Basically what it says. For me, making the memory palace and encoding is not as hard as having to review it (although I do, admittedly, procrastinate on this too sometimes). It’s so painful and tedious that I end up procrastinating until I forget everything.
Anyone else feel the same? Do you have any tips to make it easier, or should I just practice discipline?
Thanks.
I see a basic understanding of what you are doing would provide newer perspective and procastination withers away.
The basic idea is to realize what you are doing. You are basically trying to convert cued recall(Memory Palaces) to Free recall(you recalling multiple tables). So the cued recall only help to commit something to long term memory( it is because the info is stored beyond 30 sec which is the limit of working memory) but not consolidate it.
You felt the friction when you wanted free recall(like your multiple tables) but have to go with this intermediary part(cued recall) which is an extra work to you. Now, if you see that you do want to have free recall(recall without cues), which is almost reflexive, you would try to retrieve the info stored through cued recall( Memory Palace) frequently which would eliminate all the discipline, scheduled task and other ideas.
See, you want to remember something like lyrics of your favourite song, which you expect to come almost reflexively and you are using Memory Palace as intermediary to reach there.
Do NOT fall for discipline, pomodoro, schedule which frames you in certain mindset but does not help you regulate behaviourally. The ideas are excellent and cognitively sound but tideous to enact behaviourally.
I always feel sad because I had this hard time when I started and people do not even communicate this basic truth. For any beginners starting with this, please see if you get some mentors in your area and if you do than learn from them. Internet is a terrible place to develop a skill. Overly saturated instructions, no assessment of learner’s present capability, non identification of problem faced by student or mitigation of it. A million things could go wrong.
Use an external scheduler like Anki. You can either put the information itself into the flashcards or just the locations (ie. write something like “Pizzeria on X Street for Pi” if that’s what you memorized). Toggle on the FSRS setting to get better scheduling.
Procrastination is perfectly normal. It’s your brain telling you something is wrong.
So what is your brain telling you? It’s up to you to find out, to remove these obstacles. When does procrastination happens? In which environment? What do you do instead of studying? These are all hints.
For me, I tend to have two type of problems :
Maybe you are doing it as a work. And it’s boring. Find a way of making this as a game.
Yes, I sometimes want to just lose the review and wait for awhile until I work up the interest or motivation to review it again.
To break this, a chart would help. Have a daily chart where you check off or otherwise indicate that on that day, you did review the memory palace. Seeing the streak makes me happy.
Try to find ways to prime your environment so that it becomes easier for you to perform the review. Examples: 1) don’t make the daily habit too difficult; 2) block out a chunk of time in which you must work on the memory palace review; 3) play music or eat food you like while you are reviewing; 4) have a friend watch you or do it with you.
The famous book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear has several strategies on making discipline easier to achieve. The key is to change your surroundings so they motivate you.
Turducken’s suggestion of an external scheduler solves the hardest part, which is deciding what to review and when. Putting only the palace names or the first image of each route into flashcards keeps the reviews short, and the scheduler spaces them so that each palace is visited just before it starts to fade. Reviews also feel less tedious when they are fast, so walking through a palace at speed and only slowing down on the images that come back blurry keeps each session to a few minutes. Pairing it with something already done daily, like a commute, removes most of the friction.