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Study with Me + Anki Flashcard Method - Ali Abdaal

2019-05-21 · Study with me · Ali · recording, 7:15 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Learning and studying · mode: Demonstration and walkthrough · tags: Sponsor segment present, Evidence-based framing

On a day off spent studying neurology for the MRCP, Ali shows his quick-capture method for question banks: whatever he gets wrong or finds new goes straight into Anki flashcards, chosen over Quizlet for speed of input, and tricky material is pasted into Notion toggle lists instead of writing his own notes.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — A day off studying for the MRCP; a late start

  • ★★ Ali spends a day off work studying for the MRCP, a postgraduate medical exam, and shares his study techniques along the way. — 00:00:00 · MRCP
  • ★ Ali set his alarm for 7am to seem productive, but turned it off and went back to bed until half past nine. — 00:00:00

00:00:29 — Neurology first: scoping the subject with a mind map, then Pass Medicine questions

  • ★★ Having already listed all the subjects of the MRCP, Ali starts with his weakest one, neurology. — 00:00:29 · MRCP
  • ★★★ Ali's first step is to scope the subject: find all its topics and sort them into sensible categories on a mind map, a skeleton of the content into which new material slots. — 00:00:29 · scoping the subject
  • ★ Ali takes a break to chat for half an hour with his grandmother in Pakistan, which he jokes shows what a wonderful grandson he is. — 00:00:58 · Ali Abdaal's grandmother, Pakistan
  • ★★ Ali describes Passmedicine as an online question bank that everyone in the UK uses for medical exams. — 00:00:58

00:01:27 — Quick capture applied to revision: question banks straight into Anki

  • ★★ Quick capture, an idea from productivity, means capturing any idea quickly into your to-do list or note-taking app, so easily that you might as well get it out of your brain. — 00:01:27

    “you might as well get stuff out of your brain and into your system”

  • ★★ Ali has applied quick capture to revision; in the past he just worked through questions and read the explanations of the ones he got wrong. — 00:01:57

  • ★★ Ali calls active recall and spaced repetition the two most important components of effective studying, and says flashcard software such as Anki and Quizlet has both built in. — 00:01:57 · active recall, spaced repetition, Anki, Quizlet
  • ★★ Ali says flashcard decks downloaded from the internet tend to be less effective and much less customised than flashcards you make yourself. — 00:02:26

  • ★★★ Ali's answer to the time flashcards take to make: make your own but quickly, answering question-bank questions on one side of a split screen and pasting anything wrong or new straight into an Anki card. — 00:02:26 · Anki

    “make your own flashcards, but to make the process of making them super, super quick”

00:02:55 — Sponsor read: Japanese on Rosetta Stone

  • ★★ Ali reviews the Anki cards made from a question bank fairly regularly, so that over time everything new to him from it gets into his memory. — 00:02:55 · Anki
  • ★★ When something in a question bank is completely new to him, Ali looks it up on Google and tries to understand it before putting it into Anki to memorise. — 00:03:53 · Anki

00:04:05 — More questions into Anki; why Anki rather than Quizlet; an afternoon break

  • ★★ Ali uses Anki rather than Quizlet: Quizlet has the prettier design, but entering cards in Anki is much faster, and his quick-capture method makes speed of input matter more. — 00:04:23 · Anki, Quizlet
  • ★ In a break Ali watches Neil Gaiman's commencement speech video, which he calls pretty solid. — 00:04:23

00:04:52 — Notion toggle lists and copy-pasted notes instead of writing his own

  • ★★ Ali turns the neurology syllabus he sketched in the morning into toggle lists in Notion, his new favourite note-taking app, which further fixes the subject's skeleton in his head. — 00:04:52 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali pastes anything new or tricky into Notion as he makes its flashcard, building a bank of copied notes on what he found difficult to blitz through in speed revision sessions. — 00:04:52 · Notion, Anki
  • ★★★ Ali copies and pastes notes because he considers writing his own notes a complete waste of time, especially in medicine, where others have already done the work: no point reinventing the wheel. — 00:05:21
  • ★★ Ali says evidence from hundreds of studies shows that summarising content is a very inefficient study technique compared with active recall and spaced repetition. — 00:05:21 · active recall, spaced repetition

00:05:50 — Evening: instrumentals on Spotify, Anki with Jake, haematology, Game of Thrones night

  • ★★ While studying Ali plays his public Study With Me playlist on Spotify through his Amazon Echo speakers: instrumentals from films, TV shows and games. — 00:05:50 · Spotify
  • ★★ In the evening Ali and his friend Jake, also taking the MRCP, go through Anki questions together, as they did at medical school, which adds variety to a monotonous day. — 00:06:19 · Jake, Anki, MRCP

00:06:49 — Sign-off and a promised video on the quick-capture technique

  • ★★ Ali promises a video on his quick-capture technique for Anki in a lot more detail. — 00:06:49 · Anki

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Anki · MRCP · quick capture

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's grandmother · Jake · Neil Gaiman

Works: Game of Thrones

Concepts: active recall · scoping the subject · spaced repetition · spider diagram

Places: Pakistan

Products: Amazon Echo · Notion · Passmedicine · Quizlet · Rosetta Stone · Spotify

Also centred on quick capture: The 5 Key Principles of Productivity

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