Hi guys,
Yesterday I discovered this community and I wanted to say in first place THANKS for all this great work and compilation both in the wiki and the forum. I had some previous basic knowledge of the different techniques that are discussed here, mainly thanks to Ramón Campayo (I am Spanish), Tony Buzan and Antony Metivier. I’m in the process of building my own memory palace and really the wiki information along with the @gavino system and the enlighting @Bateman and @r30 posts have been very helpful.
I have been quite obsessed this past year with the idea of creating an efficient system with which I can remember what I spent time on (which is basically books and online courses, but also the preparation of university exams with greater efficiency). It makes me angry to read or study something and then, sometime later, the important ideas barely remain. IMHO it’s good to know something about everything, but it is more important to know well the things you know (an equilibrium between exploring and exploding).
I did some research. Initially, I wanted to build some kind of external knowledge graph (something like an ontology but using neo4j’s Bloom or related software to perform searches quickly), but (although more universal) this approach was too dependent on the external source. I finally found an already existing platform in which you can store a lot of different knowledge in different formats: Notion. I really recommend it, it is fairly complete in terms of functionalities: notes, knowledge base, tasks and projects, databases… I was really impressed with the features (during the search I also found Dynalist, which is pretty good for outlining).
But, as I mentioned, I’ve realized that there’s no point in trying to manage everything EXTERNALLY. I then rediscovered Anki and SRS thanks to Michael Nielsen’s post but I reached the complementary conclusion: there’s no point in trying to manage everything INTERNALLY.
So, so far I have found the following internal and external tools:
- Major system
- Method of Loci (memory palaces)
- Mind maps (related to ontologies although not exactly the same since they are more flexible but may be less optimal in terms of recall)
- Mnemonic linking techniques (specially @r30’s article, very useful for memory palaces and pegs)
- SRS (Anki, also SuperMemo but I prefer Anki)
- External knowledge management (with Notion, also Dynalist for outlining)
- Lanier’s verbatim system? (I still have to get on with it).
My question is basically how do you think these internal and external strategies and tools can be combined to make the most of them and when they should be used. For example: there are things for which it is more convenient to have them directly in the head while others are less “urgent”. Another example: it may be more useful to store certain information through SRS or memory palaces while for another it is better to have a different structure. The closest thing I found was @JayDugger’s answer in this post.
My goals are (I separate them because the “composite strategy” may change in each one) to make good use of internal and external means for:
- Books, mainly technical, informative and textual.
- Online courses (of aspects related to psychology, economy, computer science, mathematics).
- Study for exams (specifically, in my case are economics studies: mathematics, history, accounting and micro/macro)
The main element that blocks me is how to treat abstraction in a conscious way, the way to memorize, because I mostly deal with abstract concepts, but until now I have done it mostly unconsciously (through intuition with understanding).
I have indicated my personal interests in case it is a little less generic in this way. Thank you in any case for any contribution you want to make and excuse me for such a long text. 