How To Learn More Efficiently

Reading Time: 12 minutes

Do you ever get the feeling you’re forgetting stuff as quickly as you’re learning it? Amassing information but with no particular purpose? There are good reasons why this is exactly what is happening and it’s happening to all of us.

Today we’re living through the equivalent of a Cambrian explosion of information and new knowledge. The Internet puts the sum total of humanities knowledge in front of us and that total is expanding faster than at any time in history. The rate of expansion itself is also increasing. It has become the norm to get lost in a daily tsunami of information and distraction. How do we get ahead of this curve or even hope to stand still?

To figure out how to stay ahead we first have to understand why our current approach is often suboptimal. Why is so hard to stay on top of things?

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Reason 1: The Forgetting Curve

In 1855 the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus published an experimental study he conducted on himself to determine the rate of ‘forgetting’ by memorising nonsense symbols and testing himself after different time periods. Afterwards he plotting the results on a graph. The resulting graph represented what Ebbinghaus called ‘savings’ but we might call information retention. This came to be known as the Ebbinghaus curve, or more simply the ‘forgetting curve‘.

Ebbinghaus hypothesised that all individuals have a base forgetting rate all else being equal. Our knowledge decays at an exponential rate starting shortly after acquiring it. That is, unless we do something to interrupt the process.

More modern experiments were successful in replicating the Ebbinghaus curve.

More importantly for our purposes – Ebbinghaus hypothesised the forgetting curve could be interrupted in such a way to flatten the curve using a form of spaced active recall. Essentially revisiting the same information over and over and attempting to recall as much as possible from memory. Anyone who has used flashcards will be familiar with this technique. More on this soon.

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Reason 2: Half-Life of Knowledge

The half-life of knowledge is a an extension of the widely used concept common in fields such as physics. The basic idea of half-life is the time it takes for half of a substance to decay on average. Applied to knowledge it encapsulates the idea that what is known to be true and correct changes over time through advancements in understanding and scientific progress. Rendering old ‘facts’ depreciated. The half life is the time it takes for half of a body of knowledge to be overturned.

You can imagine it in this way:

Not only does a body of knowledge change over time, but the rate of change varies over time, and between different fields. The total amount of information and knowledge creation going on in the world has been accelerating relentlessly. The doubling-time of new knowledge in 1900 was around one century. Today it is thought to be less than 12 months! This inevitably reduces the half life of knowledge on average. More so in some fields than others. Physics for example could be expected to have a longer half-life compared to psychology. (This is not a dig at the latter.)

Even within or across fields some types of information have a much longer half-life than other types. Example: Learning the standard model in physics is going to survive much longer than anything gleamed from the daily news on CNN or the BBC.

Note: It’s important to bare in mind the half life of knowledge is not a precise measure, and few empirical approaches exist to measure the actual rate of decay. Some methods have involved conducting a meta-analysis of the fraction of published studies that become obsolete over time. Most of us will probably have to rely in intuition.

Perhaps the best way to extend the half life of what we know is focusing on those things which are unlikely to change any time soon. More on this later.

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Reason 3: Personal Knowledge Management

What we do with what we learn is probably even more important than reasons 1&2 because getting this wrong accelerates forgetting and renders the half-life of knowledge irrelevant.

In an information dense big data type of world it makes sense to organise knowledge in a way that is easily available for retrieval, is searchable, and amendable to change.

This isn’t just a concern for firms or knowledge workers anymore – we all have our own personal information eco-system. Most of us historically do a pretty poor job of organising what we learn. If you’re like me you probably have notebooks, filesystems and bookmarks that haven’t seen the light of day in years. Relying just on our brains means much of that information is probably not easily retrievable, and further, subject to forgetting, cognitive bias and unintentional confabulation.

The ideal of knowledge management is to always have the right information in the right place, and in the right form, to meet needs at the right time.

There are no shortage of solutions and systems for trying to accomplish that ideal. This might be part of the problem – the tendency to store information in different places for different purposes – making it incumbent on the user to ‘remember’ where the right information was stored. This is a core reason why I personally subscribe to the idea of digital minimalism as part of the solution.

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Reason 4: Information Diet

Much as with food we all have a personal information diet which varies in quantity and quality. Many of us now spend most of our waking hours consuming, processing, or passing on information in one form or another. The array of information we confront each day is mind boggling. This is just a reality of the 21st century.

Much of the information we consume is in a passive state often without much in the way of intentionality. Johnson Clay, in his book the information diet makes the case for conscious consumption. That we should pay closer attention to our behaviour rather than relying solely on ‘technical fixes’ to control our information diets. Most of us probably attempt this to some extent. Some take it to extremes with ‘social media detoxes’ and ‘unplugging’ being trendy for a while. These are interesting ideas, but this yo-yo dieting approach to our digital lives isn’t really sustainable.

Controlling this diet can be tough, not just from compulsions and addictions, but rather because some information flows are not very negotiable – such as email. Others such as social media and TV are amenable to change or elimination. All flows might be amenable to improvement in quality – which is where my focus tends to centre.

Note: Before moving on this is a non-exhaustive list and I encourage comments on what might be missing here.

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Overcoming

Okay, now we have some ideas about the key issues. What can we do to overcome merchants of overwhelm and increase our learning efficiency?

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1. Continuous Education

Fundamentally the way to stay on top in any field is to adopt a process of continuous education. This is deliberate, conscious effort to stay abreast of new develops in a structured way to make a connection between what is new and what is old. This can be both personal and professional. Here we will focus on the personal.

• Agenda – Set out a clear agenda of learning objectives to avoid backsliding into bingeing on any old information. Identify the specific resources and a time-frame. These items will be the priority for continuous self-guided learning.
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• Micro-credentialing through online MOOC – whatever the subject area, chances are there is a free or low cost MOOC or massive open online course available. These are usually highly structured, specific and often offer a assessment component essential for consolidation. Some of best universities in the world offer free MOOCs through platforms like Edx and Coursera.
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• Further education – In my case this meant going back to university in order to facilitate a career shift. This might also mean collage courses, graduate school and MBA’s. Further education is more necessary more than ever in the 21st century as the average length of jobs and even whole careers grows shorter. It is likely most of us will have to reskill multiple times in our working lifetime.
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• Newsletters – If there are specific topical or industry related newsletters these can be very useful for keeping up to date with developments in a particular area.
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• Micro-courses – These are often shorter than MOOCS and focus on specific skills and are very useful as a quick way to try a new skill.
  Platforms like Udemy, Skillshare and Khan Academy offer such courses in everything from adobe photoshop to coding and calculus.
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• Books – Getting into a regular reading habit has numerous benefits and provides the flexibility that it can be done anywhere any time. On a train or bus, before bed, or over breakfast.

2. Focus on The Fundamental

Looking at things through the perspective of the half-life of knowledge and the principle of continuously learning throughout life – we now have a bare bones framework for shaping our information diet in a way that maximizes the value we get out of the information we choose to consume. The key is to focus on those things which are unlikely to change very soon, while being targeted and deliberate in the information we choose to consume. Thus building good information habits over time with a bias for quality over quantity.

• Filter – Choose areas of focus for life-long learning consciously and with specific purpose or criteria. This acts as a ‘filter’ as to what is actually relevant for us vs the ocean of non-relevant stuff. It is easy to get lost in things that add little value. By using a set criteria – information consumption choices can be vetted consistently and in alignment with our goals.
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• Max half-life – Maximize the useful lifespan of information by focusing on first principles and fundamental knowledge. This means acquiring skills and knowledge that isn’t likely to change any time soon.
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• Transferable knowledge – Another way of getting the biggest bang for our buck (or time), is knowledge that has interdisciplinary value or provides transferable skills. Example; learning to code. This can be used across many different fields and projects, and once you understand the logic of one programming language most others can be picked up quite quickly.
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• Lose Distracting flows – Minimize irrelevant or low value information flows. Things like minute by minute updates on the latest news, Facebook memes, and that hot mess of a thread on Twitter. These should have low or no priority. An extension of this is to delete and unsubscribe from things that no longer fit.
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• Create Friction – Many distractions such a social media do bring value into our lives, but they can also take over if we’re not careful. The idea of creating friction is to make distractions harder to use in order to reduce overconsumption. We’ve all felt that frustration of a slow-loading website. We can recreate some of this friction ourselves: Delete social media apps and only allow for browser access which tends to be much slower and less pleasant experience. Use a browser extension such as BlockSite to block distracting website – ensuring you have to actively unblock them in order to be distracted. Other applications like RescueTime can do this in a slightly smarter way by blocking them during specified hours.
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• Change consumption patterns – There are ways to consume lower value information while minimizing the cost in terms of time: Again, thinking of a breaking news story – most of the facts are not known initially and it takes time for evolving situations to become clear. Most people sit glued to their TV’s or social media watching in real time. Resist the urge to consume information in this way. My preferred approach is averting my eyes until a later date when the whole story is clarified. Then the whole picture can be absorbed in a few minutes. Get the news, but not in the 24/7 news cycle format.

3. Getting Organised

Personal information management is the process of acquiring, organizing, maintaining, retrieving, and refining personally useful information. This can take many forms; study/books/podcast notes, planning and project documentation, space for reflections, appointments, financial data and the list goes on.

The question is how to accomplish this level of organisation without getting lost in complexity and inadvertently increasing the challenge of information management. After all, organisation doesn’t matter much if we cannot remember where we stored something, or under what tag or category, or in which application.

How to get organised:

• Use as few applications as possible in the process of organising information to prevent information dispersion. My personal favourite application by far is Notion. I use it to create hierarchical structures for storing knowledge from everything I read as well as all my notes. Notion also has the ability to create databases, create category and tag structures, search, add kanban boards, calendars, notifications and share individual pages. I think of it as as a personal content management system in the cloud. Others swear by other applications such as Evernote.
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• Create clear categories and taxonomies structures in the chosen application. Keep this as simply as possible so it’s easy to re-find the right information later. This makes search functions much more useful in the long run.
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• Recreate the same categories and taxonomies for filesystem structures.
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• Maintain a ‘workspace’ or dashboard in a single location in your favourite application from which its easy to access all the most frequently needed information.
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• Sync bookmarks with a single account. Google chrome does this well and ensures all bookmarks are available across devices. Recreate category structure for bookmarks.
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• Maintain an archive of no-longer in use files. People generally hate deleting things, and so this digital clutter builds and builds making information management systems less and less useful over time. By creating an archive we short-circuit this process.
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• Do not introduce a new tool unless it either 1. replaces an existing tool 2. adds value in some new and specific way.
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• Use a cloud application to backup filesystems, personal data, and bookmarks making the entire information system device agnostic. The most used cloud backup providers are Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. There is nothing worse than losing a chunk of work because of a device failure.

4. Interrupt The Forgetting Process

Finally, now we know what we’re learning and why, removed low-value information flows and gotten ourselves organised – we can move on to better retaining the information flows we do want. The primary aim here is to remember more of what we learn for longer – which goes a long way towards combating the erosive effects of forgetting and compounds the gains of focusing on higher quality long-life information.

Spaced Repetition

One of the factors Ebbinghaus Identified as being key to flattening the forgetting curve is repetition based on active recall. Now at first glance this sounds like the old and ineffective technique of rereading notes. The key term here is active recall, which is the act of exerting a cognitive effort to recall what was learned to consolidate longer-term memory. This is superior to more passive forms of learning like rereading notes. Active recall at its core is really a form of self-testing.

Research suggests that without intervention retention drops to 30% within 24hrs and reaches as little as 10% after one week.

Studies demonstrate how effective active recall can be:

“One interesting study by J.D. Karpicke and H.L. Roediger, III (2008) had college students study 40 pairs of foreign language words on flash cards. One group learned the words by going through the deck of cards each time until they could recall all the words. The other group’s subjects dropped a card whenever they successfully recalled its paired word on the reverse side. Both groups alternated between study and test trials. Furthermore, half of the subjects were tested on the entire list during each test trial, while the other half were only tested on words they failed to recall on previous test trials. The results of a follow-up test on the entire list a week later clearly showed that those who were tested on the entire list during learning were able to recall a greater percentage of the word pairs (~80% as opposed to ~30% for the partial-list tested subjects). Results didn’t depend on how the students studied (entire list or only unrecalled pairs), only how they were tested.“

The lesson here is active recall through self-testing massively boosted knowledge retention after an elapsed period of time. Imagine that if after one week instead of forgetting 70% of the information you only forgot 20%? This is a massive efficiency gain that is more than worth the extra time it takes to practice active recall.

This is just the start. By testing ourselves repeatedly at increasingly spaced intervals, the forgetting curve can be disrupted in a way that increases the baseline of long-term retention each time. Meaning each repetition can be spaced further apart. The first time might be needed within a day or two of learning, then one week, one month etc… Each time the new knowledge is further solidified by repeated recall.

In Practice

• Self-testing – Create questions and answer sheets based on notes and then test yourself on the questions at intervals of 24 hours, 1 week, 1 month. Hide the answers until afterwards.
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• Scheduled recall – Create a schedule of repeated active recall sessions and mark them in a calendar app such as Google calendar.
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• Flashcards – If the objective is memorisation of facts and statistics then flashcards might be more beneficial and they work on the same principles. A free flashcard app I highly recommended is Quizlet.
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• Reflection – after each learning session, or the end of each day, take time to reflect on what was learned and how it fits with everything else.
  Information is easier to recall when it’s anchored on existing knowledge.
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• Elaboration – It has long been understood that a good way to understand and retain knowledge is to elaborate or try to teach it to someone else. This could be a friend or just writing about the subject for an audience. I use this blog as a tool for consolidating my own understanding of subjects as an example.

Final Note

The core challenges of our time really are around how we consume, organise and utilize vast quantities of information to create value and meaning for ourselves and others. The people who get this right consistently are developing a compounding advantage over everyone who isn’t paying attention. The key takeaway is to consume with purpose and intentionality, and hopefully with some meta-idea of the value of that information. I hope you enjoyed reading and it sparks some ideas.

Feel free to reach out or leave a comment!

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