Reflections On A Year of Anki, Knowledge Management, Emacs & More

Anki is a free and open-source flashcard program using spaced repetition. Mainly used by medical students and language learners.

Spaced repetition is "an evidence-based learning technique that is usually performed with flashcards. Newly introduced and more difficult flashcards are shown more frequently, while older and less difficult flashcards are shown less frequently in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect".

A lot of deserved praise goes to Anki, its developers and the community. With Anki I'm able to memorize many facts from formulas used in Financial Statement Analysis to Mathematics concepts from a course (Math For Economists) I watched a year ago.

Emacs is my main tool for learning at the moment.

Emacs and my journey in it has been one of the most fulfilling experiences I've undertaken. Coming from Notion and the Google suite (Calendar, Keep, etc) with it being slow and mouse-centric to the snappy and keyboard-driven experience of Emacs. It took some time to get used to it but I've gained a lot of speed and efficiency.

Along the way I discovered (or perhaps rediscovered) an old ambition of mine. To work with computers at the speed of thought. But that's a blog for another day.

Emacs gives me the ability to mold my environment to whatever I wish. To create the best workflow for my needs. Learning Elisp allowed me to expand and customize Emacs to my liking. I hope that one day in the future I get to contribute back to it and its community.

A case can be made that this will take a long time but such time invested in our tools pays dividends. How many time did an application you use change in ways that made it hard to use? With you having no way to revert back or restore the behavior that you once used?

ir.el is meant as a replica for incremental reading. To quote from What is incremental reading?

Incremental reading is a learning technique that makes it possible to read thousands of articles at the same time without getting lost. Incremental reading begins with importing articles from electronic sources, e.g. the Internet. The student then extracts the most important fragments of individual articles for further review. Extracted fragments are then converted into questions and answers. These in turn become subject to systematic review and repetition that maximizes the long-term recall

The goal of this is to enable me to capture content I encounter and trust that I'll come back to reading/wathcing/listening to it at some point later. And that it won't just be added to an ever-growing list of links.

Interface

I want the process to be as simple as possible. The main two functions are ir-add, ~ir-start-session, ir-read-next and ir-end-session. These are the only functions you need to bind to shortcuts.

I want to support various formats. At the moment ir.el supports .pdf, .mp4, .webm, .epub, .org and web links. Each opens in a specific application. I want to generalize this to enable working in any environment.

You add material to the queue with (ir-add) and begin processing the queue with (ir-start-session). The queue is endless and you decide when to stop reading.

I am yet to write a manual or make video tutorials but those are reserved for version 1.0. You're welcome to check out the repository with its main and development branches here.

Beyond Emacs

I want to expand this project beyond Emacs. Perhaps a web application in Clojure? Choosing Clojure for no reason other than wanting to learn it and seeking a project that interests me. Codename OpenMemo.

Sit down and study

The input is material in its various forms, web articles, videos, books. Output are transient notes.

Depending on factors such as the density of information and learning goals I might write notes as I consume or set a 15-10-5 minute loop, consume in the first 15 minutes, write notes for 10 minutes, take a break for 5.

Transform your notes

During this I open notes tagged with inbox and work through them. The input is transient notes The outputs here are 1) Anki cards. 2) Formulated notes.

I try to have less than 3 notes tagged with inbox but in practice I end up having many notes with it that I trim through. The ideal is to have no reference notes as they all get transformed into Anki cards and/or main notes.

Review Anki cards every morning for a minimum of 25 minutes. Simple as that.

I want to add a process to return to old notes after some time (no less than 6 months) after writing them and reflect. This could be done in some form of incremental writing.

I didn't find myself using backlinks as often as I thought I would but my note-taking skill has increased as I've exposed myself to these frameworks.

Mainly I now seek to consolidate information I gather from various sources (reference notes) into main notes and put them in my own wording if possible.

The biggest change I had is that I no longer use tags because tags are an ineffective association structure.

Although the separation of What I think against What others think is vital.

I organize my org-roam notes into directories as follows:

main/ contains notes I wrote. The output of Formulating transient notes.

wiki/ contains notes that are descriptions of my personal systems. An example would be my quarter planning system and its associated files (e.g. Q3:22).

public/ contains published content such as this blog.

reference/ contains transient notes on material. Example of a note title "MIT 18.01 - Single Variable Calculus".

bibliography/ simply contains my *.bib files.

I use filetags to indicate status or type. My main two are inbox and structure-note.

inbox indicates a note under processing.

structure-note indicates a note that is the starting point of a network of notes. An example would Statistics, Clojure and Business Analysis.

Simple cards can become generic with time.

In formulating cards, there is the standard Twenty rules of formulating knowledge. I've started to struggle with Rule 4: Stick to the minimum information principle. While great to breakdown information. It can backfire in the sense of losing context.

I was formulating some notes from "Applied Statistics for Engineers and Scientists" by Devore in the summer of 2021. I now find these cards like broken twigs from a tree. Where I can recall the information but can not connect to other pieces of information.

I think moving forward I'll create more cards with context in addition to the "atomic" cards. Create more examples and even exercises.

This feeling came up at various points, sometimes it comes after I finish formulating a whole bunch of notes. The feeling comes from the sensation that I've only thrown a pebble in the deep waters of the field I'm studying (e.g. Statistics).

I usually step away and trace back my resource gathering and try to simplify the curriculum.