[srfa]

I've been in a similar boat - wanted to share what I found worked for me, perhaps it helps.

I constantly found myself in the following loop:

1) Motivated to study, study productively

2) Several days / weeks later productivity stops (for any number of reasons)

3) Quickly forget everything I learnt over the next month or so

4) Back at stage 1, feeling I have 'wasted' the last few months.

My big problem was the _forgetting_. Life is always going to get in the way, and I needed to 'drop anchor' when this happened, so I could resume where I left off, not start over.

I use Anki [1] to do this. I learn things, make flashcards, and spend dead time on public transport keeping up with them. As Anki uses spaced repetition, you can input a LOT of cards without this becoming overwhelming.

This gave me a sense of progress even when I did not study for a month, and massivly increased my motivation.

[1] https://apps.ankiweb.net/

[kaiwen1]

With Anki retaining what you’ve learned becomes a choice. If you put it in Anki, you _will_ retain it. The challenge then becomes, What to put in Anki? I’ve memorized loads of history, often down to the birth years of notable historical figures. This doesn’t seems very useful but it has changed my appreciation of history. Every historical fact I hear now drops neatly into context. I did the same with geology, Ankifying much of the New History of Life course. I think the amount of trivia I’ve loaded into Anki is excessive, but because I have this amazing new superpower, it’s hard to stop using it. And once I have a fact in Anki and in memory, there’s just no point in removing it. That would be a choice to forget something I already know. Why do that?

I’m now using Anki to learn Vietnamese and to work through Linear Algebra Done Right. It is such a pleasure because I know what I learn won’t evaporate. It’ll be right there, instantly accessible decades from now.

Anki is an incredibly useful tool. I can’t recommend enough.

[rsanek]

Strong +1. I constantly felt like I was wasting time by studying and then stopping since I would forget 95% of what I learned. With a small daily investment, Anki flips that percentage to retaining 80-90%. It has been an insane boon to my motivation, and I've been able to keep a near-daily habit of doing it for 6 years now.

[mertnesvat]

Are you using every week or is it when you resume where you left of you check the cards?

[kaiwen1]

To be effective you need to use Anki every day. I set my goal for learning and reviewing ambient knowledge at 30 minutes per day. All ambient cards are organized under one “Daily” deck. If studying that deck exceeds 30 minutes, then I reduce the number of new cards added per day until it goes below the threshold.

For knowledges that I’m actively learning, I keep separate decks and have no time limit. Creating, splitting, and tuning cards is fundamental to my learning process.

[mertnesvat]

Looks really cool I downloaded thanks a lot for sharing. How long are you using? And are you using for programming if so how does it look like your cards?

[srfa]

Been using for around 2 years, not that long compared to some others.

I mainly study maths and also find Anki useful for learning things like vim shortcuts (Q: Move the cursor to the middle of the screen, A: 'M').

Getting the right level of depth in a maths card is tricky and I don't think I've completely figured it out yet. Too much information in a question or answer and it becomes a 1+ minute problem every time the card appears; but not enough information and it's hard to learn the hard stuff.

So I try and break the problem down into chunks to learn the detail, and also have cards for the higher-level intuition.