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Writing Inbox - Sean's notes

published 2020-08-27

Andy Matuschak's notes, which were posted yesterday on Hacker News, describe a system for doing personal notetaking and writing. Three good ideas:

1. All notes and ideas flow through a "writing inbox".
2. Link your writing to other writing.
3. Use spaced repetition to periodically revisit, revise, and integrate your writing.

Software to support these practices could be fairly simple:

• New => Write a new item. This schedules the item.
• Search => List items that relate to words / phrases / patterns.
• Inbox => Show scheduled items for today.
• View => View the item rendered.
• Edit => Edit the item. The new revision is scheduled (and the old unscheduled).
• Configure => choose the scheduling algorithm, fiddle with parameters.

Items are scheduled when created / edited by some version of a spaced repetition algorithm:

• SM-2 ("SuperMemo 2") - includes "easiness factor" which might not be relevant here. https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/english/ol/sm2

  Interval:

  • $I(1) := 1$
  • $I(2) := 6$
  • $I(n) := I(n - 1) * EF(n)$

  Easiness Factor:

  • $EF(1) := 2.5$
  • $EF(n) := EF(n - 1) + (0.1 - (5 - Q) * (0.08 + (5 - Q) * 0.02))$ ∈ {-0.54, -0.32, -0.14, 0.0, 0.1}
  • $Q$ in ${1..5}$ – quality of the response

• Anki - includes "easiness factor" which might not be relevant here.https://faqs.ankiweb.net/what-spaced-repetition-algorithm.html

• Simple -

  • Fibonacci (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...) == easiness factor = 1.618

  • Exponential (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, ...) == easiness factor = 2.0

("easiness factor" could be interpreted here as an inverse "interestingness factor" -- the more interesting the item, the more often you see it. Then, when you defer or edit, if you've set the interestingness, it can affect the schedule when using Anki or SW-2 or "simple".)