Last week’s post cautions learners to be aware of Illusions of Competency. A common Illusion of Competency is spending time on things you already know vs what you’re struggling with. This of course makes sense. We want to protect our ego and feel competent. So we just keep reviewing questions where we already know the answers. How do we take off the blinders and keep ourselves in check?
Anki
Anki is a great software tool to address this issue using a technique called Spaced Repetition learning. I first discovered Anki via Nicky Case’s wonderful Explorable Explanation “How to Remember Anything Forever-ish”. At it’s core, Anki is just flash cards like you used in grade school to learn vocabulary and multiplication. However, the secret sauce is that it maintains a history. If you get a card correct, it extends the period for when it is reviewed again. So the first time you get it right, it might schedule it for review tomorrow. Then if you get it correct tomorrow, it’ll schedule it two days after that. Then four days, eight days, and so forth. If you get a card incorrect, then it resets the review period back to zero. By doing so, you spend more time reviewing the things you aren’t remembering and less time reviewing the things you already know.
Obstacles to Success
There are two obstacles to be aware of with Anki. The first is that you need to consistently use it every day. Since I’ve bootstrapped myself with The Two Fundamental Habits I simply added a daily reocurring task named Anki.
The second obstacle to be aware of is that it takes intentional effort to populate items into Anki. At first, just make a bunch of cards and focus on using it consistently. Then put a reminder on your calendar in a couple weeks for some meta-evaluation.
I’ve found it’s most useful to keep things simple. Virtually all my cards use the “Basic (type in the answer)" note type. This keep me honest for checking the correctness of my answer. Also, this forces me to have each card focus on a single piece of information. For example, here is a card I made for learning music theory.
Front:
Music: How many sharps/flats in A Major?
Back:
3#