You will always face far more knowledge that you will be able to master. That is why prioritizing is critical for building quality knowledge in the long-term. The way you prioritize will affect the way your knowledge slots in. This will also affect the speed of learning (e.g. see: learn basics first). There are many stages at which prioritizing will take place; only few are relevant to knowledge representation, but all are important:
- Prioritizing sources - there will always be a number of sources of your knowledge. If you are still at student years: these will most likely be books and notes pertaining to different subjects. Otherwise you will probably rely more on journals, Internet, TV, newspapers, encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc. It is always worth being aware what is the optimum proportion of time devoted to those varied sources. As you progress with learning, you will quickly develop a good sense of which learning slots bring better results and which might be extended at the cost of others
- Extracting knowledge - unless you are about to pass an important exam, it nearly never makes sense to memorize whole books or whole articles. You will need to extract those parts that are most likely to impact the quality of your knowledge. You can do it by (1) marking paragraphs in a book or journal, (2) pasting relevant web pages to SuperMemo, (3) pasting relevant passages to SuperMemo, (4) typing facts and figures directly to SuperMemo notes, etc. You will need some experience before you can accurately measure how much knowledge you can indeed transfer to your brain and what degree of detail you can feasibly master. Your best way to prioritize the flow of knowledge into your memory is to use incremental reading tools
- Transferring knowledge to SuperMemo - you may try to stick with the 20 rules of formulating knowledge at the moment of introducing your material to SuperMemo. However, you can also literally transfer your notes or import whole files and later use the mechanisms provided by SuperMemo to determine the order of processing the imported material. Probably the best criterion for choosing between formulating or just importing is the time needed for accurately formulating the item or items. If formulation requires more knowledge, more time, comparing with other sources, etc. you can just import. Otherwise, if you believe that formulating an accurate item is a matter of seconds, formulate it
- Formulating items - make sure that explanatory or optional components of the answer are placed in the parentheses so that your attention is focused on the most important part of the item. The parts in the parentheses can be read after the repetition to strengthen the memory in its context
- Using forgetting index - you can use the forgetting index to prioritize pending items. The sequence of repetitions will naturally be determined by SuperMemo; however, you can request higher retention level for items that are more important and lower retention level for items of lower priority
- Learning - the process of prioritizing does not end with the onset of repetitions.
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20 rules of formulating knowledge in learningr, you will rarely want to memorize stamping itself. If you would like to remember the changes of a given figure in time (e.g. GNP figures over a number of years), the date stamping becomes the learned knowledge itself.
<span>Prioritize
You will always face far more knowledge that you will be able to master. That is why prioritizing is critical for building quality knowledge in the long-term. The way you prioritize will affect the way your knowledge slots in. This will also affect the speed of learning (e.g. see: learn basics first). There are many stages at which prioritizing will take place; only few are relevant to knowledge representation, but all are important:
Prioritizing sources - there will always be a number of sources of your knowledge. If you are still at student years: these will most likely be books and notes pertaining to different subjects. Otherwise you will probably rely more on journals, Internet, TV, newspapers, encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc. It is always worth being aware what is the optimum proportion of time devoted to those varied sources. As you progress with learning, you will quickly develop a good sense of which learning slots bring better results and which might be extended at the cost of others Extracting knowledge - unless you are about to pass an important exam, it nearly never makes sense to memorize whole books or whole articles. You will need to extract those parts that are most likely to impact the quality of your knowledge. You can do it by (1) marking paragraphs in a book or journal, (2) pasting relevant web pages to SuperMemo, (3) pasting relevant passages to SuperMemo, (4) typing facts and figures directly to SuperMemo notes, etc. You will need some experience before you can accurately measure how much knowledge you can indeed transfer to your brain and what degree of detail you can feasibly master. Your best way to prioritize the flow of knowledge into your memory is to use incremental reading tools Transferring knowledge to SuperMemo - you may try to stick with the 20 rules of formulating knowledge at the moment of introducing your material to SuperMemo. However, you can also literally transfer your notes or import whole files and later use the mechanisms provided by SuperMemo to determine the order of processing the imported material. Probably the best criterion for choosing between formulating or just importing is the time needed for accurately formulating the item or items. If formulation requires more knowledge, more time, comparing with other sources, etc. you can just import. Otherwise, if you believe that formulating an accurate item is a matter of seconds, formulate it Formulating items - make sure that explanatory or optional components of the answer are placed in the parentheses so that your attention is focused on the most important part of the item. The parts in the parentheses can be read after the repetition to strengthen the memory in its context Using forgetting index - you can use the forgetting index to prioritize pending items. The sequence of repetitions will naturally be determined by SuperMemo; however, you can request higher retention level for items that are more important and lower retention level for items of lower priority Learning - the process of prioritizing does not end with the onset of repetitions. Here are the tools you can use to continue setting your priorities while the learning process is under way:
Remember (Ctrl+M) - re-memorize items of high priority that have Summary
| status | not read | | reprioritisations | |
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| last reprioritisation on | | | suggested re-reading day | |
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| started reading on | | | finished reading on | |
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Details