Evernote: Online Incremental Reading without SRS

The other day I was looking for incremental reading alternatives for the iPhone or iPad, and I came across Evernote, a platform that lets you archive information and create notes that are searchable for later use. While the purposes of Evernote and Incremental Reading are different, they do overlap quite a bit.

Evernote helps you create a "scrapbook" of things relevant and interesting to the user. Phone numbers, interesting quotes, ideas you read about, etc. are all placed on digital "index cards" that become searchable for later use. You can also create to-do lists based on that information.


The difference between Evernote and Incremental Reading is that with Incremental Reading, all of your "index cards" are placed on a conveyor belt that forces you to review and evaluate the information, and choose to do something with it (Remember it, delay it, delete it, read as much as you can/want). The end result of Evernote seems to be accumulating a useful collection of searchable information, Incremental Reading creates a useful collection of remembered information.

To put it another way, Incremental Reading is an internal, offline version of Evernote where notable information is eventually turned into flashcards.

But unlike incremental reading, Evernote can be used on an iPhone, iPad, the internet, etc.

So here has been my recent workflow with using Evernote with Incremental Reading on my iPhone:
1. Find interesting article.
2. Read in Instapaper.
3. When I find an interesting piece of information, copy into Evernote.
4. Once a week, copy things from Evernote into SuperMemo via Incremental Reading and process the information in the days to come.

I'm not sure why I never thought of doing this in the past, but it almost completely takes care of my need for portable Incremental Reading. There are not very many steps and it has been working out wonderfully. Maybe it will be helpful for you, too.

Using Pimsleur (Or any audio language course) with SuperMemo

Language acquisition is not a simple, cut-and-dry matter. A great deal of blood and sweat is required, and no single language course is a "silver-bullet" for becoming fluent in a language. Each language course has strong points and shortcomings. Pimsleur is a language course that has strong points and also shortcomings, but I believe that the strong points outweigh those shortcomings, especially when you are starting out with a language.

When I first started learning Japanese (And before I started using SuperMemo), I listened to Pimsleur Japanese I, doing one lesson a day. Although I read reviews criticizing Pimsleur's Japanese course, I found it very useful in acquiring a few phrases and getting rid of my American accent. After I was using Pimsleur for a couple of weeks, a Japanese friend (Who is very strict at correcting my Japanese) called me, and I picked up the phone and said "hello" in Japanese, and my friend said "I thought I accidentally called a Japanese person." I say this not to toot my own horn, but to show that Pimsleur language courses have at least SOME bit of usefulness.

If you've never heard of Pimsleur, they are a company that makes (Expensive) audio-only language courses. What makes them effective is the "fill-in-the-blank" structure, which requires that you produce responses frequently AND the smart use of graduated interval recall to aid in short and long-term retention (It helps short-term retention like nothing else I've ever used, personally).

For years I have not been using Pimsleur, but after deciding to learn Hindi, I have started using Pimsleur Hindi. This time, I am going through the course with the aid of SuperMemo.

This has been my routine, and it has been very useful for me:

1. Listen to a lesson of Pimsleur with SuperMemo turned on.
2. If I hear a new phrase or word used, pause the lesson and make a flashcard of that phrase.
3. If I have trouble producing a phrase they ask for, pause the lesson and make a flashcard of that phrase.
4. Keep doing this until lesson is finished.

Two things I've noticed so far:
This whole process takes about 35-40 minutes to complete.
The Pimsleur lessons take care of short-term retention while SuperMemo can take care of the long term retention. If you do more than one lesson per day relying ONLY on Pimsleur, you risk messing with their spaced repetition algorithm. Using SuperMemo ALONGSIDE Pimsleur removes this barrier, allowing you to complete more than one lesson per day.
You can also go days or weeks without doing a lesson without losing progress. Typically Pimsleur courses are best done one lesson per day, every day. Again, SuperMemo acts as the safety net you would otherwise be without.

I'll create another post if I find anything else notable as I go along this course. I suspect I will be finished with Pimsleur Hindi in the next couple of weeks, mainly due to various demands of my time.

Flashcard selection based on core values and abstract patterns

Committing things to memory can be beneficial or detrimental to one's life. For example, one could memorize the entire phonebook and waste a great deal of time. On the opposite end, you could memorize how to do the Heimlich Maneuver and save someone's life. So one important thing is the SELECTION.

So the next question is: Which knowledge is most beneficial? It depends on a number of things, but the most important one is this: What do you want to do with your life? Do you want to understand Indian culture? If so, learning the history of bubble gum might not be a good idea. If you were trying to compete in the bubble gum industry, though, learning the history of bubble gum seems much more useful now. So much depends on your CORE PRIORITIES.

This is what guides my overall intellectual life: "Learn something about everything and everything about something." It is my goal to learn a great deal about a few subjects, and learn a bit about many other subjects. The few subjects that I want to really know well are (Broadly speaking): Foreign languages (And language acquisition), history and neuroscience/social psychology. When it comes to these subjects, I crave new knowledge like water.

Other subjects are like soft drinks; I drink them every now and then, but they don't receive as much attention as my core subjects.

So when you look at something you could memorize (Math equations, jokes, quotes from books), the only one that can make a proper judgment call on this is yourself; "Do I want this in my mind forever?" If so, make a flashcard out of it. It will only require two or three minutes in your lifetime, so the long-term "damage" of committing a few extra seemingly trivial things to memory is very slim (As long as you don't commit a great deal of trivial things to memory).

Certain information might not seem very useful, but it becomes EXTREMELY valuable later. What is the value of having JUST the right joke or anecdote to say at the dinner table with friends? What about having JUST the right romantic quote to say to a pretty girl? Or a succinct metaphor that contributes to a discussion on a subject? While many factual flashcards have a definite value (Foreign language vocab words, test material from medical textbooks, etc.), certain things are more abstract but are also very valuable; saying the RIGHT THING at the RIGHT TIME is a great feeling for yourself and others.

Success in most fields boils down to recognizing and properly anticipating patterns. If you know what kind of situations you are going to encounter, you should commit to memory enough patterns of knowledge relevant to that field. The more abstract those patterns, the more creative you must be to articulate and anticipate them. If you can hit the sweet spot by anticipating the right pattern at the right time, good things can happen on a small or large scale; I am convinced that most breakthroughs in various fields (Science, computer design, etc.) is a result of this process. Like Wayne Gretzky said, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." If you can do this in whatever your field of study, the time investment in SuperMemo has more than paid off.

This serves to reinforce that SuperMemo (Or any other flashcard software) is only a shovel to be used not for the sake of using it (To dig holes), but to find buried treasures of knowledge beneath the many patterns we encounter in life.

Incremental Reading: What is of Value?

Imagine you are an archaeologist exploring a cave that potentially has valuable fragments of a lost civilization. As you explore the cave, you find many rocks of little value (If any). However, as you find artifacts that might be relevant to your field of work, you pause, examine the artifacts, place them in bags, label them for future study, etc.

Incremental reading is difficult to describe; like traditional reading with books it involves exploring a line of thought, but unlike traditional, linear reading, you are encouraged to examine and constantly assign value to the material under consideration, much like an archaeologist exploring a cave. What information and articles are valuable can be very subjective, as people have many different motivations, hobbies, fields in which they are ignorant, etc. (After all, to a geologist, the same "valueless" rocks that were discarded by one might potentially be more useful than a valuable artifact at that same site!).

As you examine any text, you need to first ask yourself, "What information is valuable to me?" To do this you must first have a set of core values (Stated or otherwise). To illustrate, consider an article I just finished reading from Time magazine: "Red Truth Blue Truth."

What information is valuable to me? I have no political affiliation, I consider myself neutral when it comes to politics. While one might cut the top part of a weed every few years by electing a new face for the government, the roots of corruption, greed, etc. stay the same. Thus, while one political party might advocate a policy I feel is good, the corruption runs so deep on every level, the decaying institution is either beyond reform or very close to it. I'm not advocating that you adopt this viewpoint, I'm simply stating my core values that came into play when evaluating this article.

If I was a Romney supporter, I might be more inclined to look for knowledge and facts that would be detrimental to Obama's administration and something I could use to win an argument with a co-worker. If I was an Obama supporter, I might be just as inclined to look for things detrimental Romney's policies and track record. Because I don't have a stake in either side, going into the article I was looking for mainly historical tidbits and a more complete picture of the tattered state of political discourse.

(It is also good to remember that many statistics are greatly subject to change. To memorize them would be just as valuable to memorize the stock price of a company on any given day.)

I read the article, one paragraph at a time. If I didn't find anything enlightening, surprising, etc. in one of those paragraphs, I would delete that paragraph and move on to the next one. If I found something interesting in that paragraph, I would analyze what was valuable in that paragraph and try to condense each point into a single sentence (Very important!). After doing this, I would extract that sentence, delete the paragraph and move on. I kept this up until I finished reading the article.

Among the interesting points I found in the article were:

-Lies and mud-slinging is as old as US politics itself; it goes back all the way to the very first election involving John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

-The quote "We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers," is telling about politics in general.

-Those that subscribe to a political party are more likely to dismiss or downplay the lies said or endorsed by their own party (Basically "fanboy-ism," which works with technology, movie franchises, etc.).

-I never knew Ronald Reagan claimed that 80% of pollution came from trees and vegetation.

Other than the above points (Along with a few more), the rest of the article contained nothing extremely surprising or enlightening. Still, 6 or 7 good flashcards came from an article that took 10-15 minutes to read, so I'm satisfied with the result.

Incremental Reading Principle: Priority

(This is in response to a question asked in the comments section of the previous post)

I had been using Incremental Reading on-and-off over the past few years, but only recently do I think I have hit my stride when it comes to Incremental Reading. I am having fun reading more than a dozen recreational books, articles from various journals (Time, New Yorker, etc.), long blog posts, articles on TV Tropes (It's the only way I can read that site), reviews of movies, video games, etc. Obviously different texts receive different treatment. A fluff blog entry isn't analysed to the degree a book on string theory is.

Here is a rough way I mentally classify articles/books/etc. that I read:

HIGH PRIORITY (Methodical)
-Read every 1-5 days
-Create flashcards as soon as I extract noteworthy information
-Do not advance the article until I understand every piece of  information
-When I encounter difficult parts, endeavor to understand them ASAP

MEDIUM PRIORITY (Casual)
-Read every 10-30 days
-Extract topics, make flashcards out of them whenever I get to it
-Skip difficult parts that require further study

LOW PRIORITY (Passive)
-Read a paragraph or two every 50-150 days
-Extract topics, but I don't really care about them unless I'm getting rid of old topics that clutter my database

So when reading a high priority article, I will methodically break down every paragraph and sentence that contains something noteworthy, creating flashcards as soon as I think I can create one adequately. If I find a piece of information that I do not understand but understanding it is necessary for progressing through the article, I put the article on "pause" (Delay it for a few days) while I endeavor to understand that piece of information, doing the same steps as mentioned above. Once I am done, I resume reading the original article.

When reading a medium priority article, I will casually read it and freely jump around from one section to another as I see fit. I don't really care about deeply knowing every thought contained. If, in order to understand the article, I must first consult a different source to grasp a concept alluded to in the article, I may or may not confront that gap of knowledge. If I choose to, I do so "when I get around to it."

When reading a low priority article, I am almost completely passive about the information I'm reading. Aside from a few interesting things that the article might potentially contain, I don't care very much whether the article lives or dies. It might be delayed for many months or years (Or deleted), and it doesn't take up any "mental RAM."

Some articles might start out as a 'medium priority' article, but as I read it I realize that it has very valuable information contained within, and it goes to 'high priority' for a few days. After I extract the most useful bits of knowledge from the article (If I do not delete it), it might go back to 'medium' or even 'low priority' for a few months until I put it out of its misery.

As you can see, how you incrementally read articles changes as your priorities change. What you consider valuable one month might not seem so valuable later. Although I never explicitly say to myself "This article is 'high priority' now," my thirst for the knowledge contained in the article compels me to gobble more and more of it, while an article that doesn't excite my knowledge apatite are delayed (and eventually discarded if they don't prove their worth).

As the SuperMemo web site says, Incremental Reading is more of a reading management technique than anything else. And while it has taken me a while to get used to it, it is one of the most compelling features of SuperMemo. Once you hit your stride, you can quite comfortably read hundreds or thousands of articles at the same time, although I didn't think that it was possible at first.

Reading books incrementally

Reading Books Incrementally

I love reading books, but I enjoy incremental reading too much to read books, blog entries, etc. in the linear fashion they were intended to be consumed. The negative aspects of linear reading will be covered in another post soon. Until then, to make it easier to read books using Supermemo, I have found this to be particularly helpful:
There are many sites that allow you to create text documents of .epub and .mobi files. Here is one that I have been using: Whoosh.


After I first acquire the epub or mobi file and convert it to a .txt file, I copy and paste 10 or so pages into Supermemo (Too much text slows Supermemo down). I use the "picture article" template so I can put a picture of the cover of the book on the opposite side of the page (I have always been fond of book covers, album covers, etc.). I delete the text that has no value to me, highlight and extract sentences or paragraphs that might contain a flashcard, and keep doing this until I read the end of the text I copied over. After this, I copy another 10 or so pages, and then continue on.

Right now I am reading at least 10 books (Two of which are fiction), and I have thoroughly enjoyed this way of reading. If you haven't tried it, it is a very fun way to read scientific and historical books (Which is what I enjoy reading the most).


To summarize:
-Incremental reading is superior and more fun than traditional reading.

-Convert an acquired epub or mobi file into .txt.

-Only copy 10-15 pages of text at a time to prevent slowing Supermemo down.

Reading Books Incrementally

I love reading books, but I enjoy incremental reading too much to read books, blog entries, etc. in the linear fashion they were intended to be consumed. The negative aspects of linear reading will be covered in another post soon. Until then, to make it easier to read books using Supermemo, I have found this to be particularly helpful:

There are many sites that allow you to create text documents of .epub and .mobi files. Here is one that I have been using: Whoosh.

After I first acquire the epub or mobi file and convert it to a .txt file, I copy and paste 10 or so pages into Supermemo (Too much text slows Supermemo down). I use the "picture article" template so I can put a picture of the cover of the book on the opposite side of the page (I have always been fond of book covers, album covers, etc.). I delete the text that has no value to me, highlight and extract sentences or paragraphs that might contain a flashcard, and keep doing this until I read the end of the text I copied over. After this, I copy another 10 or so pages, and then continue on.

Right now I am reading at least 10 books (Two of which are fiction), and I have thoroughly enjoyed this way of reading. If you haven't tried it, it is a very fun way to read scientific and historical books (Which is what I enjoy reading the most).

To summarize:

-Incremental reading is superior and more fun than traditional reading.

-Convert an acquired epub or mobi file into .txt.

-Only copy 10-15 pages of text at a time to prevent slowing Supermemo down.