This video is made possible by Skillshare. Check out my complete Anki class completely free when
you use my special link. Anki is the best way to memorize anything, but are you using it right? The forget function, learning intervals, missed questions, add-ons. Do you know what all of these things are? Are you using all of
these things with Anki? Because you should. In this video, I'll show you
seven less well known tips for maximizing your
attention while using Anki. (gentle music) Anki revolutionized the way I study. And if you don't know what Anki is, I recommend you check out
one of my other videos where I go over a basic intro. You can check out my complete class, which is now on Skillshare. Or you just Google what Anki is, and there are some great
explanations on the internet which tell you what Anki is. But this video is gonna show
a few more advanced tips when using Anki to get the most out of it. But these are tips I think
everyone should be using when they're using Anki. If you guys don't know
me, my name is Zach, and I'm a fourth-year medical
student in Philadelphia. Okay, let's get started. (gentle music) Tip number one, and the most
important tip is understanding is way, way, way, way, way
more important than memorizing. So Anki importantly is
not an understanding tool, Anki is a memorization tool, and you must understand
before you memorize. Whenever you are looking
at a flashcard on Anki, it should be for revision
and reminding yourself of what that topic is as
opposed to learning that card or learning that piece of
information for the first time. If you wanna double check to make sure you understand the general topic, I would use something
called the Feynman Technique to make sure you're understanding
what you're learning. And again, you don't wanna use this for every single card you're studying, 'cause that would be a waste of time. But say you have 100 flashcards
that you want to learn and they're all about the
heart and murmurs of the heart. You don't wanna just jump into this if you don't know the
four valves of the heart or which way blood flows
in and out of the heart. Maybe you should ask yourself a question, okay, what is the basic
physiology of the heart? And explain it using
the Feynman Technique, which is gone over tons
of time on the internet. But just try to explain this topic. Just try and explain the flow of the heart as if you were explaining
it to a 12-year-old. But let's jump right into it. I'm gonna actually show you on my computer what settings I have to make sure I select for understanding
as opposed to memorization, and there are a couple little
sneaky things you can do to make sure you get that benefit. Now don't be afraid by
my reviews number here, I was just unsuspending
and redoing some cards 'cause I'm switching around rotations. But normally I do all my
reviews every single day. I've also disabled a bunch of add-ons, and I'll enable them as
we go through this video. So the first thing I want you to do is I want you to go to
Preferences on the top left. And now that you're in the
most recent version of Anki, or if you're watching this video, you should be using the
most recent version of Anki, you can see this thing
called the V3 Scheduler. I would definitely use the V3 Scheduler. This will let you do a bunch of things. Basically, all V3 learning does is it allows you to customize your reviews a little bit better. It allows interday learning, it changes the undue
function a little bit, which makes it work a
lot better with Anki. It integrates the Fuzz Factor, which is basically just saying, okay, when you learn a card, it's not gonna be exactly
sent into the distance as you set it. It's gonna be fuzzed a little bit, that way when you study later on, you're not studying tons of
cards all in one setting. You'll spread them out a
little bit, which is good. So I have the V3 Scheduler enabled. I have my next day starting here. The other thing I like to do is I like to have my learn
ahead limit set at zero minutes, because this is the saying, okay, if the card is
set to be shown to you 20 minutes in the future and you have your learn
ahead minute at 20 minutes, then you could see that card right away. Except the reason that
card is set in the distance is because of the whole
point of space repetition. If you're looking at
that card really soon, it might just be in that
short-term memory in your brain and you might not actually retain that information in the long term. That's why I don't like to mess with the Anki algorithm at all. I don't like to change
the learn ahead limit. I'll look at that card when I get to it. Any other settings here in the preferences I don't really change. I have my theme always at dark, but that's not for understanding. So the next settings I wanna talk about when focusing on
understanding and not memorizing, ignore the daily limits,
the new cards, the lapses. I talk about those in other
videos and in my class. But let's go down to display order here. So this is a new kind of section that we're seeing kind of with V3 and kind of the most recent Anki update. So new deck gather
order, this is important. Random cards, right? I wanna be shown things from
different decks randomly. I don't wanna learn cards in session, like what they're meant to
be, one after the other. New card sort order,
don't worry about this, just hit card type. Now, new review order, I usually have it show after reviews. I wanna see my new cards
after I do all my reviews. And this could create
issues if your reviews are capped at a low
number, like 100 or 200. But remember, we're doing all
our reviews every single day. So I'll set this number to 9999, and that way I'll always
be able to get to my news. Okay, this interday learning/review order, this is also a new thing. But all this means is
that interday learning is like when you have cards that are in the learning
phase of learning. For me, that is a while, because you can see I have
15 minutes one day, six days. Sometimes people like
to see their old reviews before they get to their learning cards, because the learning cards
are like harder to learn or something like that. That's the idea behind it anyway. I just like to mix it all up randomly, because I want things to be
really as random as possible. So again, I'm choosing understanding as opposed to memorization. So I just have my interday learning cards mixed in with my reviews. So review sort order, this is really only if you
have a large backlog of cards that you haven't reviewed, and it'll show you the cards
that have kind of been waiting the longest to be reviewed. I have this as showing the cards that you've been waiting
the longest to review first, but then it randomizes
everything together. And again, you really won't
need to worry about this if you're doing all your
reviews every single day, because then it'll fall into the setting of just randomizing. Okay, so again, we want
new gather order cards, random cards, new card
sort order, card type. New/review order, this you can
play around with on your own, but I like to do my renewed
cards after my reviews, so show after reviews. Interday learning/review
order, mix with reviews. And then, review sort order,
due date, then random. The next thing I'm gonna do to make sure, again, I'm understanding as opposed to memorizing is burying. So if you have a new card and the card has like two
cloze deletions on it, all this will do is it will delay like one of the card's
parts till the next day. So if I have the card that's
like two plus two equals four, and one of the cloze deletions is two and the other one is four, it'll be like two plus blank
equals four, I'll know two. And then, the next card will
be two plus two equals blank, which is four. I don't wanna see that second card right after the first card, right? 'Cause I could just memorize four from seeing the card before. So instead, what this function will do is it'll send that card one day ahead, so you'll see it the next day. This way you have to actually understand what two plus two equals as opposed to just memorizing what you saw on the previous card. And the same thing is for reviews. So this applies to all new cards. This applies to review cards. And this applies to interday
learning siblings, which are, again, those cards that
are in the learning phase. So I'll expect to change that here. Okay, and those are the settings
to use your Anki to, again, focus for understanding as
opposed to memorization. (gentle music) Okay, now let's talk
about missed questions and the forget function. Every question you get wrong should be linked to Anki flashcard. And I know this sounds crazy, especially the amount of
flashcards you're doing, but this is a great way to fill the holes in your understanding. It seems obvious, but usually
we look at a wrong question, and then just move
quickly onto the next one. We should be instead focusing
on making sure we understand, "Okay, why did I get that question wrong? Was there a piece of
information in that question that I didn't understand?" And then, going into Anki
or going into some resource to make sure we don't forget that again, and get the answer right the next time. So sometimes I'll be
doing a practice question and I'll get a certain item
wrong and I'll be like, "Okay, it's because I didn't know that piece of information." So, for example, if I got a question wrong about benzodiazepines and I was like, "Oh, I just didn't know
that benzodiazepines are used in anxiety situations." I would find that card here and say, "Okay, I really didn't know that at all, even though I've been
reviewing that card a lot." What I'm gonna do is
use the forget function. And what the forget function will do, will basically reset it to a new card. The important thing here is I also do a little bonus thing here is I have it reset repetition
and lapse count as well. Because you see the ease
factor on the right here? Usually this is a question
that I've got wrong over and over and over again, so the ease factor has gone down from 250% to maybe 220, 200, 190, 175, all the way to the bottom of 130, and I wanna treat it as a fresh card. If it's at 130%, it's gonna be seen over
and over and over again, and the idea is it's because
it's a harder card for me. But in my opinion, it's not actually because
it's a harder card for me, it's because I just
literally haven't reviewed it in a long time and it's
just one of those things that isn't sticking in my head. So I wanna reset it, treat
it as a new card completely. Especially since I got
a missed question wrong, I'm gonna be much more apt
to focus on that information and retain that information. So I just have reset repetition
and lapse count as well. And then, you can see it's
set as a new card here. It goes into the learning phase again, which means even though remember, the ease factor was lower before, if I just reset it without
resetting the ease factor, I would see it even farther in the future because it wasn't a new card and it wasn't gonna be
affected by my learning steps, which are like 15 minutes,
one day, six days. But now because of this, I'm gonna see it more
frequently in those 15 minutes, one day, six days, which is good because I'm
treating it as a new card. So overall for this tip, remember use the forget function
on questions you get wrong, and then plug in the missed question into that part of the Anki flashcard. When you focus on the specific information you're getting wrong for your flashcards, that'll help you retain information and really focus your learning on what you are getting wrong, which is I think one of
the best ways to study. (gentle music) The next thing, let's talk
about customizing cards. So if you look at my cards,
you can see, and again, I didn't make a lot of these cards, these are from a premade deck, but you can see there's some
really nice bolding going on. There's some really nice
underlining going on. There's this lovely
information at the bottom, which is information from a textbook. There's one of my missed
questions that I put in. Here's another piece of
information from a textbook. All these cards are
highly, highly customized, And I think this is important, because anything that makes your studying a little bit nicer, a
little bit more enjoyable, a little bit easier to focus on the information is a bonus, is a plus. Now I just wanna also give
you a little added bonus thing that I would do for certain
questions that, you know, you wanna like learn a little bit more or understand a little bit better. So, for example, if I
just hit a random card, let's just scroll down here
and pick a random card here. So I've been doing my infectious disease, as you can tell here. What is Novobiocin sensitivity of Staphylococcus epidermidis? Sensitive, okay, so that's
just saying, you know, Staph epi is sensitive to this
certain kind of antibiotic. Now a great question for me, because I remember there's a
certain kind of thing here, is to add an additional field that says "What is an extra question
or add a connect question." So under additional resources here, but again, I would make
your own field that says, like additional questions or connect. But under additional resources here, I might ask myself the question, "What other bacteria is Novobiocin resistant?" And then, I'll write
the answer under that, which is Staph saprophyticus. And that way I'm also
connecting two topics. I'm adding a little bit of bonus, a little bit of extra studying
to whatever I'm working on. And this is just a great way to consolidate the information even more. There's a theory called Hebbian theory, which means the more connections you make, you might actually be
making neuronal connections in your brain, which makes the information
stick around longer. (gentle music) Okay, now let's get onto a little bit more of a complicated topic, and that's figuring out the perfect interval modifier for your goals or modifying the interval modifier, modifying the interval modifier
for whatever goals you have. Understanding this really
depends on making sure you understand the settings. If you don't understand the settings, if you don't know what
all these things mean, I recommend, again, you watch one of my videos where I talk about all the settings on Anki, you check out my complete
class on everything Anki and using Anki as best as possible, or just watch another video where the settings are explained. 'Cause if you don't
understand the settings, you won't understand what
I'm about to talk about. So the interval modifier
is simply a number that's multiplied by every
single time you do a card. So if you have a card
that is set to be shown to you 100 days in the future and the interval modifier is one, then after it goes through
all the other multiplications, it'll be multiplied by
the interval multiplier, which is one, so it'll go
100 days in the future. If you set the interval
modifier to say 0.9, then instead of being set
100 days in the future, the card will be shown
90 days in the future, 'cause 0.9 times 100 is 90. Or if you set it to 1.1, the card would be shown
110 days in the future as opposed to 100 days in the future. And this is a really good thing to adjust when you're trying to
maximize your retention rate to a certain percentage, or if you just feel like
you're seeing all your cards too frequently or all your
cards too infrequently. So using the interval
modifier really all revolves around what your certain goal is. What percent of this information
do you want to retain? So, for example, in medical school, I like to be in the high
80s, probably 88, 89%, so I'm retaining a lot
of this information. And all this retaining
this information means is that when I see the
flashcard that's mature, so I've learned it, I want to hit good or
easy at least 90% or 89, 88% of the time. So the way you do this, again, make sure you have the True
Retention app downloaded, hit stats, you can just click it, and then don't worry
about the stop parts here. Scroll all the way down until you see the answer buttons here. You can play around with
one month, three months. I like to kind of look
at three months average and see all the way on the right, what buttons I'm hitting for mature cards. So you can see that about 90% of the time, which is exactly where I wanna be, I'm hitting good on my mature cards. I'm hitting again about 9% of the time. I'm hitting hard about
0.46 amount of the time. And I'm hitting easy
about 1.34% of the time. So what I would do is
I would go down here, don't worry about young cards, 'cause, again, those cards aren't at a certain interval of learning for them to have enough points of data to be really kind of good to look at. You wanna look at your mature cards, 'cause these have more points
of data to point you to, "Okay, this is around where my retention is with my flashcards." My retention is right around
90%, which is pretty much good. But say, for example,
this said like 82% or 83%, well, then what would I wanna do? Well, one thing you could do, you could go to your deck settings here and you could change the interval modifier so you're seeing the cards more frequently so your retention percentage would go up. So maybe I would change
this to, I don't know, 0.95 or 0.90. This means I would see the
cards about 10% more of the time than I am seeing them originally, and this might bump up my
retention rate a little bit. But, importantly, it's
really hard to increase this retention rate. It's actually a logarithmic scale to increase this retention rate. If you go to the SuperMemo website, you can see there's actually a multiplier for the retention rate. And it's log of the desired
retention percentage divided by log of the
current retention percentage. Okay, so for example, imagine
I had a retention rate of 85% and I want it to be at 90%. So using the equation here, that's log of 90% over
log of 80% equals 0.65. Well, what does that 0.65 mean? Well, that means technically that I would wanna plug in that 0.65 into the interval modifier. So I would be seeing these
cards nearly twice as frequently because my interval modifier
was one and now it's 0.65, which would make me see the cards a crazy, crazy amount of time. And you have to think about this, right? You have to think, okay,
is seeing these cards nearly twice as much worth it for getting that extra
little bit of 5% retention? And I don't think so. I think I like to play around with five, 10% of changing this interval modifier to kind of change the numbers
of my actual retention rate. When you start changing
the number to like 20%, 30%, 40%, those are two big
changes to do right away. What I would do is occasionally, maybe once a month, go to
stats, go in the top here, scroll all the way down,
ignore all this stuff, go to here and maybe hit
three months and see, "Okay, what am I hitting and
what am I at right about here?" And then, I would change that
interval modifier five, 10%, and then study for another month. And then see, "Okay,
did this number go up?" Write it down somewhere
or take a picture of this, "Or did it go down?" And see if the change
in the interval modifier is actually having an effect and you haven't gone
crazy in the past month from seeing the cards
more frequently too much, and then kind of play it out. You don't wanna change huge changes in your interval modifier, 'cause just trust me,
it'll drive you insane. So again, remember in
the example I just said, if you wanted to get 5% more retention, it's not a linear relationship
according to SuperMemo. We'd have to study 35% more
to get a 5% increase in grade. And I think this makes
sense to me in real life, you know, getting A++ as opposed to like a low A on a paper, or something like that, requires a huge amount
of additional effort. So think about this for yourself, but in general my recommendation is only play around with
changing your study percentage by like 10, five to 10% in the beginning. Then you can start to adjust it more if you feel comfortable
every single month. Okay, well done, that's probably
the most complicated thing I'm gonna talk about, but one of the most helpful things in adjusting the frequency
that you're seeing cards and understanding what kind of effects you can have on your retention percentage. Also, this stats section is pretty cool. Again, download that True Retention app and you can get more
information on the right here, which I like. (gentle music) Okay, tip number five
is learn or kill cards that are taking up too much time. And for this you want to use something called the Advanced Browser add-on. So again, the Advanced Browser add-on, I'll put a link for it below, or the numbers are 874215009. And, again, you should know
how to download add-ons, but that's just how you
download the add-on. So this fantastic application lets you see how much time
you're actually spending on each one of these cards. So I'll just disable this so it looks like kind of a
normal person's browser here. So I'll disable time-average, and I'll disable time-total. And you only get this advanced thing when you have the
Advanced Browser download. So the only thing I like to look at is I like to go on
the left here and see, "Okay, what's the time total I'm spending on every single card?" And then, what I'll do is
I'll drag that over there 'cause I want the flag to be over there, and I'll rank all my
times from like descending or ascending order I guess. And I'll scroll down until I see kind of some really heavy cards, some cards that are taking up lots, and lots, and lots of time. As you can see on the right here, this card's taking 49.7 minutes total, 39 minutes, 37 minutes, 36 minutes, all these kinds of things. And you also notice that the ease factor has gone down to pretty much the lowest it can possibly go, 130%, 130%, 150%. That means I'm seeing these cards a lot. And you can see that all these cards are suspended right now, again, because I'm in my
fourth year of medical school, I don't really need to be keeping all this information in my head. There's certain pieces of information I wanna be keeping in my
head for certain rotations. So now that you have
this, I would do this, I would rank them by time and go to the things that's
taking up the most time for you. Go to the cards that are really
sucking the time outta you. And this one is acetyl-CoA carboxylase is regulated via positive
feedback by insulin and citrate. And this is part of the
fatty acid synthesis cycle, which is one of my definitely
more difficult things for remembering in med school. And you can see the next
one's about that too. The next one's another train of things. Two options here, I can
either focus really hard and try and learn this information, and then reset the card. Or I can just kill the
card and suspend it forever and realize that it's
sucking away too much of my studying energy. And it's just one of those things that I'm not really gonna remember, and it's not that important
to my doctoring knowledge. So it's okay to suspend it. And that's the decision I came
to for a lot of these cards. Like, listen, these are
taking up like 40 minutes, 39 minutes, this is total time, right? This is not like every day I'm spending 40 minutes on this card, but these are taking up a lot longer time than some of my other cards, which are usually around, you know, a couple of minutes or
something like that. So I just suspended them. So what I would do is I would
go through all these cards that are taking up a lot, a
lot of time at the bottom. Maybe just go through like
100 or 5% of the cards that are taking up the
most time and then say, "Okay, listen, do I wanna
learn this information? Do I think this is important
information to learn? Or do I just wanna suspend it forever?" So information that I would wanna learn, I would just unsuspend,
reset it as a new card, and then really focus on
learning that information. I might even tag it, create a new deck, or something like that and say, "Listen, this is information
that I need to relearn and I wanna focus carefully to relearn." But then certain things that
I don't ever wanna learn, certain things that I'm
like, "You know what? This information is gonna
be suspended forever. I'm never gonna try and
learn this information, 'cause it's just not high yield enough." I might flag it as a different color. So I might say, "You know what? This is a really, really
low yield question. I don't need learn that,
I'm just gonna flag it." So all I do is I just hit
Command + 1, which flags it. And you can just do
Command + 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, which flags it all these different colors. You can see on the right here, they're coming up with different colors. But I like to flag cards that I'm never really gonna focus on again or I think that are pretty
low yield as Command + 1. And that's just the best
way I like to do it. You can also add a tag to it that says, "Listen, no, this is a card
that I don't wanna learn." The custom browser, just as a side note, has some really cool things. You can change it, you can see, "Okay, when was the card created? How long did I get it? What percent of the time
am I getting this correct?" All this kind of good stuff. The only thing I like is total time, 'cause this shows me kind
of the total on average time I'm spending with these cards. (gentle music) So the next thing I wanna talk about is making simpler cards. Your cards should be fairly simple, maybe two or three cloze
deletions, maybe one sentence. Paragraphs are gonna be too confusing and just complicate
pretty much everything. So you wanna simplify your cards. So there's one card in
particular I wanna show you that's in one of these
premade med school decks that has a really not
simple kind of thing. So you see this card here that says branches of the external carotid artery can remember with the mnemonic, Some Angry Ladies Fight Off PMS. So this is just so you can remember the branches of the
external carotid artery. And I don't like the way it'll do this. 'Cause remember, we're using our berrying, birrying, burying, how
do you say that word? Burying? Burying function. Which we talked about earlier. So this card you'll see on one day, and then you'll see this the
next day, and the next day. So you're gonna see all
these cards over eight days, and it's not the way the
mnemonics meant to work, right? The mnemonics meant to say, okay, Some Angry Ladies Fight Off PMS. So then you use, okay, Some
Angry Ladies Fight Off PMS, and you can say, "Okay,
superior thyroid artery, ascending pharyngeal artery." And you're meant to go
through all of these using this mnemonic, instead of just going through
them individually day by day. So what I like to do, instead of having this like this, 'cause this card is just
way too complicated, I'll set it to c1, c1, c1, c1, c1. 'Cause I guarantee you every single day you're just gonna remember if C, "Okay, maybe I can find the little one that I'm forgetting using
all my context clues here." The much better way to learn these kind of more complicated things is just take the time and learn the mnemonic the right way the first time. So create as simple cards as possible, you'll thank yourself in the long run. (gentle music) Finally, tip number seven
is you need to understand the settings of Anki. You can't begin to take
true advantage of Anki without understanding the settings. Understanding the Anki settings is vital to maximizing your potential
when you're studying with Anki. I know a good amount about Anki, I know pretty much every nook and cranny of the way the algorithm
works, the way the code works, and it's allowed me to
kind of maximize my use of this amazing application, and hopefully has helped some of you guys when you've watched my videos. And I wouldn't have survived
medical school without Anki, so I wanted to make the ultimate guide, the ultimate class, from beginning to end, for using Anki for everyone. Showing how anyone, even if
you're not in medical school, if you're in high school, college, if you're trying to
learn a learn language, the ultimate way to study and use Anki. My Ultimate Guide to Anki is a full-length class on Skillshare. In this class, I'm gonna take
you through everything I know about using Anki to the
best effect possible. I've been using it for over three years. I've spent 3,000 hours on it and I've reviewed over
half a million flashcards. I think I know how Anki works. By the end of this course,
you'll know how Anki works. What is the algorithm? What add-ons are best? How do I set it up for the first time? This course goes extremely in depth, because in order to get
the most out of Anki, you need to understand
exactly what's going on. So if you wanna check out
my two-hour plus class on Anki for free on Skillshare, make sure you use this link, because the first 1,000 people to use it will get a one-month
free trial on Skillshare. And when you sign up for Skillshare, you will also have access to their entire online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes. Pretty much any specific
skill you are trying to learn, you can find on Skillshare. But thank you so much for watching, and I will see you on the next one. (inspirational music)
