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This article is the best summarization of real, everyday usage of Anki outside of language learning and medical studies which are common uses of Anki. Reviewing flash cards is the highest leverage 10-15 minute habit I have besides planning my day. There's a certain joy and relief from having a reasonable confidence new information will be readily available to you for years to come. Much knowledge is better absorbed through practice, conversation, and writing. If you can distinguish between what you can learn through flash cards, and what you can absorb through other practices and not conflate the two too much—you'll be in a great place.

Some categories of cards I have that may serve as inspiration for others wishing to get into flash cards..

  * Basic information about countries e.g. population
  * Ingredients and dishes from restaurant menus I didn't know
  * Important people and places
  * History facts (typically from Kindle highlights)
  * Conversions between units (e.g. lbs to kg)
  * Season for various vegetables and fruits
  * Keyboard shortcuts for vim, readline, etc.
  * Learning words and terms I don't know from Kindle/Instapaper highlights
  * Useful statistics

Thanks for the inspiration, I've been using Pocket (and browsers) to bookmark everything I want to recall (like history facts or important people like you pointed out), I knew Anki but never thought about this, flash cards looks like a more simple and efficient way to accomplish this.

Great inspiration, care to share the links?

What specific techniques are you referring to when you mention planning your day as a high leverage habit?

Is there a convenient workflow for kindle highlights - > flashcards?

To my knowledge, there's no kindle API

https://forums.developer.amazon.com/questions/68355/regardin...

Upon research, there's a few tools like https://readwise.io/ and clipping.io which are chrome extensions.

They webscrape your homepage highlights here:

https://read.amazon.com/notebook

https://read.amazon.com/kp/notebook?ft

Readwise is like evernote for kindle highlights. It sends 10 or so highlights as a daily message email.

https://github.com/neingeist/kindle-to-anki

that's a webscraper not an official api though, reading through it uses beautifulsoup.

The best way I know to get highlights from kindle (I only use iPhone) is to click the "My Notebook" icon (looks like a letter paper page), click the export button, and then send to email. There is a notecard option there as well but I haven't tried it. Not exactly a solution but I'm mentioning it because it took me a while to notice.

A great list! Very similar to the kinds of things I put in Anki.

Do you have any other ideas/suggestions?

org-mode has an implementation of several spaced repetition algorithms, which is what Anki is using under the hood and what was originally invented for SuperMemo. The module is called org-drill.

I'm in the process of turning many knowledge aspects of my life into a personal knowledge base inside org-mode. For books I'm reading, I find it invaluable to create org-mode items. One per concept. Sometimes I don't even bother filling the content. E.g. I just use a title like "Hadamard transform definition" and nothing else. It'd be to time consuming to write up the definition, and it's pointless as that's in the book anyway.

Then, org-drill brings up some of this cards according to the spaced-repetition algorithm. I answer them with pen and paper. Sometimes I need to prove a theorem, or recall a definition like in the example above. I then open up a book to check my reply is correct and grade myself accordingly. It's a great system to systematize learning.

What I've written also has a connection with productivity systems like GTD (which I don't use personally but serves to illustrate my point).

Many if not most people on HN are knowledge workers. For us especially, many tasks in our inboxes are non-actionable. E.g. a link you stored that teaches a great trick to use your editor, or an elusive shell one-liner you came up with.

What to do with these? A good productivity system should also include a knowledge base, so that those non-actionable bits of information that have future value can be easily stored and later retrieved. Here they explain it better than I do: https://praxis.fortelabs.co/gtd-x-pkm-8ff720ef6939/

A further tweak is to force spaced repetition on those knowledge bits you want to be able to learn by heart. In Emacs, you can achieve this by simply tagging them for later org-drill (spaced-repetition) sessions.

As a student I used to do this with pen & paper. I would patiently deconstruct books into extremely long lists of items that included definitions, theorems, corollaries, demonstrations, and whatever concepts in the right order. Then I recalled them during repetition sessions. Doing this with a spaced-repetition algorithm is a much more efficient way, as you focus your effort on hard stuff and you time sessions appropriately to maximize the chances of learning it.

Since we are talking about Emacs now, there's a package[1] for Anki just like everything else in Emacs. :) This basically connects to a background server of Anki, you create a card and press C-c C-c to send it to Anki. End of the day, just sync it.

I am one of those guys who try moving everything to Emacs, but personally I found Anki to be much better than org-drill just for the simple reason that I can go through the cards quickly using the phone app when I have some time (waiting for someone, something, etc.). With org-drill I have to be in front of my machine.

But yeah, I've pretty much sold to org-mode. I, too, have been creating a knowledge base inside org-mode. This contains the deeper knowledge and explanations, while the tidbits are in Anki. Org mode notes are like fat nodes, and Anki cards are the threads which bind them. I personally have found both to be very useful together.

[1]: https://github.com/louietan/anki-editor

One of the problems with this approach (one-way sync/extract from org-mode files to Anki database) is losing out the context (imagine org file notes from a technical books). I use org-drill in combination with org-sticky-header, which show the path of headings to that particular node. Normally in Anki, this requires to add some extra descriptions or tags for this purpose. In org-mode, we get this for free.

But on the other hand, org-drill will fill your org file with scheduling and metadata drawers (I did some hacks to hide them but not able to make it work without messing the org-ellipsis).

Another drawback with org-drill is it manages schedules for one "card" per heading, hence cloze items are not scheduled individually. So, either you remember entirely "Alfred North Whitehead wrote [Principia Mathematica] in [1910]" or not at all. In Anki, not only the book title "[Principia Mathematica]" and the written year "[1910]" are tested separately (same as org-drill), but also scheduled/scored separately too (where org-drill falls short).

I use both, org-drill mostly for books, Anki for "standalone" facts. But I'm always wishing for some kind of a system that hit the sweet spot between them two.

I experimented with anki in law school one semester.

I decided to feed all the concepts of my criminalistics class into the program and only study that way. The class contains a lot of procedures and tidbits you kinda have to memorize (It was a bad class, I think it should've been taught entirely different but that's another subject).

I came out GREAT. I aced the fuck out of that class and I didn't even have to use anki every day.

The system described here is in many ways similar to Incremental Reading [1], which also uses an algorithm to schedule when to read the URLs provided. (the Anki addon is fairly primitive though, would rather use a browser plugin that remembers how much I read from each webpage instead)

Also worth paying attention when reviewing flashcards, as described in [2]:

  And when I rush through my flashcard reviews, I’m not thinking. I’m focusing on the wrong question: “Do I remember this perfectly?”
  Instead, whether I happen to have perfect recall or not, I should focus on: “This is my time to think about this again.”
  Major paradigm shift.

[1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1081195335 [2] https://yourawesomememory.com/reviewing-as-thinking/

Have you found any good tools other than Anki for Incremental Reading?

Supermemo has the best implementation of incremental reading and somewhat pioneered it. It's only downside is it's heavily tied into windows. [1]

[1] https://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm

Not yet, there is a project here that is worth keeping an eye on though: https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf