You’ve heard me sing the praises of productive practice — a form of deliberate practice and test-enhanced learning that involves “retrieval practice”. I’ve released the latest installment of Cognitive Productivity with macOS®: 7 Principles for Getting Smarter with Knowledge, which includes Principle 6 “Practice Productively”.

This chapter adds 15 new screencasts and text on productive practice. It focuses on Anki. But other options include the Studies app by the “The Mental Faculty”, which has a much nicer user interface but lacks some of the power of Anki. The chapter provides detailed instructions for using Anki to learn concepts, skills, lists, names, and more.

You can also use this new chapter to evaluate “flashcard” apps, and to make feature requests of flashcard app developers. The chapter can also be read a set of requirements for developers who would like to turn their flashcard apps into full blown productive practice, or to build a new set of apps from scratch! (Such software developers can get in touch with me personally, as I have put a lot of thought into this subject over many years, have designed such software myself, and have published on it.)

Chapters 7, 13, and 14 of my earlier book, Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective, describe the cognitive science of practice and more details about productive practice.