Today was day 14 and I did around 1.5-2 hours of practice with past concepts. So, I realized that I should definitely keep practicing with everything I’ve learned so far until I am comfortable with most concepts (to the point of full understanding, fine if I have to look some things up again). This should take about a few days to a week of practice depending on how much time I can allocate to my practice during the day. Unfortunately I’m becoming more busy with school due to some classes like software engineering and linear algebra, or else I would spend a lot more time on this stuff (and my cognitive load would be reduced). Anyways, one thing I want to start doing is dedicating like 15-20 min everyday to doing spaced repetition with past concepts to make sure I really memorize them. I noticed today during practice I forgot a lot of stuff I should be remembering which is unfortunate. It sucks to think I had a lot more stuff down pat, but I guess it just calls for more memorization and practice. It’s skill issues all the way down.
My process today looked like feeding my notes into NotebookLM, asking it about certain concepts like flexbox or positioning, then asking Claude to generate mini projects for me to complete. I then took my code from the mini projects and asked Claude to critique my code and asked it to teach me what to do to improve. Seemed quite effective and will definitely be doing this again for practice with combining different concepts.
If you want to actually retain information you consume, you need to practice retrieving it from memory, not just re-consuming it. You have retained information if and only if you can regenerate it from memory. So naturally that is the exercise that must be practiced. Yes, it is also helpful to make connections between isolated pieces of information. Yes, those connections are themselves information. Yes, if you want to retain the connections, then you have to exercise their retrieval, not just re-consume them from an external source. Yes, this also applies to connections between connections. Yes, this also applies to skills, concepts, procedures, applications, etc. If you want to be able to generate it from your head, then you need to practice generating it from your head.
- Justin Skycak