Under-Appreciated Ways to Use Flashcards—Part II

Florence Hinder8 Mar 2023 9:54 UTC
25 points
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By Tereza Ruzickova

TL;DR

In my first article, I outlined how significant flashcard learning has been for me and how I utilize it in many different—often unexpected—areas of my life. In this article, I will share some practical strategies for making the flashcard habit stick. Most of these I’ve learned the hard way over the past ten years (while accumulating more than 40 000 cards!). Here are my key takeaways from the article.

  1. I make notes whenever something interesting crops up using a convenient note-taking app like Things or Thought Saver.

  2. I regularly distill these notes into atomic, concise flashcards

  3. I have my decks loosely organized into Everything, ASAP, Therapy Skills, Spanish and German

  4. I built a daily habit using the Tiny Habits approach—just five cards a day.

  5. The easiest times for me to revise are when I am not groggy/​distracted by work

How I create and organize my flashcards

For the past few years, I have found that the most variable that determines whether I regularly create new cards is convenience. When I set up a super convenient information-gathering method for any facts that have flashcard potential, I am much more likely to make and revise flashcards alongside everything else that I do.

I have found the software Things to work really well for me, especially their keyboard shortcut that creates new notes very quickly and effortlessly both on the phone and desktop. This way, I easily note down anything that I want to remember throughout the day—whether it’s fun facts I hear on podcasts, gratitude moments I experience, or even life lessons that randomly occur to me. You can also effortlessly create cards directly into the Thought Saver mobile app.

About once a week, I then go through all of these notes, filter out any that no longer seem interesting, and start creating new cards. I always aim to keep each card as simple as possible, which often means having to break things down into several cards and stripping the content to the most essential bits of information.

For example, this might be one note I write down after reading a book:

Francisco Franco was a Spanish general who led the Nationalist forces in overthrowing the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War and then ruled over Spain from 1930s to 1970s as a dictator.

And this is how I might break it into several cards:

Learning to make my cards extremely simple was a game-changer for me. Before that, my cards would contain lots of complex information, which would make it really effortful to remember them and to motivate myself into regular revision. When it’s easy to feel successful, I’m much more likely to continue doing it.

How I organize my cards

Once I create a card, I then categorize it into one of several decks. My approach to this has changed over time; in the past, I used to just throw them all into one deck, which I called Everything. I felt like that simplified the whole process and made it easier to build a habit around it. I still use this deck, but I have also separated out other ones for specific situations. My current organization looks like this:

  1. Everything—most of my cards on any topic

  2. ASAP—only the cards that need to be revised in the near future

  3. Therapy skills—cards related to my work, which I often revise before I give therapy sessions

  4. Spanish—cards I revise before speaking Spanish

  5. German—cards I revise before speaking German

Of course, the way you organize your cards is completely up to you—my most important tip is just to consider what’s convenient for you in relation to applying this knowledge in your life.

Now that we have learned how to create and organize cards let’s dive into some tips for making flashcards a regular habit in your life.

How I built my flashcard habit

I’m a big fan of the Tiny Habits approach when it comes to establishing reliable practices in my life. According to this paradigm, you first ask yourself: “What’s the smallest version of this habit that I can manage even on my hardest days?” This tiny version becomes the only thing you really have to do on a regular basis. If you happen to feel inspired and motivated, you can always do much more. But by keeping the daily requirement tiny, it becomes very easy to succeed at doing it consistently. This brings positive feelings of accomplishment, which keeps the habit going.

For me, I decided that the smallest amount of flashcards I could go through is five cards a day. This takes about a minute and requires no real effort (because I keep my cards very simple). Not only is it very easy to achieve this, but it also makes the practice extremely flexible. I can do it while I’m standing in a supermarket queue, while I’m commuting, or even when it’s 10 pm, I’m half asleep, and I just realized I haven’t done my daily flashcards.

Now, you might be asking: 5 cards a day? That’s nothing! I can relate; my perfectionistic brain would much prefer it if I went through 300 cards a day. However, I have tried and failed at that many times. And each time, it would leave me feeling so disappointed that I wouldn’t even want to look at my cards for a while. So I’ve concluded that this just isn’t realistic long-term as my commitments and energy levels change over time. When I set the bar low, I feel successful every day, no matter what else I’m doing. On particularly good days (or particularly boring times on public transport), I often end up revising much more. I feel that, overall, this leads to sustained motivation and a higher number of total revisions than if I pushed myself into something straining every single day.

Thought Saver follows this idea too, encouraging you to only quiz on a small number of cards per day to build up the habit, normally around five daily cards.

One thing that motivates me in these tiny steps is to see them gradually add up. For the last few years, I’ve been using an app called Tally to track this. That way, I can see that, for example, I have gone through more than 8 000 cards in my Spanish deck this year just by continuing (and, on good days, expanding) my tiny flashcard habit. This has been a great way to stay connected with my Spanish learning hobby during my busy schedule.

Another way to improve habit-building is to find the right time and context where your flashcard learning “fits”. For example, in the past, I tried going through flashcards while eating breakfast or during breaks at work. However, neither of these habits stuck with me very well. In the post-mortem investigation I conduct for every failed habit, I realized why it didn’t work for me. At breakfast, I’m often still quite groggy and want to do something relaxing to ease into the day. During work breaks, on the other hand, I may be a bit stressed or cognitively overwhelmed, so I prefer to clear my mind with meditation or a walk.

In the end, I found that the best time for my flashcard practice is during evening relaxation or if I can’t fall asleep at night. However, this will be unique to everyone based on your individual circumstances. Experiment and find out what’s best for you!

I hope this article gave you some useful pointers on how to make flashcards a convenient part of your life. It all gets easier with practice—and if you have any of your tips, please share them in the comments below!

This post was written in collaboration with the team at Thought Saver to teach you more about how to use flashcards in your day-to-day life.

Florence Hinder8 Mar 2023 9:54 UTC
25 points
6 comments4 min readLW link