Anki tells me that since 2021, I’ve missed two days of general-knowledge flashcards. During that time, my second child was born. We’ve moved house. I’ve travelled, been ill, had work dramas, and generally had all the normal reasons for letting a pointless little habit die.
Still, almost every day, I spend about ten minutes reviewing flashcards.
I review around 75 cards a day. Anki says I’ve “stored” 11,185 pieces of knowledge, which sounds far more impressive than it is. A lot of cards go both ways. “What is the capital of Venezuela?” and “Caracas is the capital of which country?” are counted separately. So it’s probably only a few thousand facts.
All of which raises a fair question: in a world where I can ask my phone anything, why spend time memorising the capital of Suriname, the location of Burkina Faso, or which Punic War included the Siege of Syracuse?
I like the streak
I like knowing there’s this tiny promise to myself that I’ve kept through a lot of life happening around it. Ten minutes a day is small enough to be realistic, and large enough to become meaningful after years.
There’s something satisfying about an input goal too. I can’t decide to become “more knowledgeable” today, in the same way I can’t decide to become fit today. But I can do 75 cards, then show up again tomorrow.
This is the kind of thing I find disproportionately pleasing, which I accept is a niche trait. My wife has so far resisted the urge to look at me across dinner and say, “Please tell me more about Australian state capitals.”
Her loss.
Geography feels grounded
The first deck I got into was Ultimate Geography, which teaches countries, capitals, flags and map locations. It’s still the category I enjoy most.
I like knowing where countries are. I like being able to picture Benin as a thin country on the west coast of Africa, Kazakhstan above a large chunk of Central Asia, and Suriname on the north coast of South America.
Knowing this stuff makes the world feel less vague.
When a place comes up in the news, in a book, or in conversation, it’s nicer to have a mental peg already there. Tiny facts make the map in my head more detailed.
Random facts become hooks
Over time, I added decks for great works of art, Shakespeare’s plays, Canadian and Australian geography, British monarchs, English counties, US states and capitals, and general knowledge with a lot of history in it.
I kept getting questions about battles in the Punic Wars and mixing them up. One card asked which Punic War included the Siege of Syracuse. I could remember the phrase, and I knew vaguely that Rome and Carthage were involved, but the wars blurred together.
So I asked Gemini to explain how to remember the differences between the Punic Wars. It gave me a neat breakdown. Suddenly, the card had a surrounding story.
That happens surprisingly often. A card gives me a small, annoying gap. The gap becomes a reason to learn a bit more. Then the original card becomes easier because it now sits inside a story.
A timeline starts to appear
The strangest benefit is that isolated facts eventually start joining together.
I’ve never learned world history as one continuous sequence. My knowledge is embarrassingly patchy. But after enough cards about paintings, music, monarchs, inventions, battles and presidents, a rough timeline starts to form.
If someone says “1850”, I now have a few pegs around it.
Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens are publishing around then. The Impressionists are still a few decades away, so art is probably closer to Romanticism. Brahms is around. In America, you’re near Zachary Taylor or Millard Fillmore, with the Civil War getting closer.
That’s what I like most. The cards are fragments, but the fragments start to pull together. A painting has a date. A monarch has a reign. A battle has a century. A composer has a lifetime. Slowly, a grid appears.
Why bother
Information that lives in your head behaves differently from information you can look up.
Looking something up is useful when you already know what you’re looking for. Stored knowledge helps before that point. It gives you hooks, associations and reference points, so new information has something to stick to.
I still look things up constantly. I don’t particularly want to recite facts as a party trick, partly because I don’t go to the kind of parties where this would be welcomed.
I like the feeling of the world becoming slightly less blurry.
Ten minutes a day is enough for that to happen. Two missed days since 2021. Around 75 cards a day. A few thousand tiny facts, many useless on their own.
And somehow, over time, they’ve started to feel like a map.