Hi! I’m Andy Matuschak. You’ve stumbled upon my working notes. They’re kind of strange, so some context might help.
These notes are mostly written for myself: they’re roughly my thinking environment (Evergreen notes; My morning writing practice). But I’m sharing them publicly as an experiment (Work with the garage door up). If a note seems confusing or under-explained, it’s probably because I didn’t write it for you! Sorry—that’s sort of an essential tension of this experiment (Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience).
For now, there’s no index or navigational aids: you’ll need to follow a link to some starting point. You might be interested in §What’s top of mind.
👋 Andy (email, Twitter, main personal site)
PS: My work is made possible by a crowd-funded research grant from my Patreon community. You can become a member to support future work, and to read patron-only updates and previews of upcoming projects.
PS: Many people ask, so I’ll just note here: no, I haven’t made this system available for others to use. It’s still an early research environment, and Premature scaling can stunt system iteration.
Sort of like a /now page, but with a broader time horizon and focused on what I’m thinking about.
Spaced repetition memory systems make memory a choice, but the computerized component’s value lies specifically in dynamically scheduling and selecting questions to be reviewed. In some sense, the efficacy of a Spaced repetition memory system comes from its power to program your attention (Programmable attention). Think: “{cron} for your mind.”
Manually making decisions about which cards to review would be far too taxing on a per-card basis. The transaction cost is too high. When that work is mostly outsourced, you can make a coarser decision—to devote your attention to SRS practice for 10 minutes—and then let your attention be directed by the machine within that block.
Systematically, we can generalize spaced repetition to:
Within a traditional flashcard-style system, you can use this observation to go far beyond memorization: see Spaced repetition memory systems can be used to prompt application, synthesis, and creation and Spaced repetition may be a helpful tool to develop or change habits. Spaced repetition prompt design is about designing tasks for your future self.
But the core concept—automatically arranging and presenting tasks according to some expanding schedule—can be instantiated in many interfaces and domains. I call this notion Spaced everything.
As a pianist, I have a huge number of technical exercises that I maintain: e.g. scales, argpeggios, and patterns played in variations across each key. I only want to work on exercises for 20-30 minutes a day. Which ones should I do? You can imagine a system which:
It’s interesting to imagine a single interface malleable enough that I could define my piano exercises above as one sort of routine, and a SRS memory system as another routine—both special cases of a single general primitive.
Some examples:
Related:
Matuschak, A. (2019, December). Taking knowledge work seriously. Presented at the Stripe Convergence, San Francisco.
Evergreen note maintenance approximates spaced repetition
Triage strategies for maintaining inboxes (e.g. Inbox Zero) are often too brittle, vs. using spaced-repetition to “approximate” inbox grooming.
I use this concept to engage with my implementation of A reading inbox to capture possibly-useful references