April 22, 2021

Man I need to step it up with this and start making it readable. Currently I’m just doing bare minimum to “set the habit”. The the book I’m reading, they say I should always establish a tiny task to build it into a habit. I think the idea is that getting even that tiny thing done is better than not doing anything. Additionally, there is far less friction and less excuses we can make when a task literally takes less than a minute.

Exploration of learning

I’ve decided that school can actually be interesting if I make it so. The most interesting part so far for me is not the content itself, but rather trying to optimize for the best results. My goal now is to get an A with the lowest amount of time input. I use evidence based learning techniques and try to incorporate them as much as possible. The most important techniques are interleaving, spaced repetition, and active recall.

Interleaving involves mixing up the different subjects during review so we cannot rely on short term memory. In the book make it stick, they referenced an example in which baseball players were practicing for different pitches. One group would only practice hitting 1 type of pitch. For example, 15 fast balls, then 15 straight balls. The other group would have the pitches thrown at random. The results during practice favored the group hitting one type of pitch because they already knew what was coming and were able to leverage their short term memory. However, when the actual game came, the group that practiced hitting mixed pitches performed far better. This is the principle of interleaving. Mixing difference subjects or even categories within a subject forces us to use long term memory for retrieval, thus enhancing memory.

Spaced repetition is the idea that spacing out practice is better than doing it in a seperate chunk. For example, if you had an hour to study, you would want to split it up into 10 minutes a day rather than going through the whole material in an hour. However, ….. (to be continued)