Though notes in a Spaced repetition memory system are atomic in the same way as Evergreen notes (Evergreen notes should be atomic), they’re in many ways too atomized (Traditional spaced repetition memory prompts are atomized). The form discourages incremental synthesis and distillation.
The questions float in an undifferentiated mist, detached from any intrinsically meaningful context and not linked to relevant neighbors (Evergreen notes should be densely linked), and not especially meant to be accessed except within the review experience. They’re not meant to be durable, growing units; they’re meant to be disposable flotsam. All this could be fine, if they had a clear relationship with a separate system for Evergreen notes, but they don’t.
Happily: The mnemonic medium can be extended to one’s personal notes.
Nielsen, M. (2018). Augmenting Long-term Memory. http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
I start to identify open problems, questions that I’d personally like answered, but which don’t yet seem to have been answered. I identify tricks, observations that seem pregnant with possibility, but whose import I don’t yet know. And, sometimes, I identify what seem to me to be field-wide blind spots. I add questions about all these to Anki as well. In this way, Anki is a medium supporting my creative research. It has some shortcomings as such a medium, since it’s not designed with supporting creative work in mind – it’s not, for instance, equipped for lengthy, free-form exploration inside a scratch space.
In using a Spaced repetition memory system, you’ll fill it with notes on what you’re learning, observing, and thinking. Unfortunately, Existing spaced repetition systems discourage evergreen notes. A memory system will help you retain and continuously engage with what you write, but it won’t much help you build on those ideas over time. An Evergreen notes system will help you build on your ideas over time, but it won’t help you retain and continuously engage with those notes (outside of Evergreen note maintenance approximates spaced repetition). So you’re stuck either duplicating your efforts messily in two separate systems, or giving up one system’s benefits.
The Mnemonic medium solved a similar problem for published prose: The mnemonic medium gives structure to normally-atomized spaced repetition memory prompts. One can use the same approach to give structure to one’s personal spaced repetition prompts, within one’s personal notes. We can call this a {personal mnemonic medium}.
For example, one could imagine creating a {cloze deletion} prompt within one’s personal notes by {wrapping it in curly braces}.
And one might create a traditional two-sided prompt like this:
Q. If one only took notes in Anki, what key limitations might one experience?
A. (e.g. no serendipitous note-finding when note-writing, no way to easily evolve notes over time, limited connections between notes, difficult to “read through” one’s notes on a subject, etc)
There are a few other implementations of something like this idea:
Nielsen, M. (2018). Augmenting Long-term Memory. http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
I start to identify open problems, questions that I’d personally like answered, but which don’t yet seem to have been answered. I identify tricks, observations that seem pregnant with possibility, but whose import I don’t yet know. And, sometimes, I identify what seem to me to be field-wide blind spots. I add questions about all these to Anki as well. In this way, Anki is a medium supporting my creative research. It has some shortcomings as such a medium, since it’s not designed with supporting creative work in mind – it’s not, for instance, equipped for lengthy, free-form exploration inside a scratch space.
Because writing Evergreen notes with dense associative structure (see Evergreen notes should be densely linked) requires that we constantly reread and revise our past writing, this type of note-taking approximates spaced repetition.
In particular, the spaced repetition follows your present interests. If you stop reading or writing about a given topic, you’ll mostly never revisit it. If you’re regularly reading or writing about a topic, you’ll revisit that prior material fairly constantly.
This isn’t an efficient spaced repetition, memory-wise: you’re not really taking advantage of the Testing effect. But it does take advantage of something like the Generation effect, and it may be a useful lens to think about managing your attention across the corpus of ideas you accumulate over time. Specifically, this practice will encourage you to repeatedly give attention to past ideas which seem relevant to your present work. And because you may find yourself revising your notes on those past ideas, the attention may be quite effortful.
This same effect occurs when maintaining systems which involve Transclusion.
Ahrens, S. (2017). How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers.
We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), but also when we try to retrieve it at different times (spacing) in different contexts (variation), ideally with the help of chance (contextual interference) and with a deliberate effort (retrieval). The slip-box not only provides us with the opportunity to learn in this proven way, it forces us to do exactly what is recommended just by using it.