Like taking notes, many of us have probably not used a flashcard since our college or high-school days. However, as job descriptions and even careers are switching with higher frequencies, knowledge workers today are increasingly finding themselves in the position of life-long learners. As a companion skill to the art of note-taking, condensing information we want to learn onto flashcards can be valuable for learning, as well as for improving our long-term memory. When faced with a daunting amount of information we need to commit to memory—an entire book, whose dry contents we wish to absorb; or a long list of foreign language vocabulary words—we may fall into a rut if we try to tackle the whole pile of material each time we sit down for study. Information we already know bores us when reviewed, while information we never seem to master is potentially skipped time and time again. The Leitner system ensures that material is divided and reviewed according to how well we know it—allowing us to retain much more in less time through selective and spaced repetition.

Spaced Repetition

When using flashcards, we learn by spaced repetition: German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus was the first to discover that our recall improves dramatically when we learn material in short but spaced out sessions, as opposed to trying to remember everything at once in one big session.

We can make flashcards simply by taking a blank card (three by five inch cards work very well, but any kind of blank card or paper will do) and putting a prompt on the front and the information we want to learn on the back. Flashcards are useful for memorising long lists of information such as dates or formulas, but they can also help us get the most out of a book. If you find yourself faced with dry text whose contents you must have detailed knowledge of, it’s a good idea to take what you believe to be the most important idea from each page and put it on a flashcard. A 200 page book would yield you 200 cards, but you will have the most pertinent 200 ideas or concepts distilled for you.

Creating flashcards can be thought of as a particular way of taking notes: It’s important to write only the most essential information on the card so that it serves as a trigger for your memory. Flashcards force you to condense the material down to its fundamental elements, and though premade flashcards are available, creating them yourself is highly recommended, as the process of choosing what to condense and what to omit and writing it down gives you an important initial opportunity to absorb the information.

Once you have a big pile of condensed ideas in the form of flashcards, you can learn them by cycling through the deck and seeing if you can correctly answer the prompts, but you may run into the problem of repeating information you already know and glossing over material you can’t seem to get down. The Leitner System helps flashcard users divide their cards into separate piles, based on how well they know each card, and then to space out repetitions according to the progress they make in retaining the material. As the boxes get higher, they also get larger—this allows the user to space out the repetitions more, as material in the higher boxes gets reviewed less.

The Leitner System

Austrian commentator and author Sebastian Leitner developed the Leitner System for using flashcards more effectively in the 70s, and …..

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