How To Retain Knowledge

You’ve done it! You’ve written down your thoughts, ideas, and notes. Now it’s time to solidify that knowledge.

Review Your Notes

After a day of capturing notes, it’s time to review them. This is the time to revisit the information and make sure it’s understandable.

Extract Evergreen Notes

During the span of your day you may have outlined an idea or may have solved a problem, consider moving that to an evergreen note and placing it in the correct place in your garden.

Learning By Troubleshooting is at the core of this.

Write In Your Own Words

Elaboration

Note

Elaboration is the process of giving material that you learn new meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.

When data is extracted from your surrounding world, that information should be written in your own words, rather than quoting or paraphrasing. When you are reading back what you’ve captured, that information should be understandable by you and nobody else.

Why Elaborate?

Write Notes To You! After all, notes are meant to be useful for you.

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Emphasize

Emphasize

Bold characters in my garden represent emphasis. This is what you should read to get the idea fast! They highlight the most important parts of a note.

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This way knowledge is “chewed” and ready for consumption. Going through the process of extracting the most important parts not only helps the future you but the current you to better understand how much of the information written is essentially boilerplate.

^[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73s6Dgg3NZ0]

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Create Links

Don’t forget that the most important part of your garden is that everything is inter-connected. Notes are and should be linked together, just like the neurological pathways inside of your brain. You think with links, so should your second brain.

Ask Questions

Asking questions for a specific subject, helps form durable knowledge. Questions present a problem and a problem presents a learning opportunity. Use questions in your notes and answer those questions.

Reflection

Reflection

Reflect on issues and events that happen during the day. Examine different situations and think how you could have handled them better. Try New Things next time you encounter that problem.

Practice Until It Becomes A Reflex

Some information becomes engraved in your mind, the neurological pathways formed and overall the information is very durable to the point where recalling it and acting on it become a reflex.

Recalling information over and over, practicing it over and over is so important to mastery.

Actively challenge yourself

Did you do really do x,y or z correctly? Is there any other way people do things? Can you take some inspiration from them.

Create goals

Use reflection to create future goals. When thinking about a specific event, upon discovery that there is a better way for that event to have been handled, create a goal in your mind (or vault) to next time attempt the new solution.

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