Personalized Spaced Repetition

You can now create personalized spaced repetition rules that best suit your needs and styles of learning. For instance, you can specify things such as the repetition frequency, the number of notes in a digest, the books to include or exclude, and the time of the day to perform the repetition. More customization options will be added.

The spaced repetition feature, until recently, had not catered for our individual needs. The reason is that Dnote performed the spaced repetition on a fixed schedule against all books and notes for each user. Due to such a lack of flexibility, we were not able to utilize the automated spaced repetition to its fullest potential. For instance, we could not specifically target certain areas of knowledge which we felt the need to pursue further. Also, we all learn different subjects at different rates. The arbitrary schedule imposed by Dnote did not particularly help us retain our knowledge most efficiently.

The friction caused by the fixed spaced repetition rule became particularly apparent to me when I began extensively using Dnote to learn Mandarin. I had been putting in a lot of vocabulary and expressions into Dnote in the hope to repeat my learning regularly. However, as there was no way to customize the spaced repetition, Dnote did not help with the personal goal of learning Mandarin. I ended up forgetting a lot of what I had learned as a result, and partly also because of my tendency to procrastinate.

With the recent release, you can avoid such pitfall by creating any number of spaced repetition rules tailored just for you.

Whatever your learning goal is, now you can simply create a spaced repetition rule from Dnote and completely automate the knowledge retention. For instance, you may configure spaced repetition rule to choose notes from all of your books, or from a certain subset of books including or excluding the ones you specify. Additionally, you can specify the frequency, time of the day, and the number of notes. You can have multiple of these spaced repetition rules.

The custom spaced repetition rules pave a way for some exciting future improvements to come. In future releases, it might be possible to configure the delivery method to something other than email to suit your circumstances. That way, Dnote can send the digests to your Slack channel, SMS, or custom webhook endpoints. Possibilities are endless, just as our learning potential is.