Imagine you had a button you could press whenever you saw or heard something you wanted to remember. By holding that button down for about a minute, you’ll be able to remember that thing forever. There are no undesirable side effects. Sounds like a pretty good deal, right?
There’s only one catch: you have to regularly find new things to press the button on. If you stop for more than a few days, the effects wear off. If you ask me, it still seems almost too good to be true! But it’s not. It’s the magic of spaced repetition.1
I had known about this magic for a long time and read blog posts from all directions telling me to use it, typically but not necessarily through Anki. Examples include Nicky Case’s interactive guide and Alexey Guzey’s guide; and because this has been so well-covered, I won’t go into how or why spaced repetition works or how one would use Anki in this post. Still, for a long time, I found the one “catch” to be of the -22 variety: I didn’t use Anki regularly because I didn’t have any flash cards of things I wanted to remember; but I didn’t make any flash cards of things I wanted to remember because, given that I didn’t use Anki regularly, making those flash cards wouldn’t actually help me remember those things.
Here is the One Weird Anki Trick that got me to finally turn spaced repetition into a habit: I created an Anki deck with a bunch of amusing but utterly useless cards,2 in order to make studying the Anki deck an entertaining activity I actually wanted to do. (Getting the mobile app and syncing my deck online also helped a lot.) Only after I started to habitually check my Anki deck did I start adding cards for the things I actually wanted to learn. I keep everything in one deck,3 so that my fun cards are spread out among my “work” cards, and when I find myself losing motivation, I add more useless entertainment cards.
That’s it. That’s the whole post.