In spaced repetition, it's tempting to ponder per-card cost—"should I pay three minutes over my lifetime to memorize this?"
But for me, marginal cards are effectively *free* to add:
1. I review cards in time that'd be dead anyway.
2. I can't add enough cards to fill that time.
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For instance, often I'll review cards while waiting 10 minutes for the next train. This doesn't "cost" me 10m because I would've just been screwing around on Twitter or something. And even with 1000s of cards, it often takes less than 10m! I can't write new ones quickly enough!
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This leads to a *very* unintuitive feeling: it's… effectively free to memorize as many new cards as I can write? What?
Which in turn means that for me, the real marginal cost is in the moment of *writing* a new card.
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I think there are ways to mitigate that cost, but some of it's essential: in writing cards, I'm synthesizing, comparing, filtering, personalizing, etc. I'm interested in structures and routines which support me in doing those things more rapidly or with less friction.
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Once one's attention is on the writing-a-card cost, environment becomes a key barrier. The cost is way higher on a smartphone keyboard, so I make cards on my laptop. But my habits often misalign: I read while out, I read in bed, etc—the laptop's not around. Gotta "buffer" cards…
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I'd be interested to know what potential cards you did not write and for what reasons.
I've struggled to start Anki a few times. Perhaps bc I didn't feel I was making useful cards for myself.
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Simplest category: 100s or, alas, probably 1000s not written because they’re things I found striking when reading away from a computer, and I failed to follow up (hard to build that workflow).
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