Toolkit : Plan FAQ
Use incremental reading instead of Plan to optimize time allocations to different learning subjects
Luis Neves, Brazil, Dec 4, 2000:
Question
I would like to spend five hours on effective reading and learning starting at 6 pm. However, my interests are wide. Here are some things I would like to read: 3 daily newspapers, 1 daily Dilbert comic strip, 1 daily Linux news journal, 1 daily Internet news journal, 2 weekly magazines, 2 monthly science magazines, 1 on-line book of C language, 1 on-line book of TCL/TK language, 1 site for Kylix and Delphi, 1 neuroscience site and more. What would be my optimum strategy assuming I want to use SuperMemo and incremental reading?
Answer
You could best prioritize your entire learning with incremental reading. Proportions of individual subjects could best be determined by the priority queue. However, Toolkit : Plan can also be helpful, esp. if you need to add some reading on paper. This could be your exemplary schedule:
Reading&Learning (5 h)
- 18:00 - SuperMemo - incremental reading and importing new articles(81 min, 100%)
- 19:21 . SuperMemo - incremental reading of high-priority material(40 min, 100%)
- 20:01 . SuperMemo - core repetitions(40 min, 100%)
- 20:41 . Linux, C, TCL/TK - 2 articles(17 min, 100%)
- 20:59 . Internet - 1 article(13 min, 100%)
- 21:12 . Kylix/Delphi - 2 articles(20 min, 100%)
- 21:33 . Neuroscience - 1 article(20 min, 100%)
- 21:53 . reading on paper (weekly, science)(61 min, 100%)
- 22:53 . other (Dilbert)(7 min, 100%)
The plan above was built using the following assumptions:
- due to possible delays, you should put strategic slots first. If SuperMemo eats up too much time, you will just reduce the rate of importing new articles
- you would import only 1-2 articles per slot (as specified in the plan). These articles would immediately be introduced into the process of incremental reading
- Linux, Internet, Kylix and Neuroscience slots are supposed to be spent only on locating articles and importing them to SuperMemo. The actual reading will take place in the first slot of the day
- all reading on paper was put into a single late slot. As reading on paper is by far less efficient, you will then give it lower priority and you will have to retype important notes to SuperMemo if you want to ensure long-term retention
- SuperMemo slots will be used for reading articles, extracting their portions, reviewing extracts, creating cloze deletions, standard repetitions, etc.
- SuperMemo core will include only repetitions of your top-priority items
Tasklists vs. Plan
Jarek Dobrowolski, Poland, Aug 25, 2000:
Question
Tasklists are an interesting concept but they are too trivial a model of reality to be universal. For example, how can I best split 9 hours into the optimum amount for sleep and jogging? Should it be 8+1 or 8.5+0.5? Tasklists do not help!
Answer
Tasklists work well for a subset of optimization problems you will meet in your daily schedule. Your example is indeed entirely unsuitable to be handled with tasklists. Tasklists demand tasks to be well-defined, uniform and with good estimates on value and time. For example, they work great for prioritizing investments. SuperMemo has always been developed with the use of tasklists. However, you cannot prioritize your house chores and your shopping list using the same tasklist. This fails the uniformity criterion. You need two tasklists for that. Tasklist do not work well with deadlines (even if deadlines are included in the concept). Tasklist are not good at reflecting dependencies between the tasks. In other words they are far from universal. For the problem of optimizing your day, you should rather use Toolkit : Plan. There you could include 30 minutes of jogging, 8 hours of sleep, 2 hours of incremental reading and 30 minutes of core repetitions. Using delay analysis, you can easily make minor adjustments to your schedule on a daily basis. If jogging made you too tired, you could shorten the distance and the time slot. If you did not get sweaty enough, you could add 3-5 minutes and see the results on the following day. You could add some sleep time if you do not wake up within the slot. You could also add some time for core repetitions if your incremental reading floods the learning process with topics and results in low retention. Tasklist fit well with the Plan within a single uniform time slot. In that slot, you can prioritize your reading, writing, making orders in your house, etc. To sum it up: the model proposed by SuperMemo will regulate the length of the time slot with the Plan. Within your uniform time slot you can use tasklists to prioritize individual activities
Gray fields cannot be edited
Question
Why can I not edit the Delay field?
Answer
Delay is computed automatically by SuperMemo and depends on the start time of a given activity as compared with the optimum time. Once you set the start time of an activity, its delay (in minutes) is fixed and cannot be changed. Only Start, Activity and Length columns are editable. The remaining columns are determined by SuperMemo. The value of those fields come from their mathematical definition and cannot be modified (as much as you cannot modify the number of minutes in an hour)
All activities included in the schedule are added to the statistics
Question
I am using Plan to compile my learning time statistics. Why are unmarked/unchecked activities such as Reading included/counted in my 2009 Year Total?
Answer
All activities listed in the schedule are taken into consideration. SuperMemo has no way of knowing if you used Begin to mark the beginning of each activity and set up the alarm, or simply stuck to the plan religiously and completed it without using Begin. To simplify things, SuperMemo adds all activities from the schedule at the moment when you choose to save the statistics. All activities have their duration taken from the ActLen (actual length) column. The only exception are activities with a manual expression of the duration (e.g. ++Reading 22). If you do not want an activity included in the statistic, simply delete it.
SuperMemo Plan is not of much use beyond SuperMemo
zm, August 28, 2001:
Question
I would like to see better integration of Toolkit : Plan with MS Outlook. For example, export plan and import it in MS Outlook
Answer
The main idea behind Toolkit : Plan is to perfectly adjust proportions of time allocated to individual activities during a day or during a learning time block. Those proportions are continually adjusted as you proceed with the execution, and such a plan is of little use without SuperMemo. If you only need to export a record of your daily activities, you can use the Export button. This will export Plan in the HTML format
Slots do not fit Toolkit : Plan
Question
If I included all my slots in Toolkit : Plan, it would require 18 hours which is impossible to manage
Answer
That is exactly where Toolkit : Plan is supposed to help. We always want more time than we have. Either for work or for rest. The main idea of the Plan is to collect all activities that you would like to execute, give them as much time as you would like to give, and then ask SuperMemo to fit it all together. Your appetite can still be considered temperate if you need only 18 hours per day (after all this is a quite realistic number). However, if you happen to call for 28 hours, SuperMemo will still help you by compressing all activities proportionally. Then, with a daily execution of your schedule, and with the help of delay analysis, you will be able to hone your routine and find the perfectly adjusted proportions for all activities. In an extreme case, some activities will have to go. Others will get compressed to tiny slots. Toolkit : Plan will help you take a birdseye view of your day and look for efficiency bottlenecks
Undo in activity editor
Question
Alt+Backspace does not work in the activity editor (Ctrl+E). What if I delete some text by mistake?
Answer
You can use Ctrl+Z or Undo on the context menu (right click). The undo is one-level only