Atomic SRS

Almost everything there is to say about how to make cards has already been said. See Peter Wozniak's 20 rules of formulating knowledge for general tips, Michael Nielsen's long post on using Anki, and Gabriel Wyner's Fluent Forever for language-learning tips.

Instead of saying what has already been said, I'll make a few comments about how to begin with an SRS. How to apply the idea of "atomic workflows" to building up an SRS practice.

I've been using Anki for a long time, so I may not be the best reference for starting an SRS practice. But——I did fall out of the habit for most of 2019, and having to relearn the routines gave me a few ideas that might be useful to real newcomers.

Habits of an SRS

The atomic workflows process begins by identifying the basic habits that build up a workflow, reducing that set to the most essential subset, then reducing those habits to their fundamental actions.

An SRS workflow comprises three habits:

1. 🔄 Reviewing cards (once a day)
2. 📥 Gathering content (continuously)
3. 🏷 Making new cards (once or twice a week)

Of these, the first is the most important to long-term memorization, and it's where we'll start.

Reviewing Cards

And a Note on Using Other People's Decks

At some point, you'll hear the advice to avoid using other people's flashcard decks. It's good advice: when you create your own cards, they're more personal and ultimately easier to learn. But you can break the rule when the deck is predominantly visual and when its cards are totally irreducible.

The most obvious examples of acceptable deck-stealing are in subjects like geography (e.g., countries and capitals, US states and capitals, German provinces) anatomy (e.g., bones, muscles), and occasionally history (e.g. US presidents, art history, Egyptian gods).

Cards to steal

But do not use other people's decks for subjects like languages (where other people's definitions and translations mislead) or science and history if you still lack the big-picture understanding (let me point out that Wozniak's very first rule is to understand before you memorize). Otherwise, the cards won't fit you.

Besides the risk of impersonal cards, another risk in using other people's decks is that their cards are simply bad. The cards may demand too much information, provide too little imagery, or end up irrelevant. So tread carefully and refer back to the 20 rules.

Cards to avoid stealing

How are you going to know that I meant "hood" with this picture and not "hoody" or "shady" or "delinquent." Probably not a great card of mine, but how are you ever to guess that I prefer this answer over "to provide early evidence of oxygen and carbon dioxide" or "to provide evidence of photosynthesis and respiration." And you won't know any of these broader implications if this card is your only exposure to the subject.

Still, for the newcomer I recommend starting with a shared deck that meets the "obviously appropriate" criteria above.

Choose a fixed moment of your day (for me it's the last part of my morning routine) to build the habit of a daily review session. Don't worry about raising the number of cards you introduce per day—just keep the review short enough that you're able to it consistently.

Tip: except for foreign languages, group all of your cards together under one parent deck. This way you'll train a memory resilient across different contexts.

Avoid languages and avoid making your own cards. Whatever your end-goal, there's almost certainly some bit of trivia you'll find amusing enough as detour. Build the habit first because the daily review is the most important part of the practice.

Falling behind: If you stop reviewing your cards for only a few weeks, you can rack up hundreds or even thousands of backlogged cards. To recover use the same principle as you would when first starting: cap the number of cards you review per day so you focus on consistency over flux.

Making Cards

Next in importance after reviewing cards is making cards (so you can start to learn more than just geography and anatomy). I put aside one hour a week for Italian and one hour a week for general information. You probably won't need more than this.

So you're ready to start making cards. First, familiarize yourself with Wozniak's 20 rules. Then, establish a fixed moment every week (maybe right before or after a weekly review) for making cards. For the time being, keep it simple. Restrict yourself to the following note types: basic, basic and reversed, and cloze deletions.

As for gathering content, choose an easy subject. Something that lends itself to lists. E.g.: vocabulary in your native language, local bird species, or notable political/royal figures.

Basic provides a question and answer Basic and reversed is useful for word-pairs to train both active and passive memory. Cloze deletions are useful for smaller items in sentences (also for grammar in a language).

Don't play around with creating your own note templates until you're intimately familiar with these basic types. And if you do want to explore this avenue, finish reading the Anki documentation first. More often than not, you won't need anything fancier. If you want to learn a language, this is the stage to start dabbling with Gabriel Wyner's strategies in Fluent Forever (and, if you're interested, he's built a new app that might be worth looking into).

Example from Gabriel Wyner's Arabic pronunciation trainer.

Gathering Content

With GTD, you need an inbox where you write down your thoughts before expanding them into tasks then moving them to their relevant horizons. With the Zettelkasten, you take fleeting notes before converting them to permanent notes. So too, with an SRS practice, you need a place to gather questions before converting them to cards in your weekly card-making session.

The easiest starting point is the unassuming list. For example, with physical books I use a post-it as a bookmark that I fill with new vocabulary. With Italian I return to a list of Kindle highlights from my reading and to a separate list of feedback from my weekly speaking practice. With research articles I use variants of the Cornell note-taking method: the questions in the side column immediately translate to questions in Anki.

Consider my examples as illustrations not prescriptions because this habit offers the most flexibility of the three. So use trial and error, and see what sticks.

My next step is to migrate to keeping these lists in Obsidian. Then, to incorporate the Obsidian to Anki plugin. Indeed, the similarity between all these workflows points to a possible unification, but that will have to wait until a future post.

Conclusion

To adopt an SRS workflow, begin by cheating: steal another person's deck to build your daily review habit. Only then move on to making your own cards. Start with simple note types and expand from there. As for gathering content, use simple lists.

In the future, we'll explore fancier integrations with other workflows (GTD and the Zettelkasten), so stay posted.

Since I value understanding why I do the things I do, I thought I'd explore why I've started a website. The proximal reason is to establish a regular writing practice. So the real question is: why write?

1. Write to think

Foremost, Writing is thinking. The process of writing is the process of refining your assumptions and arguments. And publishing your writing is the test of your ideas and conclusions. And through this feedback we learn to think better.

But why think?

Cardinal virtues Both Stoics and Christians (and to an extent Buddhists) recognize four cardinal virtues:

1. 🧠 Wisdom (prudence),
2. ⚖️ Fairness (justice),
3. ⛓ Self-control (temperance), and
4. ❤️ Courage (fortitude).

Though these virtues can be abstract, their definitions open to debate, and their promoters prudish, let us assume that some version of these virtues is worth pursuing. In all cases, the immediate precondition is simple awareness (the awareness of one's fears, cravings, cruelties, and fallacies, in reverse order). It's an awareness we reach in writing.

2. Write to convince, Write to inspire

We write to convince and inspire or—if we're feeling less scrupulous—to deceive and incite. To make our assumptions digestible and our arguments contagious, so others might share our values and behave accordingly.

Because there are ideas are worth fighting for: e.g., the inherent value of living beings, the importance of science in making sense of the world, and the danger of dogma. And there are more than enough ideas worth fighting against: e.g., jihad, creationism, climate change denial, and constructivism.

The liberal arts

For more than two millennia, a "classical" education concerned the seven liberal arts, split into the lower trivium,

1. 🗣 Rhetoric,
2. 📏 Grammar, and
3. 🤖 Logic,

and the upper quadrivium,

1. 🎶 Music,
2. ◾️ Geometry,
3. 🔭 Astronomy, and
4. 🧮 Arithmetic.

That rhetoric, grammar, and logic could last for so long attests to their importance: these arts form the basis of communication, and communication forms the basis of community. He who commands rhetoric controls history. It's rhetoric that gave Hitler Germany, MLK the civil rights movement, and Trump America. Even before grammar. Even before logic. (Certainly before music.) And writing is the most visceral practice of persuasion.

3. Write to inform,

Sometimes, our mandate is less to convince and more to inform—to provide the facts without a preordained conclusion. We welcome debate and understand that participants must share a common core of information for productive debate to be possible. Writing becomes a path to develop that shared core.

4. Write to create

From an early age, I've had a desire to create: first pillow forts, then legos, now writings. This pleasure of having created plays at a more carnal level than any of my more uppity reasons for writing. It's just fun to make stuff.

But this comes with a caveat: if you write to create, you have to accept that you will likely never express an original thought (except in select technical disciplines). We are penguins swallowing the regurgitated ideas of previous generations. If we're lucky, we put those ideas in a new context or point out surprising connections. But the ideas are the same predigested morsels as always.

Case in point: The impossibility of creativity So don't take it too hard when you discover that "creativity" (in anything but the sense of identifying new combinations) is mostly a farce.

5. Write for the ego

I would be deceiving myself if I didn't admit to writing for the validation. I was a quiet, studious kid who got his recognition from most of his authority figures for being "intelligent." So my reward circuitry is still wired to worship intellect and to fire up at being seen as smart. And I'll admit that the thought of literary immortality is as tantalizing as any fountain of youth.

What to Write About?

As for subject matter, I'll write about the questions that excite me (from physics to cognition and consciousness), the problems that inspire me (e.g., climate change, inequality, and automation), and the systems and tools that work for me (in learning and in health).

This last banner requires a little more justification. After all, aren't there more than enough Tim Ferrisses, Tiago Fortes, and Nat Eliasons writing about productivity? Do we really need more content on self-improvement?

Why Write (about self-improvement)?

Yes, most everything I will write about self-improvement will be a trite rerun of things already said. As is always the case but even more so. Still I'll write.

Accountability

First, because writing about self-improvement helps you (the writer) stick to the tactics you describe. You are accountable to your audience, and the fear of being labeled a hypocrite cuts deep.

Writing focuses

Next, because writing focuses your attention. It helps you clarify your own reasons for pursuing your goals. And when you deeply understand your reasons for pursuing something, it's easier to persevere.

Finally, because most of the self-improvement crowd focuses unilaterally on one thing: self-improvement. It's about developing second brains so we can write more about second brains. We risk forgetting the world beyond the self that makes self-improvement worthwhile.

So we need more content that helps us bridge from self-improvement to societal improvement. Ambitious, yes, a little arrogant, likely, but my plan is to contribute to that bridge. Because self-improvement alone is not going to save us.

"Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself." — Rumi

I'd like to see more of the wise folk try to save the world again.

Workflows are no static things. To ensure yours are resilient—nay, antifragile—you must build them up gradually and adapt them to your circumstances.

My failures with the Zettelkasten

My difficulty with the Zettelkasten lay in forming the habits.

I had no problem populating the Zettelkasten— in three of my five initial attempts, I had managed to quickly produce more than a thousand notes. But writing notes is not enough to sustain the workflow, and my focus on reaching a "critical mass" came at the cost of the other key habits.

Sönke Ahrens, the master guru of Zettelkasten-ry, acknowledges this. In the last section of his book, How to take smart notes, he closes with a call-to-action to "[m]ake [the Zettelkasten] a habit." What he doesn't acknowledge is that "making the habit" is precisely the hard part. It's even harder because the Zettelkasten is a workflow itself composed of multiple habits, so you need to "make" several habits all at once.

Unfortunately, Ahrens doesn't draw his thought to the logical conclusion: atomic workflows. We can still derive the benefits from less intensive workflow than pioneer Niklas Luhman, and starting simple will help us build momentum to ultimately get to Luhmanian mastery.

With the Zettelkasten, we can do better: there is a simpler set of habits which still accomplish the overriding aims of Luhman's Zettelkasten. And that simpler set of habits will serve as our starting point. But before we can decompose and simplify Luhman's workflow, we need to understand it as is.

Luhman's workflow

In Luhman's model, you'll perform pretty much every one of the core habits pretty much every day. In fact, Ahrens presents this intensity as a perk: you'll never have to do anything you don't want to do. When Luhman had had enough of reading, he went back to drafting a manuscript. When he had had enough of drafting, he went to transfer notes to permanent storage. Etc.

Healthy Procrastination. Like other good workflows, Zettelkasten takes advantage of our tendencies to procrastinate. No need to expend unnecessary willpower—let yourself cheat within the bounds of the system.

This approach is fine if you have eight a hours a day to invest, but I know I don't. And because I don't have this kind of time, I couldn't find the consistency to turn the steps into habits.

Identify the purpose

Building atomic workflows consists of three basic steps:

1. Reduce a workflow to its minimum set of habits.
2. Reduce those habits to their minimum set of actions.
3. Introduce new habits and expand existing ones steadily and iteratively.

Actually, there's an zeroth step: to identify the workflow's Purpose. Because the purpose sets the criteria by which we reduce the workflow. Having done so, we should…

• Keep only the habits essential to achieving the purpose.
• And modify those habits in order to reduce the time it takes to reach the purpose.

So what is the purpose of the Zettelkasten? The purpose of the Zettelkasten is to write. Because writing is thinking.

Actually—that's not right. The purpose of the Zettelkasten is to publish. You can gather all the notes in the world, but if you aren't turning them into stories to share with the world, you risk becoming the worst combination of Rain Man and Cassandra.

Without a publishing deadline, a written work never has to be finished. And it's only when we finish a work that we can look back and be proud of our effort (yet painfully aware of how we could have done better). That's the moment of reward and feedback which powers the entire cycle.

So as we proceed we have two key questions to keep in mind:

• What habits of the Zettelkasten are essential to sharing a written work?
• How can we modify these habits to shorten the time until publishing?

Decomposing the Zettelkasten

We'll proceed in reverse order as an exercise in Inversion.

Creating

🖨 Publishing

If the true purpose of the Zettelkasten is not just to write but to publish, then I missed a step when describing Luhman's workflow. Hitting the "Publish" button is as crucial a habit as editing even if the former occurs outside the confines of your box.

This is why I've created a personal website. And why I've self-imposed a strict weekly deadline to publish content. In previous Zettelkasten attempts, I got ahead of myself. I quickly conceived of books and entire series I might try and write. But those aspirations killed any chance I ever had at actually writing those books. It stopped me from publishing regularly, and that ended the habits before they could form. This time, I've forbidden myself from (intentionally) working towards the more ambitious book deals. For now, it's publishing short-form articles until the publishing habit is fully entrenched.

🛠 Revising and Editing

There's not too much to say here except not to be a perfectionist. Creating a deadline is the best way to ween yourself off of nonterminal perfectionism. But don't skip this step or your work will be sloppy and confused.

🏗 Drafting

Ahrens spends a lot of time defending the Zettelkasten as a cure to the blank page syndrome.

Unfortunately, I'm not yet familiar with that problem. For now, I have plenty of topics I can just start writing about. This entire article, for example. I say "unfortunately" because it means I can skip over the other steps and just start here. Which, by the 2 Areas/Principles/Laws/Principle of maximum laziness, means I will skip over the other steps, and they won't form habits.

But I'm not taking it too hard. I have the sense that, if I just keep on writing, I'll eventually exhaust my most pressing thoughts and end up needing the creative support of a Zettelkasten.

"Reverse-drafting"

More than that, I'm not taking it too hard because the Zettelkasten has changed how I write: I write more concisely and more discretely. And, as I'm writing this text (on Obsidian), I convert the paragraphs and their constituent ideas back into notes— the reverse of Forte's 1 Projects/Writing/02 Series/Laws of Learning/Progressive summarization. This has the added benefit that I fill my Zettelkasten with the thoughts I find most pressing, and it eases a gradual transition to a more traditional Zettelkasten approach.

Connecting

✂️ Linking and Trimming

This one has been a particular challenge for me. I had so many ideas to capture that I didn't have the time to connect them. The most obvious solution is patience, to just take your time writing up notes. Two other things that have helped are:

1. Setting aside a time (if only 5 minutes) at the end of the day to go through my box just to trim and connect notes.
2. Using and abusing Obsidian's wonderful graph-rendering tools.

🗃 Making Permanent Notes

Though I'm producing most of my notes through reverse-drafting, I'm also still taking fleeting and literature notes. Since the permanent notes are already meant to be essential, there's not much more to say about them. You can't strip them down to something more basic.

Capturing

💨 Gathering fleeting notes.

After reading How to take smart notes, I got myself a pocket journal and started scribbling away. But that notebook filled far faster than my capacity to drain it. Though Ahrens had warned of just this, I couldn't help myself.

I have a new solution: I give myself one sheet of scrap paper on which to doodle fleeting notes per day. Then, every evening, after I compile my to-do list for the next day (part of my Atomic GTD practice—to be written), I transfer those notes to my box and I discard the piece of paper. The urgency forces me transfer what matters.

📓 Gathering literature notes:

Much of my current reading is related to my masters (in theoretical physics), so it can be technical and dense. I haven't found a good guide to using a Zettelkasten in the hard sciences, so I'll have to defer that discussion to another date. But one thing that has helped me avoid the problem of an ever growing backlog of literature notes is to restrict myself to read no more than two articles at a time.

And I'm focusing on taking notes only for articles. For now, I consider books too long. That is, if you want to form habits, it takes too much time between starting to read a book and transferring the last permanent note. As I build my note-taking habit for articles, I'll slowly expand it from there.

A final struggle of mine is that I take too many literature notes. One solution is to restrict myself to take notes in the margins of the articles I read. Less space means I have to be more concise. When I have finally learned my lesson, I might move up to a larger piece of scrap paper.