Spaced repetition may be a helpful tool to incrementally develop inklings

I’m often struck by an interesting question or notion in conversation or on a walk. In many cases, I can’t write anything terribly insightful on that topic in that moment: I certainly can’t write a good Evergreen notes. I don’t have anything useful to say about the notion yet—it just seems awfully interesting.

What action should I take now? How can I arrange to develop that inkling over time? I could create a “to-do” or block out time to think about this question, but that’s often not what’s called for. Instead, often what I need is marination: let’s come back in a few days, see what bubbles up.

I can capture the notion in A writing inbox for transient and incomplete notes, but it’ll rapidly become a pile of unwieldy scraps which I’ll come to ignore (Inboxes only work if you trust how they’re drained).

Spaced repetition systems can be used to program attention, so such mechanisms might be helpful here. In such a system, I might:

  • Sit down to my morning writing and see a small handful of writing prompts for the day, drawn from my writing inbox
  • I can choose to append whatever’s top of mind about any of them (perhaps they obscure what was written previously until I’ve added new material)
  • Once I’ve done that, I can mark the prompt as “fruitful,” meaning it’ll come up again relatively soon, or “unfruitful,” in which case the system will increase its interval substantially.
  • Alternately, I might take a moment to convert one of these prompts into one or more Evergreen notes.
  • Any prompts which I simply ignore will have their intervals increased, but perhaps not as substantially as explicitly-unfruitful prompts.

By taking advantage of the exponential nature of spaced repetition intervals, one could make incremental progress on potentially hundreds of prompts, while considering only a few on any given day.

This would represent a system for incremental thinking.

Related: Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate.

Implementations

Rice Issa has published a simple implementation.

References

Matuschak, A. (2019, December). Taking knowledge work seriously. Presented at the Stripe Convergence, San Francisco.

Last updated 2023-09-14.

Spaced repetition systems can be used to program attention

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:

  • a priority queue of microtasks
    • (for memory tasks, in SM-2: a simple due date)
  • an interactive environment which presents sufficiently high-priority tasks
    • (for memory tasks, a flashcard UI which shows “due” cards)
  • feedback actions which modify a task’s subsequent priority
    • (for memory tasks, forgotten / remember modify the next due interval)

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:

  • keeps track of each exercise, including axes of variation (blocked, arpeggiated; keys; modes)
    • priority is a function of both recency and the previous maximum tempo I achieved, relative to my target tempo
  • presents a prioritized queue of 20-30 minutes worth of exercises
    • perhaps the exercise durations are estimated by measuring my practice
    • perhaps it can be configured to present at most 5 variations of any single exercise, to ensure breadth
  • solicits feedback from me in terms of a subjective rating and/or a maximum tempo marking

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:

References

Matuschak, A. (2019, December). Taking knowledge work seriously. Presented at the Stripe Convergence, San Francisco.

Related

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

Last updated 2023-07-13.