💖 UX of People, The Sublime, Diversity Scores...

Spaced Repetition, Memory Triggers, and other late additions to my October Favourites 2023

Lamar Elimbo

Nov 09, 2023

🍿 My Favourite Movies of the Month

📺 My Favourite Shows of the Month

🛠️ My Favourite Tools of the Month

Total Recall – A Notion Template for Improving Memory

🔗 / Notion Template /

This spaced repetition Notion template has been my new favourite memory tool.

Essentially, it’s a flashcard deck that holds our favourite words, concepts, quotes, etc and automatically places the cards that need to be reviewed each day at the top of the deck.

💪🏽 My Favourite Exercises of the Month

Memory Trigger Optimization

What if your flashcard deck was optimized for memory triggers over memory recall?

Level 1 strategy for creating flashcards — The Destination Method:

Create a card for every word you want to remember.
On the front of each card, write a concept.
On the back of each card, write a definition.

The goal is to solidify the memory we want to retrieve.

Level 2 strategy for creating flashcards — The Journey Method:

For each concept you want to remember, create multiple cards that you want to trigger your memory of it.
On the front of each card, write a trigger.
On the back of each card, write a concept.

The goal is to multiply the triggers for the memories we want to retrieve — when do you want remember a concept — what topics do you want to trigger your memory of a concept.

The more paths we pave to a memory, the easier it will be to retrieve that memory when we want it.

Internalizing Measurements

How long it would take you to walk/run 1 kilometre?

How accurately can you guess what a centimetre/meter/foot/inch looks like?

I’ve been trying to internalizing measurements lately.

Looking at things around my home and comparing my guesses of their lengths to their true measurements, walking through trails and timing how long it takes me to walk their distances.

💬 My Favourite Words of Wisdom of the Month

Biggest Tradeoffs

A good question to ask to get to know someone better: what’s one of the biggest tradeoffs that you’ve made in your life?

🤔 My Favourite Realization of the Month

Podcast Questions

I'm realizing that one of my favourite takeaways from listening to podcasts is getting ideas for fun questions I can ask in my own life. I love the idea of becoming a quality question collector.

💭 My Favourite Reflections of the Month

Bad Good

Are you getting too good at the wrong thing? 🔗 / Nat Eliason /

Practices for the Sublime

How can I experience more of the sublime in my life?

The philosopher Edmund Burke on the Sublime. He noticed that when we’re made to feel small in some ways, we become large in others.

What would it look like to routinely expose ourselves to things that make us feel insignificant, in order to minimize the importance we give to the negatives in our lives?

UI Personified

Do I as a person have ux/ui?

I’ve been tasked with thinking more deeply about strategies for improving user experience through design at work lately. And it’s got me starting to see the world through a lens of interaction psychology — how do we interact with things and how can we improve those interactions.

My favourite application of psychology is figuring out how to use it to improve my own life, so I’ve been wondering: If I looked at myself as a user interface or piece of software, how could I improve other people’s experience of interacting with me?

Tell-all Docuseries

If you could watch a tell-all docuseries on one person right now, who would you want to learn about?

Diversity Scores

What if you gave your life diversity scores?

I’ve been hearing more and more about the benefits of expanding the amount of diversity we have in our lives. For example, this month I learned that “the diversity of kinds of social interactions someone has is a predictor of their well-being.” 🔗 / Clearer Thinking /

I wonder what it would look like to measure our diversity score across all aspects of our life: social interactions, nutrition, fitness goals, interests, spaces we spend time, etc.