Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Memorizing passages with repeating tasks

Memorizing literary passages or quotations requires some regular work and repetition to get it into your short-term memory, then to move it to your long-term memory. This week’s tip, shared by darhull, exemplifies this process using Remember The Milk tasks and repeats.

If you’re someone who memorizes scripture or other passages (poetry, topics, etc) that you want to remember long term I’ve set up a memory learn/review system. The one I’ve set up is for Bible passages, but you can adapt it to fit anything you’d like to learn and remember long term.

You start by reading what you want to remember 5x daily for 1 week. At the end of the week you study what you’re learning (in this case, we’d do an in-depth study of the Bible passage). Then you divide what you need to learn over the span of 1 week. Then you schedule regular reviews.

I’ve made all the steps below a first priority because I want it to happen at the beginning of the day. I’ve also put a number (001, 002, 003. etc) before each task to order the tasks the way I want them to appear on my to-do list.

Here is an example for learning the short Psalm 117:

003 Read Psalm 117x5 ^Monday !1
003 Read Psalm 117x5 ^Tuesday !1
003 Read Psalm 117x5 ^Wednesday !1
003 Read Psalm 117x5 ^Thursday !1
003 Read Psalm 117x5 ^Friday !1
003 Read Psalm 117x5 ^Saturday !1
001 Study Psalm 117 ^17/05/15 !1
002 Learn Psalm 117:1 ^18/05/15 !1
002 Learn Psalm 117:1 ^19/05/15 !1
002 Learn Psalm 117:1 ^20/05/15 !1
002 Learn Psalm 117:2 ^21/05/15 !1
002 Learn Psalm 117:2 ^22/05/15 !1
002 Learn Psalm 117:2 ^23/05/15 !1
001 Review Psalm 117 ^24/05/15 !1
004 Review Psalm 117 ^25/05/15 *every 1 day for 100 times !1
004 Review Psalm 117 ^01/09/15 *every 1 week for 12 times !1
004 Review Psalm 117 ^23/11/15 *every 2 weeks for 6 times !1
004 Review Psalm 117 ^14/02/16 *every 1 month for 6 times !1
004 Review Psalm 117 ^13/08/16 *every 1 year !1

Hope that helps someone!

Thanks for sharing this tip, darhull! 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.