Hi, this is Lesson 2 of 4 in the Anki Fundamentals free course. I hope you like it! Let me know if you have any questions or feedback — I'd like to hear what you think! 🙂
In this post, you’re going to learn how to create a deck structure that actually helps you learn faster and makes your cards effective outside of Anki.
That’s because using Anki for learning doesn’t just mean memorizing what you’ve learned…
It also means being able to use your knowledge.
If what you’re learning is unretrievable outside of Anki, well, it’s useless. No matter how good you are at answering flashcards, you’re just going to waste tons and tons of potential just because of your deck structure.
The opposite happens when you create effective decks.
You become efficient.
You become effective.
There’s no other way to put it…
For example, one of my readers from the Philippines, Joseph, was able to review faster—from 2 hours to 1 hour—for his Board Exams because of creating effective decks, too:
And I know you can do the same.
A simple rule for effective decks
Be guided by this graph:
This basically says that there is a trade-off between answer speed and transfer of learning.
The more you separate your cards into multiple decks, the less connections you’re likely to make. In contrast, putting everything into a single deck will take tremendous effort.
My rule for deck making focuses on the sweet spot:
Use the least amount of decks possible.
This does a few things:
- You are still efficient. You are not inducing unnecessary retrieval effort by mixing in keyboard shortcuts and Anatomy knowledge, for example.
- Dissolves boundaries between topics — allowing you to freely build newly learned information on top of what you already know
- Slows down forgetting even more
- According to Dr. Robert Bjork, an expert on forgetting, an increased retrieval effort leads to an increase in “storage strength”, a type of strength in memory that slows down forgetting.
- You can discriminate between topics better (ironically…)
- Participants in the spacing condition (who learned the paintings in an interleaved manner) were able to correctly identify more target paintings than the massed condition (who learned the paintings consecutively) despite the presence of distractor paintings. [@kornell2008learning]
If that isn’t the perfect advantage of having a single deck for learning faster, then I don’t know what is!
Now, that’s MY recommendation, especially if you’re a student.
If you’re a lifelong learner, well, the least amount of decks is ONE — just sayin’ 😉
Michael Neilsen, one of the pioneers of quantum computing (!), apparently uses a unified approach to deck structure:
The world isn’t divided up into neatly separated components, and I believe it’s good to collide very different types of questions. One moment Anki is asking me a question about the temperature chicken should be cooked to. The next: a question about the JavaScript API.
Is deck structure such a big deal?
If you want to use Anki for learning rather than memorization alone, this is a big deal.
The real pros at using Anki know that the items in your memory should get built upon and associated to new knowledge, rather than merely get stockpiled and disordered.
Having too many decks is the antithesis of this concept.
To give you a concrete example, here’s happened to me when I put all General Engineering subjects in a single deck:
First, I was able to learn new topics in subjects under “General Engineering” rapidly because concepts actually related to one another or at least resembled it. (The subjects are Strength of Materials, Mechanics, Physics, Engineering Economics, to name a few)
One time, I was able to turn material strength analyses into an easy circuit analysis because the governing concept looked like Ohm’s Law — a concept from Physics.
If that looked like Ohm’s Law, then that means it can be analyzed using techniques formed from that principle. (i.e. “Voltage Divider” or “Current Divider”)
My solutions became extremely short and more efficient.
Other concepts had carryover in my life as well—especially Physics.
Frictional force on a flat ground increases with mass and roughness.
If applied to productivity, then massive tasks must be broken down; workflows must be smooth.
That way, you feel no friction.
In addition, the absence of friction means you can accelerate even when using little force; less energy required = efficiency.
I would NOT have figured that out had I got “stuck” into artificial containers called “topics”.
Yet, Anki newbies approach Anki learning exactly this way; they create too many decks — one deck for each topic, and then further dividing them into sub-topics.
With the bottom-up approach, transfer of knowledge from one topic to another is more probable.
There’s no “strict” hierarchies, after all.
This deepens your understanding, and thus strengthens retention more than spaced repetition alone.
At the end of the day, though, this a trade-off YOU have to make, so I’ll leave that to you.
Read the free mini-course: Using Anki Efficiently: Root Cause Edition (Lesson 1) →
