• Book: How to Take Smart Notes
• Slipbox workflow
• Slipbox pitfalls
• Potential of slipboxes

Reading something we have previously read about feels like we encounter something we already know. This comfortable feeling deceives us. The test of knowledge isn't in the feeling of recognition. If we've never otherwise retrieved this thing from memory, we won't when it counts.

From Book: A Mind for Numbers:

We don’t engage in passive rereading because we are dumb or lazy. We do it because we fall prey to a cognitive illusion. When we read material over and over, the material becomes familiar and fluent, meaning it is easy for our minds to process. We then think that this easy processing is a sign that we have learned something well, even though we have not.

It gets worse the more often we're exposed to the same story, as we'll less and less feel the need to put in the effort and ask questions about it to commit it to memory for real.

Related: mere-exposure effect / Zeigarnik effect

On multitasking:

• multitasking is inefficient
• multitasking generates a deceptive feeling of productivity
• the longer you multitask, the worse you get at it, as if depleting a mental resource

Try to multitask all day, and you'll find yourself extra bad at dealing with more than one thing at a time (more ADHD-like?). Better conserve it so that when it's necessary to multitask, you'll have more resources for it.

Even at the start of a good day, with a full tank of potential for multitasking, it still has poor real-world results. As such you may as well only do it when an external force requires you to. Always single-thread when possible.

This justifies

• Write, and edit later
• Writing one atomic note at a time, as per the slipbox method

When teachers prearrange curricula into modules, categories, themes, they rob students of discovering these regularities. Confident we don't have to write down such patterns, or even look for them, we never know them by heart. Because Recognition is deceptive, these preidentified patterns do harm.

Doyle 2008: "The one who does the work does the learning".

"Manipulations such as variation, spacing, introducing contextual interference, and using tests, rather than persentations, as learning events, all share the property that they appear during the learning process to impede learning, but they then often enhance learning […]" (Bjork 2011)