5 Surefire Ways to Increase Learning In Everyday Life (For Busy People)
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to learn more efficiently. Given the same amount of time and resources, how can we learn more?
While efficiency is beneficial, focusing too much on it can lead us to neglect the more important factor for learning success: the quantity of time spent learning.
Consider an activity like using flashcards to learn vocabulary in a new language. Focusing on efficiency, you would try to figure out the best way to learn each card. Should you study isolated words or embed each one in a sentence? One card or multiple per term? Use pictures or only words?
These are good questions to ask, but the gains from more efficient flashcards are dwarfed by the more important question of how many cards you study.
While learning Mandarin Chinese, I set a target to do 100 new flashcards per day, plus reviews. I had multiple cards per word, but this approach meant I could add twenty to fifty new words to my vocabulary daily, which made it possible to get up to a conversational level more quickly during my short stay in China.
This more-is-better approach isn’t limited to flashcards. The value of increasing throughput for learning is apparent everywhere:
- How many books you read per year (vs. trying to read the “right” books).
- How many essays you publish.
- How many practice exams you complete.
