Years ago, Jerry Seinfeld told a joke about “night guy versus morning guy”. You can see the clip below, but he essentially says that when he stays up too late, that’s him as “night guy”, and he’s not concerned with what “morning guy” needs to deal with. Here’s a clip:
I’m finding that I’m the same way in parts of my life, particularly with Anki.
Anki is essentially a flash card app to help me remember things, and I use it every single day. I love it because I can put anything in there that I want to learn, and I’ll “magically” learn it over the coming weeks. As Michael Nielson has said, “Anki makes memory a choice“.
That’s not my problem
The drawback to using Anki so frequently is that I’ve got a lot of cards in there, and it’s in large part to treating Anki like Seinfeld treats sleep — I’ll let the “other” Mickey deal with actually learning them.
When I find something new that I want learn, such as the NATO phonetic alphabet, I can just throw it in Anki and it’ll magically get learned! All that *I* do is put it in Anki, and I know that I’ll learn it over the new few weeks.
Of course, “other” Mickey still has to work through the cards every day, but it really does feel disconnected — in a good way. When I want to learn something new, I can put it in there right then and know it’ll get taken care, even if I’m the one that needs to deal with it later.
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