Remember Wrong to Remember Right
This week's post is about something I learned from Anki.
Read it here: Remember Wrong to Remember Right
If you've never heard of Anki, it's a flashcard system. It uses spaced repetition to help you remember things. Essentially, when you get a flashcard correct, it increases the time period before it's shown again.
So for a new card that you always get correct you'll be quizzed today, tomorrow, in 3 days, in a week, in a couple weeks, a month, etc. This continues until the time period between showing you the card is so long (a year+) that the flashcard is effectively in long term memory. If you get a card wrong you start over at the beginning of the time interval cycle.
Anki is popular amongst med students, people learning languages with complex writing systems, and mega-nerds like yours truly.
The best introduction to Anki is probably Michael Nielsen's page at augmentingcognition.com. That post is what finally pushed me over the edge to trying Anki and I've been consistently at it for 18+ months now.
Anki is incredible because it lets you chip away at things that previously felt impossible to remember.
For example, the metric prefixes for small units of measure always escaped me. Milli- nano- micro- pico-, my eyes would alway glaze over when I read numbers like this. My brain translated any prefixed metric amount to "small". But with Anki, I now have them totally locked down. It feels like a superpower to cut through something that felt impossible to learn for the first three decades of your life.
I also memorized where all the countries in the world are. But that one's just for funsies.
CoworkList
Remember that coworking map I made a couple weeks ago? I doubled down and made a real website for it. It's called CoworkList.
The easy part is done: translate the basic doc I made into a website (although front-end design is a major weakness of mine, so easy is an understatement).
Now I have to figure out the larger unknowns:
- Solidify out how to launch within a city.
- Add more cities.
My plan right now is to do one city at a time, and improve the data collection and launch procedures as we go from city to city. This will hopefully reduce the stress of launch, and make it easier to improve the all-around process as we go.
I'll keep you posted with how that all progresses :)
Let me know if you have any feedback on CoworkList or the post—as always I love hearing from you.
Benedict