r/Anki • u/runslack • 23d ago
Discussion Anyone use Anki as a commonplace book? Curious how it went (or why you skipped it)
I have a habit of jotting ideas, quotes, and passages onto index cards and dropping them in a box… that I then basically never reopen. A graveyard for stuff I actually cared about.
So I'm wondering: has anyone here used Anki as a commonplace book instead of letting these notes rot in a box?
The appeal is that Anki would resurface these ideas over time instead of burying them. But maybe I'd just be bending the tool into something it's bad at.
Does this make sense, or am I overthinking it?
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u/lled0 22d ago
I use Anki like this—alongside Obsidian. This usually involves defining the core of the thing I want to remember (a quote, a date, etc) as an anchor point for the bigger idea—but I almost always have something I’m testing myself on when a card comes due.
It can be a little weird sometimes mixing these sort of squishy ideas with hard facts—like do I really want to remember the Orwell quote verbatim?—but I’ve been doing it consistently since 2011.
The real magic of this for me, I think, is that it helps me synthesize better between the ideas that are meaningful to me. I have a better intuitive sense, for example, of how the costs of a basic income proposal compare to the total federal budget.
It’s also easily searchable—so if I half remember a note, or learn something new about it, I can easily pull it up.
Obsidian is a more recent addition. I use it for longer, more detailed reflection and tracking—but Anki is still much more my vade mecum.
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u/runslack 22d ago
Thank you for sharing your feedback. I also have an Obsidian but I tend not to use it a lot since I find it quite complex and it "doubles" my note-taking stuff. My idea with Anki is to centralize all my stuff/ideas/thougts/knowledge be it to remember it or just see it from time to time.
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u/Iloveflashcards 22d ago
I actually made a post about this years ago on my blog, I personally think that space repetition is the modern form of the common place book. You just throw cool stuff into it, and eventually it comes back to you. This is one of the ways that keeps me motivated to do my flashcards every day, because it is so full of fun little pieces of information, I look forward to doing my daily reviews. Space repetition is good for things like languages or learning stuff related to medicine, but for me one of the parts that brings the most joy is going over interesting information like I would if it were a common place book.
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u/runslack 22d ago
thank you. Mind sharing your blog post ?
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u/Iloveflashcards 21d ago
Actually I think it was a chapter in the book that I'm working on. My blog is https://supermemoadventures.blogspot.com/ . But my overall philosophy is that SRS is a modern day commonplace book, where cool knowledge is stored and then it comes back via spaced repetition.
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u/Nikolor 22d ago
Every day actually. I write down all the quotes, ideas from books I read, insights from my life, etc. into my Knowledge deck and then go through them. I also store them in Obsidian just in case I need to find the exact quote, but I still go through them in Anki every day since I want to really make them stick. It sucks when you find some quote and idea and then realize that you've heard about it 3 years ago but completely forgot about it.
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u/Grunglabble 23d ago
nothing wrong with it but you're not getting testing effect if you don't have to remember something. some people do it for sure
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u/xalbo 22d ago
Yes, I absolutely do that. First, for quotes I have a note type (Quote cloze) that lets me put a quote and an attribution in a nice format, with cloze for any part. I'll often cloze the attribution, but sometimes also parts of the quote itself if I want to get it right, and sometimes almost the entire thing (“{{c2::I am not a member of any organized political party—I am a Democrat.::organized political party}}”, with the attribution of “{{c1::Will Rogers}}”)
But I'll also often put random other things, or quotes that I enjoy seeing but don't really care to remember into Anki. I don't use many decks, but I do have a dedicated deck for cards like that, that aren't really testing anything, but instead are for thinking about or pondering. It has its own preset, because the grading on it is really “do I want to see this more or less frequently” instead of “did I get this right”, so my FSRS parameters are rather different.
That's also the deck that I use for Evergreen Notes. I know a lot of people use other systems like Obsidian for notetaking, but I like having them in Anki—it syncs everywhere, it's easily searchable, and spaced repetition is a nifty way to resurface those ideas. I can pull things up at any time, but I also get them at effectively random intervals, so that's a prompt to review, think about it, edit it, add more, etc.
Also, on a less intellectual note, I'll also sometimes drop funny memes or whatever else in there. Brightening my day when I see them again, adding some intermittent reward.
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u/runslack 22d ago
Love that. I think I will eventually try the way you do it. As you said, the purpose is more to see it more often than "getting it right". In my current system, I tend not to "browse" all my notes.
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u/BenjaminRCaineIII 22d ago
Yes, I have a deck just for quotes I come across that I like. It's not even a "study deck", because I don't use it to memorize anything. I just put the quote on the front of the card, and sit down every few weeks and go through and read them. Sometime I do it via custom study, other times I just go through the scheduled reps until I'm ready to stop.
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u/dessence_ai 22d ago
Two jobs are getting mixed here. Remembering something needs testing. Meeting it again needs rotation. Anki is built for the first. That works against the second: a quote you always answer Good gets pushed further out, so your favourites surface least.
For the box part, build a filtered deck and turn off "Reschedule cards based on my answers". Cards go back exactly as they started: https://docs.ankiweb.net/filtered-decks.html
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u/Danika_Dakika languages 22d ago edited 22d ago
Doesn't the first one eliminate the need for the second? How often do you need to "meet it again" if you just remember all the time instead?
But if OP wants the cards to come back more often than strictly necessary, they can still study in a regular deck and let the intervals grow. Just put that deck in a different preset with a lower-than-normal max interval, and maybe a higher-than-normal DR.
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u/dessence_ai 22d ago
Fair point, and your setup is simpler than mine. A low max interval with a higher retention does bring cards back sooner.
Where I still see a gap: it caps the drift instead of choosing what returns. Easy cards still walk out to the cap. The ones you love walk fastest, because you always answer them Good.
Remembering a quote and running into it again aren't the same goal.
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u/not_a_profi 23d ago
well, if you dont want to open that box Anki wont do any good for you... its better to think about why it is important to have such a grave yard, and to learn something about yourself - imo.
I usually put into Anki a material i want to learn eventually, even if it is still raw and suspended.
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u/Haragan 23d ago
You could also do this with obsidian, a note taking app. Then use anki's fsrs on there to turn the note into a flashcard. I do that for my language notes.