For effective study with RemNote, it's important to study just the right amount of material. If you add too much material, you'll struggle to practice all your flashcards as they become due, which is demotivating and wastes your time. If you add too little material, you'll miss out on remembering content you easily could have mastered. (Note that not studying some material in RemNote doesn't mean you can't take notes on it in RemNote, or even have flashcards for it in RemNote. It only means you won't enable flashcards for the things you don't immediately prioritize committing to memory.)
Many people measure material added or practiced by number of flashcards. It's certainly true that each flashcard you add has an associated time cost, since you have to practice each card you create at least a few times. But this measure ignores how difficult the flashcards are to practice and how effective they are at teaching you what you need to know, as well as the time impact of struggling to understand something new because you didn't understand a prerequisite. It's possible, and even common, for adding more flashcards to mean less time spent studying overall. So to become experts at identifying how much material to learn, we need to think beyond just this measure.
In this article, we'll discuss some considerations for how much material you should study, as well as how you should measure material added and how this relates to the number of flashcards added.
Build a strong foundation first
No matter who you are or what you're studying, you should start here.
With RemNote, or any memory practice, consistency beats volume. That is, it's better to add and practice a small number of cards every day than to add a large number of cards but practice them only occasionally. This is for at least two reasons:
When you're consistent, you can trust that you will remember anything you choose to remember. You might only have room to select 10 new cards every day to remember, but you can pick the 10 most important things to put in those slots and be sure that you'll remember them. Because some things are vastly more important to remember than others, this is far more useful than adding 50 new cards every day and maybe-kinda remembering them.
As you practice your flashcards consistently, you'll build what habits guru BJ Fogg calls success momentum: you'll be proving to yourself that you can do this small amount consistently, and as you see the benefits of your study practice, you'll naturally become motivated to do more and more. In this way, consistency actually creates volume, and you'll have natural motivation to do more, rather than having to fight your motivation the whole way. Additionally, if you're new to tools like RemNote, you'll have the chance to get better at using them before you create hundreds or thousands of cards, so you're more likely to see the full benefits and you won't fill up your knowledge base with poorly thought-out cards that drag you down over the weeks and months to come.
So we recommend starting with a nice small, manageable goal – maybe adding 10 flashcards per day and practicing 30 or 50 per day. This is limited enough that it's hard to tell yourself it's too difficult to do.
There's one exception to this rule: if you have some project that you care deeply about right now (say, a looming exam, or a new topic you have to learn immediately in the service of a creative project), and creating and practicing more cards will immediately help you with that project, you can probably afford to start with somewhat more cards, because your motivation is very high and will remain so for some time. It's still better to aim on the conservative side and not go crazy, though!
If you want, you can add more cards to your knowledge base than you immediately trust yourself to practice consistently. You can disable the less important cards as you create them, and/or use the daily learning goal and prioritization to control which cards show up first, postponing the others until you have more capacity.
As you get familiar with RemNote, learn to trust it, and find practice habits that work well for you, you can gradually increase the amount of material you add and practice. This will probably happen naturally, without even trying.
Don't hesitate to disable cards that aren't useful
It's often hard to predict which cards will be valuable at the time you add them. That means that even RemNote experts end up with cards in their practice queues that they don't understand or find valuable. Leaving these cards in your practice queue is a recipe for frustration and wasted time. So as you practice, if you have an “ugh” feeling about a card, or simply notice that you don't care about remembering the answer anymore, consider choosing Disable this card from the menu (or pressing B) to remove it from future practice sessions. The card will remain searchable in your knowledge base, and you can always enable it again later.
If a card feels “ugh-y” but you do still urgently need to know the information on it, see the article on leeches for some suggestions on improving it.
Focus on the complexity of your overall study, not the number of flashcards
While the number of cards you create matters, even more important is the complexity of those cards. If you can create one poorly phrased multi-line card with 8 items, or 6 carefully atomized cards, the 6 cards may well take you less time to practice in total. You'll also probably understand the material better, both because you took the time to understand it well enough to break it down at the start, and because you're prompting yourself to repeat the material in exactly the ways that you find most useful.
Similarly, if some material is foundational for understanding several other pieces of information, skipping creating flashcards for that foundational material is a false economy – even if you won't be tested on the foundational material itself. When you fully understand the background, the other information will be much easier to learn and retain, so you're actually increasing the overall complexity of your study by skipping the background; putting in the time up front instead will reduce your total study time.
If you're practicing a card and feel that it's too complex, mark it as Edit Later or take a moment to clean it up and break it down.
Understand where your learning process is constrained
Full-time students in demanding degree programs full of complex information where high-quality flashcards written by others are available (e.g., medical school) are usually constrained by practice time – they can easily obtain or create more than enough cards to fill up several hours of study time per day with just practicing RemNote flashcards, and there's no more room in their day to practice more. People learning an eclectic mix of ideas in their spare time are usually constrained by card creation – they have fairly small practice queues and would have enough time to practice more cards, but they lack high-quality cards created by others on the topics they're interested in or sufficient time to make enough of their own cards.
Take a moment to work out what your worst constraint is right now, because the best card creation strategy for you will be different.
Constrained by practice time
If you're constrained by practice time, you should focus on identifying which pieces of information are highest-yield, and only making those into flashcards. A few useful techniques:
Aggressively disable or deprioritize cards that you're struggling to learn or that you don't need anymore. If you disable a hard card, you can learn several more easy cards in the same amount of time. Unless the hard card is extremely high-value, your time will be better spent on learning more cards.
Rather than adding lots of lower-level cards, focus first on creating higher-level cards that cover the lower-level topics. For instance, rather than asking about specific diagnostic techniques for a disease, you might add clinical scenarios that require you to apply them. If you find you struggle to answer these, then go back and add the lower-level cards to shore up your understanding. If you find them easy, then you saved yourself needing to practice those cards.
Focus on making your cards as atomic and easy to review as possible. If you're practicing 500 flashcards a day, each second you can shave off your average time per card will save you an hour a week. Sometimes making your cards atomic may mean splitting one card into several, but this is usually worth it, because it greatly decreases the complexity of those cards (as discussed in the previous section), making each one much faster and easier to review. Also, splitting a card up often leads to noticing part of the idea isn't that critical and you don't need to practice it at all.
Do some research on what ideas or concepts are most important in your field of study, and focus primarily on those. If you're in a school program, you can look at practice tests or study guides or talk to others who have worked through the program before you.
For material that these rules don't suggest prioritizing, keep reading, going to lectures, taking notes, and so on, but skip creating the flashcards up front. Then, when you forget something important or can't answer an exam question, search your RemNote knowledge base for the answer and turn it into a flashcard (or create a couple of new cards if you come up empty). In this way, you fill in the less obvious gaps in your material “just in time,” as you prove you need that material, instead of trying to cover all of them ahead of time and unavoidably spending time on some that you don't need to cover at all.
Constrained by card creation
If you're constrained by card creation, on the other hand, you should bias towards adding more cards, even if they don't immediately seem critically important, since you won't be overwhelming yourself with reviews anyway. Many people don't create enough cards for ideal learning. Asking the same question in several ways can help you gain a more robust understanding, and asking about basic ideas usually isn't a waste of time: if they are as easy as you expect and you repeatedly press “easy,” you'll very rarely need to practice them anyway, while forgetting something easy can be a major obstacle to understanding more complex ideas as you continue learning. And, of course, your cards should be atomic, which will often involve creating more flashcards.
A caution here, though: It's still important to skip creating useless cards or cards you don't particularly want to learn, and disable cards you don't like when you encounter them in the queue, even when you're constrained by card creation and theoretically have plenty of time to practice. Many new RemNote users get excited when they realize they can easily memorize anything they choose, and start committing things to memory “just because they can.” The result is a practice queue filled with cards that you don't care about and that will maybe earn you 1 point on an exam or save you 10 seconds at some indeterminate point in the future, which is, overall, extremely demotivating.
So if you're constrained by card creation, rather than worrying about the priority or return on investment in studying a particular card, worry about whether you'll enjoy practicing it or see the value in knowing it when you do. If so, go ahead and add it.