Why is it useful? My job at least isn’t bottlenecked by me not memorizing enough things. Or maybe it is! But I’m not convinced

I am completely self taught (started programming at 14 and dropped out of high school) yet I have never user Anki and spaced repetition once.

I am curious to know how it can make my life better, and I'm not being sarcastic, but yours is a tall claim and I am very used to learn everything I do by myself.

What can Anki do for me in 10-20 minutes a day? Finding or preparing good flash cards is a lot of effort for someone used to ADHD-fueled information skimming to learn something breadth-first.

This is where I've found ChatGPT sooooo effective in searching.

I ask it a question much more naturally vs google - meaning less cognitive load and the answer it spits back is usually a result of multiple sources distilled down to the smallest amount of information - basically all the "fluff" removed. This means less time spent reading, filtering, finding the answer.

It's been wrong a number of times which costs me 5-30 minutes at a time, but I've severely benefited in time overall by orders of magnitude.

I have the exact opposite opinion. My wife is a doctor.

Anki was insanely popular in med school. It was certainly helpful for passing exams, but it's all stuff that can be easily looked up. It's all simple, basic facts.

It's far better to learn the theory, then fill in the details with easy reference.

Could you share some examples of the type of stuff you’ve added to this system that’s had that kind of professional pay off? I’m familiar with the approach, but I suspect part of the reason I’ve not been able to maintain a long term habit is I’ve always used it for things like learning a language. Which is great, but doesn’t have the kind of process re-enforcing payoff given I rarely get to apply it.

And I’m drawn a blank on the kind of professional stuff I’d put in here.

The other high ROI activity is writing/re-writing and writing these prompts yourself will make it more effective.

It seems to me that pretty much anything has better ROI then 10-20 minutes of pure rote memorization a day. Plus, keeping in 10-20 minutes a day requires separate skill on itself. Anki has a way of taking over and expanding the time it requires.

Do you have a TLDR for that article? It's pretty long and wordy.