Tactic 2: Free Recall A simple tactic for applying retrieval is, after reading a section from a book or sitting through a lecture, to try to write down everything you can remember on a blank piece of paper. Free recall like this is often very difficult, and there will be many things missed, even if you just finished reading the text in question. Ho

The final step is to go back to direct practice and integrate what you’ve learned.

If you have ten hours to learn something, therefore, it makes more sense to spend ten days studying one hour each than to spend ten hours studying in one burst. Obviously, however, if the amount of time between study intervals gets longer and longer, the short-term effects start to outweigh the long-term ones.

The educators Maria Araceli Ruiz-Primo and Susan M. Brookhart argue, “The best feedback is informative and usable by the student(s) who receive it. Optimal feedback indicates the difference between the current state and the desired learning state AND helps students to take a step to improve their learning.”5

In the experiments mentioned, students were asked to do free recall but weren’t provided any feedback about items they missed or got wrong. The act of trying to summon up knowledge from memory is a powerful learning tool on its own, beyond its connection to direct practice or feedback.

To achieve it, fifty minutes to an hour is a good length of time for many learning tasks. If your schedule permits only more concentrated chunks of time, say once per week for several hours, you may want to take several minutes as a break at the end of each hour and split your time over different aspects of the subject you want to learn.

The third theory of forgetting says that many memories we have aren’t actually forgotten but simply inaccessible. The idea here is that in order to say that one has remembered something, it needs to be retrieved from memory. Since we aren’t constantly experiencing the entirety of our long-term memories simultaneously, this means there must be some

Step 2: Schedule Your Time

Habits tend to work best when the act of learning is mostly a process of accumulation, adding new skills and knowledge. Ultralearning and more deliberate efforts are better suited to when improvement in a field requires unlearning ineffective behaviors or skills.