TJL #32: Use active recall (Daily productivity #7)
Simple tips & tricks to be more productive
Welcome back to Today Jan Learned (TJL) #32. In this newsletter I share the best of what others have figured out already. To get these delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe by clicking the button below!
Key insight:
To study effectively, use active recall instead of rereading/highlighting
First of all, I wish you all a Merry Christmas 🎄🎅!
The tip I want to share with you today is that you should stop highlighting and start recalling.
This tip, just like TJL #31, comes from A Mind for Numbers.
Active recall, trying to recall the material that you are trying to absorb, is far more effective than simply highlighting/rereading the material. In fact, highlighting and rereading can actually be dangerous because they provide the illusion that know the material. This is called the illusion of competence:
Psychologist Jeffrey Karpicke and his colleagues have shown that many students experience illusions of competence when they are studying. Most students, Karpicke found, “repeatedly read their notes or textbook (despite the limited benefits of this strategy), but relatively few engage in self-testing or retrieval practice while studying.”
Many people repeatedly read their notes over and over again while this is actually a very ineffective way of studying, much less effective than self-testing through active recall.
When you have the book (or Google!) open right in front of you, it provides the illusion that the material is also in your brain. But it’s not. Because it can be easier to look at the book instead of recalling, students persist in their illusion—studying in a far less productive way.
Why do we do this then? Because it is very easy. When the book is open in front of us it is easy to “go over the material once more”. By doing so we think we have the material absorbed in our brain, but we actually don’t.
This is a bit like going to the dentist. We think we brush our teeth properly (illusion of competence) but once the dentist starts poking at your gums (self-testing with active recall) they start bleeding.
This is also the reason why simply wanting to learn the material does not lead to us actually learning the material. Just spending time with the material does not guarantee us that we actually learn it well. We must spend time and use it effectively.
How to apply?
How do we apply this idea to our own life?
Easy. Flashcards.
This is going to take a bit of work but I promise you it’s worth it. You don’t have to take my word for it, take the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen’s word for it!
To make flashcards I use Anki. Anki is a free and open-source program that allows you to quickly and easily make digital flashcards.
I make digital flashcards for things I want to remember. This way you actually test yourself whether you know what you think you are knowing, avoiding the illusion of competence.
These can be very random things like how long to cook chicken in the oven or when the 2nd world war ended. Anki then allows you to review these cards at an algorithmically optimal schedule that is based on a lot of science, which is pretty neat.
This is for example a card that I had to review today. This is the question.
And this is the answer.
I knew this one :)
Make your study time more effective with digital flashcards instead of mindless and ineffective highlighting and rereading!
Thank you for reading!
That was today’s issue of the Daily Productivity Newsletter 🚀
Daily Productivity is a newsletter in which I share practical and effective tips on how to become more productive.
I collect these tips from the best self-help books, podcasts, videos, and turn them into immediately actionable tips for you to apply to your own life!
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As always, you can find me on my website janmeppe.com or on Twitter at @janmeppe.
Previous TJLs
Read my previous TJLs by following on the links down below:
TJL #6: How to remember the difference between margin and padding
TJL #7: According to Jeff Bezos there are two types of failure
TJL #27: Be aware of the spotlight effect (Daily productivity #2)
TJL #28: Start with the upper-left hand brick (Daily Productivity #3)
TJL #30: Start with writing your README (Daily productivity #5)