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by Sirupsen 2857 days ago
This article is the best summarization of real, everyday usage of Anki outside of language learning and medical studies which are common uses of Anki. Reviewing flash cards is the highest leverage 10-15 minute habit I have besides planning my day. There's a certain joy and relief from having a reasonable confidence new information will be readily available to you for years to come. Much knowledge is better absorbed through practice, conversation, and writing. If you can distinguish between what you can learn through flash cards, and what you can absorb through other practices and not conflate the two too much—you'll be in a great place.

Some categories of cards I have that may serve as inspiration for others wishing to get into flash cards..

  * Basic information about countries e.g. population
  * Ingredients and dishes from restaurant menus I didn't know
  * Important people and places
  * History facts (typically from Kindle highlights)
  * Conversions between units (e.g. lbs to kg)
  * Season for various vegetables and fruits
  * Keyboard shortcuts for vim, readline, etc.
  * Learning words and terms I don't know from Kindle/Instapaper highlights
  * Useful statistics
5 comments

Thanks for the inspiration, I've been using Pocket (and browsers) to bookmark everything I want to recall (like history facts or important people like you pointed out), I knew Anki but never thought about this, flash cards looks like a more simple and efficient way to accomplish this.
What specific techniques are you referring to when you mention planning your day as a high leverage habit?
Is there a convenient workflow for kindle highlights - > flashcards?
To my knowledge, there's no kindle API

https://forums.developer.amazon.com/questions/68355/regardin...

Upon research, there's a few tools like https://readwise.io/ and clipping.io which are chrome extensions.

They webscrape your homepage highlights here:

https://read.amazon.com/notebook

https://read.amazon.com/kp/notebook?ft

Readwise is like evernote for kindle highlights. It sends 10 or so highlights as a daily message email.

that's a webscraper not an official api though, reading through it uses beautifulsoup.
The best way I know to get highlights from kindle (I only use iPhone) is to click the "My Notebook" icon (looks like a letter paper page), click the export button, and then send to email. There is a notecard option there as well but I haven't tried it. Not exactly a solution but I'm mentioning it because it took me a while to notice.
A great list! Very similar to the kinds of things I put in Anki.

Do you have any other ideas/suggestions?

Great inspiration, care to share the links?