Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn Surrender to This Algorithm I've found that item in my g+ stream from some of my friend and eager to share it here http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all I've found it utterly instructive as I also have the same problems. Here are some quotes from the article to allure you to devote some time to it: ...SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. ...Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they? ...Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm ...In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus made up lists of nonsense syllables and measured how long it took to forget and then relearn them. (Here is an example of the type of list he used: bes dek fel gup huf jeik mek meun pon daus dor gim ke4k be4p bCn hes.) ...Among his original observations was an account of a strange phenomenon that would drive his successors half batty for the next century: the spacing effect. ...Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions ...After all, there is a tremendous amount of material we might want to know. Time is short. ...To this day," Bjork says, "most people think about forgetting as decay, that memories are like footprints in the sand that gradually fade away. But that has been disproved by a lot of research. The memory appears to be gone because you can't recall it, but we can prove that it's still there. For instance, you can still recognize a 'forgotten' item in a group. ...Every time he learned the name of a student, Jordan is said to have complained, he forgot the name of a fish ...The most popular learning systems sold today — for instance, foreign language software like Rosetta Stone — cheerfully defy every one of the psychologists' warnings ...Landauer and Bjork were looking for the optimal moment to rehearse something so that it would later be remembered ...The best time to study something is at the moment you are about to forget it ...One of the sets he studied every five days, another every 18 days, and the third at expanding intervals, in