22 reasons I did 301,432 flashcard reviews in 2025
A few different "why?" questions came up in response to my 301,432 reviews post:
- "Why study this instead of that?"
- "Why did your library require so many reviews?"
- "Why on earth would you spend so much time studying flashcards?"
Different combinations of these address those questions:
- I enjoy it.
- It connects me to the world of quizzing.
- It connects me to my own past.
- I am improving at LearnedLeague and would like to keep doing so.
- I make the software myself, so it has value in testing and improving my work.
- I care deeply about this specific software, but also just making something I use myself is important to me.
- I'm interested in exploring new approaches to spaced repetition, and extensive self-experimentation is the best way to do that.
- I've worked hard to remove friction, so my time per review might be smaller than others'.
- My algorithm is probably inefficient on some categories of card, so I might have done some excessive reviews in 2025.
- I add in some cards that are not due to my study sessions to (a) make it harder to guess the answer based on when I'm seeing the card and (b) enable certain kinds of comparisons.
- I made tens of thousands of flashcards in 2025, and newer cards tend to require more reviews per card, so 2025 was a particularly heavy year.
- I had some bugs that led to extra reviews. (For whatever it's worth, the bugs I'm talking about affected when I saw a card, not the correctness of my response, so I don't mind them as much. (After all, I want to see some cards at weird times; see above.) I estimate that >99.99% (but <99.999%, so there's room to improve) of these correct/incorrect responses are recorded properly.)
- Drilling flashcards is a hobby that adapts well to a life with many short leisure windows.
- I have a long commute and can drill flashcards as I walk.
- You have to do something on the toilet.
- There are opportunity costs to spending time flashcarding, but there are also some opportunity benefits: having a good default activity for small blocks of time makes it easy to avoid some low- and negative-value activities.
- I choose better books, movies, and TV shows when I know about more of them.
- I experience the world more richly when I know more about it, or at least when I study it in the right way. (I can't improve on Yogesh Raut's formulation: "Success at quizzing isn’t about having a superior innate memory; it’s about making the world memorable by investing it with meaning.")
- It makes me better at my job: learning facts is not the best or second-best way to improve as a software engineer, but it's a way, and an underrated one.
- A world full of wonderful information-retrieval systems (the Internet, LLMs...) competes with human memory in some ways, but completements it in others. Boosting the near-zero-latency information-retrieval system between my ears makes me a better user of external technology (and vice versa).
- If a new acquaintance wants to talk about X, I'm more likely to have a good conversation with them if I know something about X.
- I want to stay a bit weird.