The Motivation Hacker by Winter Nick

Author:Winter, Nick [Winter, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Nick Winter
Published: 2013-04-06T07:00:00+00:00

Anki

If you want to learn facts, then you should use a spaced-repetition system (SRS). You break knowledge you want to acquire into short answers to tiny questions, and then you make digital flashcards of those in an SRS program, which will then prompt you to review them at the most efficient time for strengthening your memories: right before you were in danger of forgetting them. You learn fast, you remember almost everything, and it’s easy to turn into a daily habit that can deliver massive piles of knowledge in a few minutes a day.

Say you’re learning Spanish. Now, not everything of learning Spanish should be learned as a fact with an SRS. Your pronunciation will best improve from actual conversation, and you’ll want to read and write longer pieces to get context for the words you’re learning. But part of learning any language is learning a lot of vocabulary, and SRS makes vocabulary learning easy. You put in the time each day, and you get a big vocabulary.

I bring up SRS not only because it’s a great way to learn facts, and because learning facts is a large part of many goals, but also because it’s easy to hack motivation with an SRS. SRS programs give you daily stats on how much progress you’re making, how much time you’re spending, how many reviews you need to do to stay on track, and how well you’re remembering what you’ve learned. It’s trivial to set measured goals for yourself, whether it’s in Beeminder or not, whether you’re aiming to learn X items per day or spend Y minutes studying. There’s no Delay, since you get to learn useful information every day. With many SRS programs now being mobile apps, it’s often easy to make time to do some reviews wherever you are, when Impulsiveness is lowest (commuting, waiting for people, after breakfast). Expectancy will be high: as long as you start slow, you’ll automatically get great progress and start a success spiral of steady progress, since there aren’t many reviews to do at first. And if you pick what you want to learn well, then the Value of what you’re learning will be clear, and doing the reviews can even be fun.

If you’re wondering what SRS program to use, you should choose Anki, which is a free desktop app, web service, and Android app, with a $24.99 iPhone app. Its flashcard system is versatile enough that you can learn just about any facts with it. I’ve used it to learn many things, including Spanish, cooking, and sensual massage. (To learn skills like sensual massage, it helps to think of the question as the cue of what just happened and the answer as what to do next: “Q: Second half of chest circulation, after pressing up to the neck?” “A: Lightly press back down the sides to the abdomen.”) I’ve also used Anki to start learning many things which turned out to be useless, which I then deleted, like extensive geographical details on every country in the world.

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