Spaced Repetition

In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus, memorised a bunch of nonsense words, and mapped how much he forgot over time. He discovered what is now called the forgetting curve.

This basically means you forget most of what you learnt within 24h, then if you don’t practice recall, your remaining memories decay exponentially.

How fast the decay happens depends on the person and the memory, but in general the rate of decay slows down each time you actively recall it. This is not the same as re-reading the thing. That does not have the same effect. If you stop practising, it still decays.

When you do the recall, memory still decays but it decays more slowly. That’s why an optimal strategy for reminding yourself is with increasing gaps between when you’re reminded something.

This is called spaced repetition. The systems that allow this, like Anki, and my own website How to use AI to learn, are called SRS.

The Leitner Box is one way to do this.

How to write good prompts for Spaced Repetition Systems has some practical guidelines.

I have used AI to create cards for learning Finnish and Linux commands, but this works best when you create your own prompts, which is the idea behind using evergreen and til notes to feed this system as well.

Some interesting further reads on this-

1. The seminal essay by Michael Nielsen - Augmenting Long-term Memory
2. NCase - it’s cartoons!
3. Derek Sivers post on using srs to memorise programming.