Andy Matuschak

Notes on Vision Pro

Spaced repetition memory system (2024)

A spaced-repetition memory system combines the Testing effect and the Spacing effect to enable efficient memorization of many thousands of facts ( Spaced repetition memory systems are extremely efficient ). Some people also use them for a broader set of tasks (see below). Spaced repetition memory systems make memory a…

Work with the garage door up (2024)

One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to riff on a passage from Robin Sloan (below). This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday ; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re…

Athletes and musicians pursue virtuosity in fundamental skills

Those writing extensively on note-writing rarely have a serious context of use

Much of the day-to-day thinking involved in creative work is simply lost, like sand castles in the tide. Ephemerality can actually be useful in low-fidelity thought, but it’s simply an accidental property in many cases. We should do our serious thinking in the form of Evergreen notes so that the thinking accumulates.

Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies

Let structure emerge organically. When it’s imposed from the start, you prematurely constrain what may emerge and artificially compress the nuanced relationships between ideas.