Conversation

But I don't add 40 questions a day! Question-writing, not reviewing, is the real bottleneck for my practice. It's awfully difficult to write good questions, and taxing even if you're skilled at it. I find it also requires a significant context switch.
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There's some tension here. If I made my own 112 prompts for the first chapter of QC, I'd likely get a much deeper understanding of the material. But—also—I probably wouldn't do it! I want to spend that effort on material core to my creative work, less on more peripheral material.
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The first chapter of QC takes most readers 4 hours to read (and has 112 questions). I spend 1-2 hours a day reading. So if the mnemonic medium were ubiquitous, I'd end up adding 40 questions a day, no sweat. That seems awfully enticing!
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The mnemonic medium is a long way from ubiquity, to put it mildly. In the meantime, I've significantly increased my rate of new SRS prompts with another approach: turning my daily writing practice into a kind of *personal* mnemonic medium.
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Those embedded questions end up in my daily review practice. I find that it's easier to write a lot of them this way, in the context of writing prose. Particularly cloze deletions. The practice feels quite strange! It certainly distorts the prose… but not always harmfully?
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One thing I like about this approach is: I don't want to just remember things I read—I want SRS to help me develop new ideas! I want to regularly review all the fragmentary inklings I sketch on the way to new insights. Embedded prompts are a convenient way to make that happen.
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I'm curious, how do you write your flashcards for these fragmentary inklings; is it just like any other note, or do you have specific format for composing a prompt for reviewing ideas?
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