After i used SuperMemo consistently for a few weeks I started to understand the power of spaced repetition based on the results. I was spontaneously remembering vocabulary words I never had actually used in conversations, all because they were in SuperMemo. It honestly felt like magic the first time I remembered the Japanese word for “doorbell” π (εΌγ³ι΄, YOBIRIN).
After about two months or so of using SuperMemo daily, I realized that this was now a habit. I’m now “that guy/kid (19 at the time) that does flashcards every day.”
After a few months of daily SuperMemo use, and after it became an ingrained part of my daily routine, I came to realize that doing it early, as soon as I woke up, was the best thing for me. If it didn’t get done in the morning, there was a chance I would forget about it, aside from the fact that the rest of the day felt “off.” At some point it became my daily “main quest objective,” and my typical morning goal became “finish SuperMemo as early as possible.”
This sometimes became a problem when circumstances were abnormal, such as when traveling, staying at a friend’s house or when I sometimes have to work the late night shift. On these occasions I have gotten close to missing days, but after one close call I figured out a good long term solution that I will outline in another post.
The main point is that there was an initial “motivation hump” I had to get over, but after the benefits of SuperMemo “clicked”, SuperMemo became just another part of my life; just as eating, bathing or flossing are. Sometimes it requires some extra effort, but eventually the thought of skipping a day and messing up my multi-year streak is more painful than the effort of doing SuperMemo even when I’ve had a bad night of sleep.
Hi, I wonder if sometimes you do your daily reps for the streak shake and it is not pleasurable at all; specially when feeling sick, under emotional distress from a loved one passing etc. You seem to enphatise your streak over and over again so it seems that keeping the personal streak became a goal by itself shake.
ReplyDeleteGood questions, I can easily see how it could come across that way! I’ll answer it in another post, but the short version is:
ReplyDelete-Remove as many pain points as possible from the process.
-Make the cards fun to review by using images, sounds, etc.
-Make cards that contain information that is fun for you to think about (jokes, movie trivia, etc.)
-Use an easy method of controlling the card review process (I have used the same Wii Remote for more than a decade to do my daily reps)
Basically it’s not any one thing, but a combination of things that all come together to make you say “sweet, it’s the morning! I wonder what flashcards im going to see today!”
Like I said, I’ll elaborate further in a post (or multiple), but those are the most important data points that factor into making the routine addictive.