Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Flash cards with Remember The Milk
People use Remember The Milk to keep track of all sorts of things, but this week odelaney shares a tip for a unique method to remember all sorts of specific details: flash cards! odelaney even has a video demonstration too, included below. (Is this the first tip with a corresponding video? :)
I’ve recently started studying for Cisco’s CCIE qualification and was wondering how best to ensure I’m remembering as much as possible. Flash cards are always a memory good tool, and I had a look at some dedicated flash card apps, as well as Evernote. But I’d prefer to keep things centralised with RTM, which I use for all other tasks and reference notes. The RTM iPhone app is actually pretty well suited to flash cards, using the notes function and swiping to reveal an answer.
I setup a Smart List called flash cards using “tagContains:fc-”.
Then added a task per study topic, each with a tag representing the study area, e.g. a task called BGP fundamentals with a tag fc-routing.
Then, in each task I’ll be creating multiple notes, one note = one flash card.
A single note has a title, a question and an answer. I’ve put >10 lines between the question and answer, so that in the iPhone app, the answer is not visible until I swipe to reveal it. Multiple blank lines don’t seem to work in RTM notes, so I’ve used a ↓ per line.
That’s pretty much it. Creating the cards by hand is a good process in itself in terms of memorising things.
A good way to create multiple flash cards at once is using rtm’s email import function. Then you can add a load of notes into the email body.
Thanks for sharing this tip, odelaney! You’re our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week. Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum, add a new topic, and let us know how you use Remember The Milk. Each week we’ll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.
