Using Anki to remember what you read

Yeah, my initial thought was "why are you building all of these systems to remember random factoids?"

> 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 ;)

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.

I wrote a quick script today to use Airtable and Python Flask to do a simple Spaced Repetition. Need to add the following fields in Airtable: Front, Back, Scores (long text), NextReviewAt (date with GMT time).

https://gist.github.com/abhiyerra/7a7c31d7e695010e0bd0669c7c...

I recently tried instead of remembering stuff with anki, trying to get to the root cause / why of what I try to remember, it's usually a tree meaning the outcomes of what I used to enter to anki was way too many things, and the causes of these items were much fewer, once I get the causes of what I try to enter to anki, I can derive the anki cards just by deducing them. Not perfect but better than having hundreds of anki cards to remember.