The memex vision inspired many later computer pioneers, including Douglas Engelbart's ideas about the augmentation of human intelligence, Ted Nelson's ideas about hypertext, and, indirectly, Tim Berners-Lee's conception of the world wide web

In this essay we investigate personal memory systems, that is, systems designed to improve the long-term memory of a single person.

the essay is a distillation of informal, ad hoc observations and rules of thumb about how personal memory systems work.

The single biggest change that Anki brings about is that it means memory is no longer a haphazard event, to be left to chance. Rather, it guarantees I will remember something, with minimal effort. That is, Anki makes memory a choice.

What made Anki finally “take” for me, turning it into a habit, was a project I took on as a joke.

for fun, I wondered if it might be possible to use Anki to essentially completely memorize a (short) book about the Unix command line.

Anki would make it easy to learn things that would formerly have been quite tedious and difficult for me to learn. This confidence, in turn, made it much easier to build an Anki habit. At the same time, the project also helped me learn the Anki interface, and got me to experiment with different ways of posing questions.

I find Anki a great help when reading research papers, particularly in fields outside my expertise.

using Anki gave me confidence I would retain much of the understanding over the long term.

This is important: I find Anki works much better when used in service to some personal creative project.

when I'm reading in support of some creative project, I ask much better Anki questions. I find it easier to connect to the questions and answers emotionally. I simply care more about them, and that makes a difference.

while it's tempting to use Anki cards to study in preparation for some (possibly hypothetical) future use, it's better to find a way to use Anki as part of some creative project.

It's usually a bad idea to extract fewer than 5 questions – doing so tends to leave the paper as a kind of isolated orphan in my memory. Later I find it difficult to feel much connection to those questions.

It's a failure mode to spend too long reading unimportant papers.

Shallow reads of many papers can help you figure out what the key papers are, without spending too much time doing deeper reads of papers that turn out not to be so important.

95% of Anki's value comes from 5% of the features

to really internalize a process, it's not enough just to review Anki cards. You need to carry out the process, in context. And you need to solve real problems with it.