Thread: I’ve been thinking a lot about spaced repetition, but more broadly what @andy_matuschak calls Spaced Everything ( https://t.co/Y1K4b4BfOc. The idea is to revisit notes and concepts at regular intervals, both to improve your memory, but also to
trigger new associations and insights. Traditionally Anki has been used for more factual questions, but I love Andy’s "taxonomy" of cards, where he might ask himself to sing a song, reflect on a metaphor, refute the notion of philosophical zoombies, etc.
I’ve gotten a bunch of questions about how I "encode knowledge" in flashcards. I think about it in terms of Bloom’s taxonomy[1]. Here’s the taxonomy juxtaposed with recent cards:
but it also lazily defers the decision about which notes to spend more or less time on, and when you revisit things in the future you have a better view of their relative importance, and might be able to make interesting links to ideas you have thought about in the meantime.
On the other hand, @fortelabs’s concept of progressive summarization ( is the idea that you first capture things, and then revisit progressively adding structure and refinement. This spacing out in time again improves memory, because you are revisiting https://t.co/EtixIOs1Sw
The Roam Toolkit also has support for more advanced SRS algorithms However, I just thought of a much simpler approach that seems to give much of the same benefits: daily page retro. Every day, I add a link to my daily page 7, 30 and 90 days ago. https://t.co/uQLmMeNz8m
There’s been a lot of enthusiasm around spaced repetition in @RoamResearch, and I particularly like @ShuOmi3’s implementation of adding SRS questions while note taking Advantage of doing it all in Roam is that you can always expand context. https://t.co/zB2tVqmSF5
@cortexfutura talks about what progressive summarization would look like in Roam, and proposes the term Context-Dependent Insight. @JoelChan86 proposes the term incremental formalization, which I also like ( https://t.co/lpGksQny2Y
but has a lot of benefits. You can revisit personal anecdotes (that’s when my son did something cute), look back at predictions (I thought this project would go in a certain way), at practices (I tend to overestimate my time), emotions, but also process your notes…
Then I click on that link, and revisit my notes. I ingest almost all of my primary content on Roam through my daily pages, but I also take notes on my emotions, motivations, ideas, meetings and time usage (how much varies a lot). This practice takes only 10 minutes a day, …
less pressure to assign the perfect tag right now. I also take a few notes on my retro, which means that when I retro the current page, it functions as a portal to my older notes as well - providing denser interlinking…
see new connections, and so some "incremental formalization" as @JoelChan86 calls it ( Also makes me feel good that I can simply capture stuff on the daily page, and know that it will get revisited, it won’t disappear into the black hole of old notes -
I found a long Twitter thread from January which at the time seemed intriguing, but I didn’t quite know "what to do about it". Now the topics are very relevant to other things I’ve read, and I went through adding some tags to make sure I rediscover. I look back at old ideas I had
Revisiting personal events, emotions etc is a bit similar to @tasshinfogleman’s concept of Mindful Review He also talks about an interesting concept of Lembranisation. https://t.co/rSOfORs1DV
I added another aspect to my retro process in - email retro. I have had GMail since 2004 (remember sending someone a postcard from Mongolia to get a beta invite from them :)). Most of the emails is of course cruft, but hidden among the cruft there are gems. - Twitter thread by Stian Håklev (侯爽), [link](https://twitter.com/houshuang/status/1249375388888903680 ) #myTwitterThreads#**Retro concept**
In the last 15 years, I must have hundred of pages of ideas, reflections, etc. I used to write really long emails to my best friends, my PhD supervisor etc. Now I want to capture some of those, and put them in Roam. But where to start - I’ve sent 36,000 emails! https://t.co/FSMWdiuSjP
About 115 conversations for today. But just looking at the titles and senders etc, it’s easy to dismiss most of it. Time will tell if I find this useful, or overwhelming. I can of course easily limit the range of years (instead of finishing the full review in 365 days)
I could stretch it out over several years. Note that some of the dates are not exact, because I’m using conversation view, so it finds threads containing a post written by me on today’s date. This means I also find people’s responses, but I filter out all incoming notifications. https://t.co/wZ1lYQit24
Other thoughts:
Love this idea! Riffing: divide emails into N segments (by year/phase): each conditions a GPT2 model that "comments" on things you write (and comments are entry points into specific emails). Viola, ongoing conversations with yourself(s)! Joel Chan comment on Retro concept
reading things as a way of doing retro of your own thoughts. When I read something about juggling, it’s not so much that I’m learning something new about juggling. But I’m revisiting something that I used to do a lot. And I see it in a different perspective, based on all the things I’m reading and thinking about right now. #**Retro concept**