What follows are my notes & some retrospective reflections on a workshop I gave in summer 2025 at Manifest to folks who’re interested in starting to use Anki.
Reflections
Prompts
- What are you (enjoying) learning about right now?
- Examples from my personal life:
- What are bits of jargon you continually get confused about?
- What are concepts that you notice keep popping up? Have you looked them up? If so, how many times?
- What activities are bottlenecked by the capacity of your working memory?
- Context-switching makes the thing really difficult, you often try to block out a few hours at a time to work on it
- You often feel like you’re holding a number of elements in your head all at once, and sort of weaving them together — if someone interrupts you, you feel like you have to “start over”
- Examples of activities bottlenecked by WM capacity:
- Navigating through a city while doing something else (talking to someone, listening to a podcast)
- Programming
- Making Fermi estimates (about compensation packages, currency conversions, scale of national economies)
- What do you repeatedly look up, at least a few times a week?
- Look through your search history on your browser, on ChatGPT/Claude, etc
- Download your search histories, throw them at an LLM, ask them to see what you repeatedly look up
- Examples:
Intro
- Saul
- Using Anki for 2 years
- ~10-30m /day
- This is my first time teaching this to a group! Please give feedback :)