the brain do it's job, don't read as it's a marathon, take breaks, think about that bits you've just read that was interesting, then promptly forget about it. You'll forget the details, but not the backbone of it.
Details don't matter in the end. Quite frankly the idea of knowing /by heart/ the name of the greek goddess blah blah blah he uses as an example would bore me solid. Worse, anyone knowing it and telling me about it would bore me solid :-)
> don't read as it's a marathon, take breaks, think about that bits you've just read that was interesting, then promptly forget about it.
That's basically the spaced repetition model. You need to forget a little bit, so that working memory isn't saving you, and the recall process takes effort. That's what builds long term memory. Spaced repetition systems just extend that process beyond the length of the book, in a time shorter than rereading a book.
> Quite frankly the idea of knowing /by heart/ the name of the greek goddess blah blah blah he uses as an example would bore me solid.
I agree, the names of greek gods is a bad example, unless you're a student of mythology. Spaced repetition is hard work, so probably only deploy it on things that matter. A better example might be Bayes Theorem. Incredibly powerful, but unintuitive and easily forgotten. Cards for Bayes' theorem might include the purpose: "Bayes' Theorem calculates how to adjust our prior beliefs given new evidence", as well as cards about the formula, or an intuitive visualization.
Or, maybe you want to learn more about the linux internals and spend a portion of your time memorizing the meanings of signals and errnos as a small part of a larger program of study. Sure, you can look these up in a man page, but part of the value in knowledge is knowing things exist. How many developers do you think know of SIGUSR2? Or... SIGBUS ;)
Also notice how he mentions he remembers "trickle down economics" was a "very important idea" during Reagan's presidency. But there is no mention whatsoever about the idea itself, how it's considered today, whether it was a good or bad idea, its relation to neoliberalism, whether he understands how politically divisive the idea is, etc.
Someone remembering trickle down economics was something from the Reagan era tells me nothing about their understanding of that idea and their opinions about it. Precisely the bits I want to know!
I kind of think it's in the same vein of the millennial trend of monetizing your hobbies. We've been told over-and-over that you have to maximize every experience in order to get ahead, so there's this compulsion to do so. I used to feel this way, but eventually I realized that I'm not in grad school, and it's ok to just enjoy things as I'm reading them.
As a recently relapsed biochemistry student, with a wide variety of classes in both biology and chemistry, I use Anki exhaustively. I made at least 10k cards last semester, and that was a relatively light semester in terms of credits.
With that said, I can't imagine using such a powerful, and honestly demanding, tool for everyday knowledge and tangential facts (e.g. Greek mythology as a software engineer). It strikes me as far too much tool for the job.
It seems to me that, if you struggle with retaining things you read, some simple, lightweight note taking strategies, especially handwritten, would be sufficient. I believe that's actually a recommendation that his book recommendation, Where Good Ideas Come From, makes.
I mostly read for pleasure (and occasionally for work). Even for work, I don't tabulate what I read. I read a lot of paper books too, where uploading stuff is not practical without a lot of fuss (OCR?).
I love reading. And yes, I forget a lot of stuff. But if I had to go through all this whenever I pick up a book, I'd simply stop reading.
I feel exactly like you and when I read stuff like this one - I wonder whether those people understand they're doing stuff wrong and that writing about it won't magically make them better. It's as if they're trying to hack through their own shortcomings by throwing computer applications to the mix and writing an article about it makes it work.
The exact methodology in which he manages his life is probably less important than the fact that he's making a wide-sweeping effort in the first place, and maintaining consistency.
The opposite would be never writing anything down, never knowing what you're going to be doing on any given day, never estimating how long a task is going to take, reading books while making no effort to retain any information, etc.
We all dedicate energy toward transforming the natural chaos of life into order, even if it's just forcing ourselves to work a certain amount of hours per day, or re-reading paragraphs in books because we weren't paying enough attention the first time, or making grocery lists before we go to the store. These are things most of us do deliberately because we believe they make our lives better.
It's likely that there are certain things that he could be doing better, but I have no reason to believe that the structure he's set up isn't better than what he was doing before, and I think it's probably far more effective than the structure (or lack thereof) of most people's lives.
"At the end of the day people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel"
This is basically how I approach reading as well. I think it's fairly hopeless to have a huge organizing system that assists in trying to keep information sort of floating around in the conscious mind.
Human minds aren't really fact gathering machines so I think this is largely futile and the number of things to remember is too large anyway.
I think there is more sense in trying to absorb what you read, hope that it leaves an impression of some sort or gives you a cue when it becomes relevant and just go with it and using active time for creative things.
I recently started reading "Clean Code" by "Uncle Bob" Martin and I've decided to incorporate adding notecards on what I've come across. I've created a few cards already.
But in terms of making cards on books I read for pleasure, I agree in that it seems like overkill. One of my favorite biographies is "Peter the Great" by Robert Massie, and as much as I love reading it attempting to memorize names and details and jam pack my brain with facts would fry my brain.
Zettelkasten has been making the rounds here this year. His process appears similar to the org-mode process using Jethro Kuan's org-roam. I've started using it and while it can be a bit tricky to set up and there's a couple mildly annoying bugs (with workarounds), for a solo project it filled the niche for me perfectly. I use it for all note taking and reading now and it is very satisfying.
I also did not find org-roam super easy to set up, but after a second try I have it running and am enjoying it.
Edit: I tried it a month ago - before installation was more than just (load)'ing the file. Now there are nicely documented use-package instructions and a layer for spacemacs
Same here, org-roam just kind of "clicked" things into place for me.
I've modified a template for single-subject documents called "tags" so they're stored in ~/Org/tags/. I've also configured org-journal to store files in ~/Org/Journal/
One thing I'll be interested to discover, in the future, is how I archive or age out information. Most work stuff right now is related to a single project, so what happens when that project ends? Will I need to move things outside of ~/Org/ to remove clutter, or will I just get used to it?
Anki usage is huge in medical school [1]. There are a handful of huge premade decks students drill hours a day.
I think flashcards are hugely underrated for software developers. Memorization is commonly dismissed as unnecesary when we have searchable documentation and Stack Overflow, but the same argument could be had over touch typing. There is enormous value in moving data from disk to L1 cache.
If nothing else, having solid, open source, premade decks for the core web technologies would ease the path into web development for boot campers and other newcomers.
The first step in that direction is creating a text file format similar to Markdown or TOML for creating, editing and sharing flashcards. I created a hacky solution for myself [2], and another project was also shared in these comments [3].
Why not use techniques memory champions use though? Never heard of one of them using Anki. Mnemonics, imagery and memory palaces on the other hand... It's like all the amateurs swearing that steel bikes are the best when all the professionals use carbon fiber ones.
- I have a huge Zettelkasten note archive (I manage it through Sublime-Zk, which is getting a bit slow to operate it). Can I somehow directly import all my Zettel notes?
- I tried to import my Anki cards, but it seems like while I could go through them, I couldn't assign them to any particular deck/reclassify them. They show up as part of a "Not Found" deck and I don't see any option/drag-and-drop method to move them anywhere else.
I'll definitely be giving Mochi a try. Thanks a lot for creating it!
> I have a huge Zettelkasten note archive (I manage it through Sublime-Zk, which is getting a bit slow to operate it). Can I somehow directly import all my Zettel notes?
You can import the markdown files as notes, but it won’t maintain the linking. If you send me a sample I can look into adding a Zettelkasten specific importer.
> I tried to import my Anki cards, but it seems like while I could go through them, I couldn't assign them to any particular deck/reclassify them. They show up as part of a "Not Found" deck and I don't see any option/drag-and-drop method to move them anywhere else.
Sounds like the importer derped a bit and couldn’t find the deck associated with those cards. If you send me the .apkg file I can take a look. Anki’s data model is a little weird and there’s probably some edge cases I haven’t accounted for.
I created something similar which I no longer work on (but keep running on a maintenance-type basis). Feel free to be inspired/take features or just compare with another approach.
I'm interested in the longer form note style but it be thing that keeps me in anki-land is the Android app. Is there a way to export to Anki? I hope understand that that question is counter to you the app's model.
This is a joy-sparking product, as I've been turned off by Anki's UI/UX especially when it comes to code snippets, and I'm very accustomed to Markdown.
Yeah you can export decks. The export is .mochi format, but it's just a zip file with some plain text data and attachment files (like images, audio, etc).
Was just taking a break from my Anki session to check HN.
I'm a regular user, though I'm terrible at consistent, daily reviews. I somehow manage to keep on top of it, even after skipping weekends or entire weeks. You can tweak the settings to make it easier for less-than-perfect users.
Lifehack: Anki + exercise. Combining Anki with an elliptical or stationary bike improves both my review and exercise frequency and duration.
I've made my peace with the terrible UI/UX. Like many folks here I tried to roll my own SRS app at one point. But my review sessions would always get derailed with brainstorming new features or dealing with bugs. Personally, I'm not sure that the productivity gains from improving the UI/UX are worth the development time (especially when the whole point of using Anki is efficiency).
With bluetooth headphones I've moved to doing everything I can while exercising. Even sitting down to read a book feels like precious time that could be spent combating a sedentary lifestyle like listening to the book instead.
I find it difficult to do anything intellectual while exercising at a relatively high intensity. What intensity are your workout sessions? But perhaps review is different than trying to absorb a new concept?
Personal anecdote, but there's some optima for information retention at low intensity exercise. This is around moderate to vigorous walking pace or a very slow jog.
Increase intensity beyond that point and your brain's information processing ability drops below baseline.
I've found this consistently true. At lower intensity cardio for example, I can watch educational youtube videos or follow along a movie. At high intensity, I can't even watch an action movie and follow the plot. I have to switch to music and/or a sports action video (no meaningful dialog).
The more brainless the activity, the easier it is to do parallel flashcards. An elliptical or stationary bike session will be easier than an equal intensity run where you have to worry about your gait. Flashcards are little atomic chunks for you to process independent from one another. When you do flashcards the only thing you need to concern yourself with is the short prompt on that particular card in front of you. So even if you are working out pretty hard, you can still work your way through a deck, it's just going to be at a slower rate. This differs from reading a textbook or journal article, where you have to keep a certain amount of the previous passages in memory to understand the current line. You will hit a point where flashcards stop working but the ceiling is higher than with other types of learning activities. This will differ per exercise type, per intensity, and the subject you're learning.
There is also SuperMemo 18 (https://super-memo.com/supermemo18.html) which is from the same people as supermemo.com except it's a desktop app with way more features but also a much higher learning curve.
If you use SM and you use anki both for a significant amount of time it's not hard to see that SM leaves you with way less reps. Anki is based on the very first version of the SuperMemo algorithm (from ~1990 or so which was the first SRS algorithm ever) known as SM2. Current version of SM uses SM18.
You might also try my website (and soon to be app) Seedlang: http://www.seedlang.com. It is a site for learning German, and later this year Spanish, French, and English. It uses video flashcards to create different learning experiences, and ties them all together with a Anki-like review deck where any word or sentence encountered on the site can be saved.
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The thing in this article that most reminded me about beauty-journalling posts was the todo list. In vanity journalling circles, the todo lists are full of meta-tasks "post to instagram; new journal layout; blog post about journalling" as well as pure vanity items like "yoga!; Breakfast: saffron avocado toast (yum!!)" Likewise, in this post his todo list includes items about writing about productivity, using other productivity tools, and other such "meta-productivity" items.
There's nothing wrong with this but it reveals that the "productivity" itself is the hobby, not just a means to an end.
I'm personally more skeptical of the Zettelkasten/Roam/PKB craze as being effective, but that's only because I feel like I've had yet to find a problem where it would have been the solution. I'm constantly left feeling like it may be the solution to many problems I have related to memory and remembering thoughts, but without personal experience in it, I can't say what it's worth.
I don't think it's even possible to evaluate a productivity system without using it for a long amount of time and conducting periodic reviews on it regularly to see if it's helping with anything. I don't know what the metrics to measure are, and I don't know what a review like this would look like.
On the paper journaling thing, though, I think the answer is much more clear cut: it's more about the artistic nature of it than anything else. A paper journal is almost always impossible to search, easily damaged, easily lost, and easily customized with stickers, different pens and pencils, and other decor. It's easy to find a notebook you like with a paper you like and then justify writing in it. However, I don't think there are many practical benefits that can't be applied to an electronic system that's functionally similar, save for the effect of slowing down entry so you remember it more.
Going back through old notes I've made on books I've read or movies I've watched gives a similar experience, taking me back to how I thought at the time and a window into how I've changed.
I certainly don't want to study everything to death, but I wholly see the appeal of a system to contain things I've known and done.
A counterexample as food for thought: I do all of my task tracking in a paper notebook. It looks boring -- there's no design and I only use one black and one red pen.
What I've found in over 5 years I've used more than a dozen task trackers for various organizations across different projects and teams. Each time, I have to learn the system and adapt my process to it. Every six months the productivity community goes nuts over some new app.
On the other hand, my notebook process is just the same. Paper has been around for over a thousand years and will be around a lot longer than that. I never have to keep up with the new hot productivity system or worry about the company that makes my favorite app going out of business. Paper will never release an update that makes me redo my whole process.
Paper let's me find a system that works and stick with it. Paper gets out of the way. I can focus on being productive instead of productivity.
For the uninformed, a Zettelkasten is a searchable, unordered, labeled database. That's it.
"Zettelkasten" is more of an attitude toward note-taking than a specific technique... it can be implemented in many seeingly almost unrelated ways, from Luhman's index-card box to personal wikis, etc. The defining characteristic is more in the way you integrate note-taking and note-review into your daily workflow and thinking process.
I could spin up ElasticSearch or something similar and have it crawl all the files on my computer and get an 80% solution. Kinda like Apple's "Finder" functionality.
Here's my attempt at conciseness: A zettelkasten is like a bunch of files in a single folder with 1. a naming schema that kinda indicates what follows what (an ordering scheme, but persnickety and optional, see https://zettelkasten.de/posts/luhmann-folgezettel-truth/), and 2. links in between the files, originally just by writing the names to be manually looked for.
Some people use 2 to be able to get rid of 1, as with an indication of PREVIOUS (link) and NEXT (link)
The point is that you have one thing on each card / file that you might want to go back to on its own.
It makes a lot of sense in academia where you want to be able to trace ideas in a referenceable way, identify your own takes on bits of other people's work, and connect different sources together when you see similarities.
In traditional note-taking systems, the category is the most obvious first-class citizen. In ZK, the little ideas take precedence, because some little idea that belongs to category A can easily end up belonging to other categories B, C, D, ... as time goes on and you study more subjects/discipline.
I'm sure the idea I'm describing is nothing new, groundbreaking, or unique to ZK - but this is the impression that I got, and I've had the pain of having very poorly managed knowledge via Evernote/OneNote/Notion/etc. before. I also dabbled with Anki and mindmapping. I believe the optimal solution is to combine all 3, since mindmaps have the "graph" structure part down; Anki only focuses on recall, but not conceptual understanding/linkage; and traditional notes, while obviously storing more information, are usually organized in hierarchical top-down structures that don't lend themselves well to reviewing or building a deliberate map of knowledge.
Another alternative to mindmaps is something like Jerry's Brain [2], where irrelevant nodes are collapsed until you explore them. Jerry has given extremely compelling presentations because he's used it for something like 20 years.
I am aware of a bias as I write this: I simply might not have had enough discipline when using traditional note-taking systems before, and am going through a bit of a (pre) honeymoon phase with this new ZK stuff. Just my 2 grains of salt.
[1]: https://nateliason.com/blog/roam
[2]: https://www.jerrysbrain.com/
(I still read it. I love that people obsess so much about it. It's like going into an office supply store, and just lovingly gaze at organizers :)
Simple basic page with To Do Title. New Day starts after a blank line. Each task is a blank square box, task text. When done, a tick in the box & done-date in right margin.
At end of the month, all pending tasks get reviewed; no-longer-needed gets a cross X in box; needed ones get moved to Big To Do page, original entry gets a arrow in the box. Once all tasks sorted, done, cancelled, moved, the big box in front of title gets ticked with today's date.
Big To Do page has a box, task original date in dd/mm format, then task.
Some specific pages like Financial, 6-Monthly, Logs etc with templated tasks prefilled with current months data, kind of checklists. 6 Month page gets tasks required not in immediate future, but sometimes in ^ months. If available, deadline date gets mentioned in task.
All pages numbered at lower right corner, in continuous series.
An Index page with Page Title and page numbers.
I was using a A5 ring binder with two holes.
It was not pretty to see. It was readable, not chicken scratches. Occasionally some tasks get red marks, or green. All completed pages gets scanned as pdf.
It was amazingly working. 4 years 9f my daily office work, keeping up with everybody's every type of requests. I miss that now, that now I am in a job where we can't take our bags/books to desk.
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1. A lot of spaced repetition apps don't optimize for fast card creation. I like to make a card as soon as I come across something interesting, but the delay to get Anki started, and to create the card, etc just makes it frustrating. I wound up building my own app for this.
2. Cloze deletion is surprisingly effective. For those who don't know, cloze deletion involves taking a sentence, blanking the interesting parts out e.g. "The moon landing happened on _______", and trying to recall the blank parts. This is effective because it's a quick way to make cards, thus solving the problem of slow card creation.
3. I fared better with lots of small, one-sentence cards. My rule of thumb is that a card should fit in a tweet.
4. Subjectively speaking, using spaced repetition didn't just help me recall stuff in my cards, it also helped me recall stuff in general.
I used Anki to study Chinese for a period of about 10 years. At some point I decided that I wanted to memorize the poker "outs" (probabilities of filling out a hand based on what had currently been dealt). Then I went through a time where I was really busy and didn't study the poker deck for a month (but I made time for Chinese). When I came back to the poker deck, the "spaced repetition" system was completely broken: I had a massive long list of cards that had expired, most of which I'd completely forgotten; but it just kept showing them to me in one giant loop, rather than focusing on a few to actually teach me. And I didn't even have a clean way of telling it, "Just pretend I haven't seen any of these cards at all". I ended up just deleting the deck; that discouraged me from doing anything else I wasn't willing to commit to doing every single day.
There's absolutely no need to "reset". Ever.
If you have only ten minutes to devote to Anki, then only spend ten minutes. If at some later point, you have more time, then spend that time.
Set the maximum reviews per day to something you can do most days -- for me, that's 250 cards. If you're behind, turn off 'new' cards. And eventually, you will catch up.
What if you don't do Anki for a month or two? You still don't need to reset. Anything you remember after that month will have a much longer time until you next see it.
Only use Anki as much as you have time for it. Let it figure out which cards to show you. Resetting messes with the algorithm for which cards to show.
- If you want to just push cards to the back of the queue, but remember timings and history, there's a built-in command to do that.
- If you want to change the current interval of a card, but keep your history, there's also a built-in command for that.
- If you need to do the above in bulk, the "Reset Card Scheduling" plugin can make this a lot more convenient.
- If you really do want to completely reset a card, forget all history, etc., and treat it as a new card, there's the "Remove Card History" plugin.
Finally, when returning to old decks, I found I usually get the most mileage by leaving all that stuff alone and just suspending the whole thing, and then un-suspending them at a steady pace. I neglected my Kanji deck for months, and I used that approach to get myself back up to speed by doing the catch-up review in the original (RTK) order I originally learned them rather than based on Anki's priority.
If you make that number the same as the "new cards per day"-number, that might be a work around for your issue?
I just want a "dumb" flashcard application that doesn't try to apply "smart" techniques/heuristics.
I was just looking for a way to do the same paper card quizzing digitally without having to actually carry decks on my person.
Every app I've tried over the years powered under the hood by Anki had this issue.
It's been a few years since I last checked it out, but an option for a dumb mode would have had me throwing money at it just to even try it out.
I would prefer to iterate over small set of cards until I know them quite well.
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Exporting to Anki from Emacs is done via the anki-editor mode for Emacs.
https://github.com/louietan/anki-editor
Being able to add my slow-but-steady Lisp learning notes into Anki would be very cool.
I have this URL in my bookmarks toolbar:
https://ankiuser.net/edit/
It enables me to directly add new cards (just don't forget to sync)
Can someone tell me if this is a crazy good idea? Social network + spaced repetition. Why should you build all your own cards? Taking a class with classmates? Create a group & create cards during lecture, review/curate cards afterwards during study session, then rate which ones were most useful after the exam (or homework).
I think it's important that exercises are tightly linked to the source material, like to a specific paragraph of an article, etc. So these materials should probably be added to the system as well. * With the same starting point it should be easier to have a proper discussion. * A new person can read the source and understand cards more easily with context. * Later if they've forgotten the topic completely they can reread it and hopefully remember faster.
I also had some ideas about being able to discuss and alter every paragraph in the source. Allow it to evolve to be more clear as people come and discuss confusing points.
but my cards are hard to read by other parties, when I optimize for my own learning
I'd recommend having its own repository with Markdown files grouped by target domain using tags for every card. It'd help to search quickly relevant cards even in the same domain.
[1] https://github.com/ashlinchak/mdanki
I use a custom text file format to allow creation of cloze deletions and reversible cards as well as basic cards. I also annotate text files on export so that I can export the file again without creating duplicate cards.
The big shortcoming of my script is that it generates .tsv files and Anki only allows .tsv files to contain one note type. They also do not incorporate media.
I'd like to be able to sync edits made in Anki back to the text files and vice versa. It'd be really cool to integrate a text file parser and alternative card editing mode into Anki with a plugin.
Perhaps I'll send some PR's your way instead of duplicating effort.
1. https://github.com/isaiahstjohn/flashbang
A big problem I see with pre-made decks is that they contain just too much information.
Just leave the brain do it's job, don't read as it's a marathon, take breaks, think about that bits you've just read that was interesting, then promptly forget about it. You'll forget the details, but not the backbone of it.
Details don't matter in the end. Quite frankly the idea of knowing /by heart/ the name of the greek goddess blah blah blah he uses as an example would bore me solid. Worse, anyone knowing it and telling me about it would bore me solid :-)
That's basically the spaced repetition model. You need to forget a little bit, so that working memory isn't saving you, and the recall process takes effort. That's what builds long term memory. Spaced repetition systems just extend that process beyond the length of the book, in a time shorter than rereading a book.
> Quite frankly the idea of knowing /by heart/ the name of the greek goddess blah blah blah he uses as an example would bore me solid.
I agree, the names of greek gods is a bad example, unless you're a student of mythology. Spaced repetition is hard work, so probably only deploy it on things that matter. A better example might be Bayes Theorem. Incredibly powerful, but unintuitive and easily forgotten. Cards for Bayes' theorem might include the purpose: "Bayes' Theorem calculates how to adjust our prior beliefs given new evidence", as well as cards about the formula, or an intuitive visualization.
Or, maybe you want to learn more about the linux internals and spend a portion of your time memorizing the meanings of signals and errnos as a small part of a larger program of study. Sure, you can look these up in a man page, but part of the value in knowledge is knowing things exist. How many developers do you think know of SIGUSR2? Or... SIGBUS ;)
Also notice how he mentions he remembers "trickle down economics" was a "very important idea" during Reagan's presidency. But there is no mention whatsoever about the idea itself, how it's considered today, whether it was a good or bad idea, its relation to neoliberalism, whether he understands how politically divisive the idea is, etc.
Someone remembering trickle down economics was something from the Reagan era tells me nothing about their understanding of that idea and their opinions about it. Precisely the bits I want to know!
With that said, I can't imagine using such a powerful, and honestly demanding, tool for everyday knowledge and tangential facts (e.g. Greek mythology as a software engineer). It strikes me as far too much tool for the job.
It seems to me that, if you struggle with retaining things you read, some simple, lightweight note taking strategies, especially handwritten, would be sufficient. I believe that's actually a recommendation that his book recommendation, Where Good Ideas Come From, makes.
I mostly read for pleasure (and occasionally for work). Even for work, I don't tabulate what I read. I read a lot of paper books too, where uploading stuff is not practical without a lot of fuss (OCR?).
I love reading. And yes, I forget a lot of stuff. But if I had to go through all this whenever I pick up a book, I'd simply stop reading.
To me, this article is just more white noise.
The opposite would be never writing anything down, never knowing what you're going to be doing on any given day, never estimating how long a task is going to take, reading books while making no effort to retain any information, etc.
We all dedicate energy toward transforming the natural chaos of life into order, even if it's just forcing ourselves to work a certain amount of hours per day, or re-reading paragraphs in books because we weren't paying enough attention the first time, or making grocery lists before we go to the store. These are things most of us do deliberately because we believe they make our lives better.
It's likely that there are certain things that he could be doing better, but I have no reason to believe that the structure he's set up isn't better than what he was doing before, and I think it's probably far more effective than the structure (or lack thereof) of most people's lives.
"At the end of the day people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel"
This is basically how I approach reading as well. I think it's fairly hopeless to have a huge organizing system that assists in trying to keep information sort of floating around in the conscious mind.
Human minds aren't really fact gathering machines so I think this is largely futile and the number of things to remember is too large anyway.
I think there is more sense in trying to absorb what you read, hope that it leaves an impression of some sort or gives you a cue when it becomes relevant and just go with it and using active time for creative things.
But in terms of making cards on books I read for pleasure, I agree in that it seems like overkill. One of my favorite biographies is "Peter the Great" by Robert Massie, and as much as I love reading it attempting to memorize names and details and jam pack my brain with facts would fry my brain.
https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/how_to_take_smart_notes_org/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22337681
[0]: https://github.com/Kungsgeten/org-brain
Edit: I tried it a month ago - before installation was more than just (load)'ing the file. Now there are nicely documented use-package instructions and a layer for spacemacs
I've modified a template for single-subject documents called "tags" so they're stored in ~/Org/tags/. I've also configured org-journal to store files in ~/Org/Journal/
One thing I'll be interested to discover, in the future, is how I archive or age out information. Most work stuff right now is related to a single project, so what happens when that project ends? Will I need to move things outside of ~/Org/ to remove clutter, or will I just get used to it?
I think flashcards are hugely underrated for software developers. Memorization is commonly dismissed as unnecesary when we have searchable documentation and Stack Overflow, but the same argument could be had over touch typing. There is enormous value in moving data from disk to L1 cache.
If nothing else, having solid, open source, premade decks for the core web technologies would ease the path into web development for boot campers and other newcomers.
The first step in that direction is creating a text file format similar to Markdown or TOML for creating, editing and sharing flashcards. I created a hacky solution for myself [2], and another project was also shared in these comments [3].
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/ 2. https://github.com/isaiahstjohn/flashbang 3. https://github.com/ashlinchak/mdanki
Incidentally it also supports Zettelkasten like note taking like described in the article.
- I have a huge Zettelkasten note archive (I manage it through Sublime-Zk, which is getting a bit slow to operate it). Can I somehow directly import all my Zettel notes?
- I tried to import my Anki cards, but it seems like while I could go through them, I couldn't assign them to any particular deck/reclassify them. They show up as part of a "Not Found" deck and I don't see any option/drag-and-drop method to move them anywhere else.
I'll definitely be giving Mochi a try. Thanks a lot for creating it!
You can import the markdown files as notes, but it won’t maintain the linking. If you send me a sample I can look into adding a Zettelkasten specific importer.
> I tried to import my Anki cards, but it seems like while I could go through them, I couldn't assign them to any particular deck/reclassify them. They show up as part of a "Not Found" deck and I don't see any option/drag-and-drop method to move them anywhere else.
Sounds like the importer derped a bit and couldn’t find the deck associated with those cards. If you send me the .apkg file I can take a look. Anki’s data model is a little weird and there’s probably some edge cases I haven’t accounted for.
I created something similar which I no longer work on (but keep running on a maintenance-type basis). Feel free to be inspired/take features or just compare with another approach.
Good luck dude!
https://about.vocabifyapp.com
Would love to see sample decks for languages. Like learning basic 1000 words & sentences in different languages.
I'm a regular user, though I'm terrible at consistent, daily reviews. I somehow manage to keep on top of it, even after skipping weekends or entire weeks. You can tweak the settings to make it easier for less-than-perfect users.
Lifehack: Anki + exercise. Combining Anki with an elliptical or stationary bike improves both my review and exercise frequency and duration.
I've made my peace with the terrible UI/UX. Like many folks here I tried to roll my own SRS app at one point. But my review sessions would always get derailed with brainstorming new features or dealing with bugs. Personally, I'm not sure that the productivity gains from improving the UI/UX are worth the development time (especially when the whole point of using Anki is efficiency).
Increase intensity beyond that point and your brain's information processing ability drops below baseline.
I've found this consistently true. At lower intensity cardio for example, I can watch educational youtube videos or follow along a movie. At high intensity, I can't even watch an action movie and follow the plot. I have to switch to music and/or a sports action video (no meaningful dialog).
- Memrise - https://www.memrise.com/ - Has a very extensive selection of decks for language learning
- Supermemo - https://www.supermemo.com/en - Has a (disputed) claim that its algorithm beats Anki, various pre-made decks
- Drops - https://languagedrops.com/ - Mobile-only, has a higher reliance on pictures and audio over written translations.
If you use SM and you use anki both for a significant amount of time it's not hard to see that SM leaves you with way less reps. Anki is based on the very first version of the SuperMemo algorithm (from ~1990 or so which was the first SRS algorithm ever) known as SM2. Current version of SM uses SM18.
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