Learning & Personal Effectiveness
Memory, practice, attention, planning, and execution
-
Active Recall
Trying to retrieve an idea strengthens memory more than rereading.
-
Spacing
Review spread across time improves durable retention.
-
Deliberate Practice
Practice improves fastest when it targets a narrow weakness with feedback.
-
Interleaving
Mixing related problem types trains selection, not just repetition.
-
Attention Is a Budget
Every interruption creates switching cost and recovery time.
-
Reflection Converts Experience
Brief review turns events into reusable principles.
-
Fluency Is Not Mastery
Material that feels familiar feels learned, and familiarity is a poor predictor of whether you can produce it.
-
Explaining Exposes Gaps
Explaining something to someone else forces every step into the open, including the ones you had skipped.
-
Manage Energy, Not Just Time
Capacity varies across a day, so the same hour is worth very different amounts depending on when it falls.
-
Starting Beats Planning
Past a point, the next useful information comes from attempting the thing rather than from thinking about it.
-
Transfer Needs Abstraction
A lesson learned in one setting only carries to another if you extract the principle from the specifics.
-
Sleep Consolidates Learning
Memory is stabilised during sleep, so what you retain depends on rest as well as on study.