Learning Techniques: The Learning Toolkit

Anyone struggling to learn something new, or to learn more efficiently, can do so using these techniques. These are research backed exercises and strategies to more effectively get new information stored in your brain in a useable way.

Know before you start: If you haven’t already, please check out The Learning Logistics Center which describes how your brain works like a warehouse. It will help you understand which stages of learning each of these exercises are targeting.

Let’s start by defining learning: Learning is the process of understanding a new thing, getting it into your long term memory, and getting it out of memory whenever you need it. The goal of learning is to be able to effortlessly recall information, and to be able use it in new and creative ways.

1. Intake and scheduling (The Loading Dock)
2. Understanding and Chunking (The Assembly Area)
3. Elaboration and Encoding (The Warehouse Aisles)
4. Discrimination (The Order Desk)
5. Recall and Reconsolidation (The Pickers)
6. Diffuse Mode (The Second Shift)
7. Sleep and Maintenance (The Night Shift)
8. Fluency and Mastery (Automation)
9. The More You Know (Continuous Process Improvement)

The Short Version:

• Intake and scheduling: When you are learning something new, use these exercises: prime your brain, pay attention, pause and recall. Plan for regular study sessions: know when, where and what you’re going to study each session, and pay attention to pacing and breaks.
• Understanding and Chunking - Start with self explanation, then explain it to others, practice answering questions or doing problems. Chunk related practices into larger routines, and practice those routines.
• Elaboration and Encoding - make a list of related ideas, write about how they are similar and how they are different. Make flashcards in Anki, plan for big decks base on subjects (multiple classes and years in each deck) and refine control for individual classes and units with tags. Practice new flashcards twice in the day you make them, including a session right before bed.
• Discrimination and Recall - Practice with your flashcards regularly - focus on the difficult ones, and always practice with shuffled sets (multiple tags). Whenever possible, write your answers instead of just mentally reviewing them.
• Diffuse mode - take breaks. Short breaks during sessions, longer breaks between them. Let your mind wander. If you come back to your work with a breakthrough, check it thoroughly.
• Fluency and Mastery - This is the goal. When you can effortlessly recall information, and use it in new situations and creative ways, you’ve achieved the goal.
• The More you know - Learning gets progressively easier. The more you practice these techniques, the better you’ll get. Also, the more information you have stored, the easier it will be to elaborate (connect and organize) the new information. There is no limit - just keep going!

Detailed instructions:

• Input - the loading dock. The first challenge in learning, is intake and scheduling.
  • Intake
    • Before: Prime your brain. In our warehouse metaphor, this is your workers looking at the scheduled deliveries for the day. It helps you clear space for the new stuff, and plan where to store it as your get ready for processing.
      • Prime Your Brain:
        • Before you consume information (lecture, reading, video, whatever). Spend 5-10 minutes thinking about it.
        • If you have a text book: Look through a chapter of your book before reading it or attending the lecture. Look at the pictures, diagrams, and graphics. Read the captions. Look at the subject headings, read the first and last paragraph of the chapter. If there are questions at the end, read them and think about what you already know of the answers.
        • If you don’t have a text book: Think about the subject, what do you know, what don’t you - if you have an outline (or timestamps on a video), review those. What do you hope you’ll learn about the subject? What questions do you hope are answered?
    • During: Pay Attention: focus during a session (class, video, reading, etc.), take notes, think about what you’re learning, what are your questions, what do you want to know more about, what’s new? Ask questions during class if you can.
      • Pay Attention:
        • Show up ready to focus. Eliminate physical distractions: Pee first, get some water, get a sweater - or take one off, make sure you’re comfortable. Eliminate mental distractions: mute your phone and put it away, mute notifications on your smart watch. If you have stuff on your mind, take a quick minute to write yourself a note about what you need to do/remember. Don’t sit near someone or something that will pull your attention.
        • Get your notebook or computer ready to take notes. Sit where you can see, and in a class sit where the teacher can see you if you raise your hand.
        • If you find your mind wandering - use meditation techniques. Recognize that it was wandering, push the distracting thoughts away, and re-focus actively on the content.
        • If you’re not in a live setting, make liberal use of pause, rewind, or backup and re-read. Both to review material if you lost focus, and if you didn’t understand.
        • Take notes. Leave space at the bottom of each page of notes, later come back and make quiz questions for that page.
        • Ask questions. In a live class, ask questions from your teacher. If it’s not live, ask questions in your favorite AI tool. (Tell it about what you’re learning, what you understand, and what you’re confused by. Ask it to be concise in it’s answer.) Don’t spend too much time with AI right now, if a question or two doesn’t work, add the question to your notes and move on.
    • After: Pause and recall. In a live session like a lecture or meeting, this has to happen at the end of the whole thing, but if you’re watching a video or reading a text, you can do this at the end of each section. This exercise has a huge impact on your ability to recall later.
      • Pause and Recall:
        • At the end of a session, or section, Cover your materials, bring up a blank page, and write as much as you can remember from the session. Do this right away. Compare it to your notes or to the original material. What did you forget, what did you get wrong? Think about why, and how the stuff you got wrong or forgot connects to the stuff you remembered. Do this every time; it’s such a big deal. Even if you only have a minute, spend it doing this. If you have more time, do it 3 times. Research shows that doing it once is super useful, doing it 3 times is even better (Roediger and Butler, 2011). Each time, follow the whole process: write, check, think, repeat.
  • Scheduling
    • Dispersed Practice. Cramming just simply does not work. While it may occasionally help with a single test or assignment, it fails to deeply encode information in your brain in a way that you can easily get it back out (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006). So cramming on one test makes the next test harder, because the information you crammed has left the building. Cramming floods the loading dock with boxes and makes all of the next steps more difficult.
      • Dispersed Practice:
        • Regular study sessions: List the different things you have to study (different subjects, or different professional skills). Rate them easy, medium, or hard. Decide how much time you have each day to study, and divide up your time - giving less to the easy, and most to the hard.
        • Planning for a big project or test: List the different tasks or subjects involved, identify the due date. Space the tasks out between now and the due date, aiming to be done 2 days early. Leave the day before the due date for last minute polishing.
        • Pacing and breaks: Breaks allow your diffuse mode (that second shift) to come in a do a quick clean and reset. They are just as important to your progress as the focused mode study. For every hour your study, try to take a 5-10 minute break. Try a pomodoro timer to keep you honest. If you have several hours of study slated for a single subject, break it up. Study math for an hour, then move to social studies, then back to math. Try not to schedule more than 4 hours of study time per day. If you must, then take an extended break after 4 hours. This should be an actual get up and walk away from the desk break. Get lunch, go for a run, take a nap, really shut your focused mode down.
• Understanding and Chunking - the Assembly Area
  • Understanding. Here you’re making sure you really get the information. You’ll use re-writing, explanation, practice and chunking.
    • Self Explanation or Re-Writing
      • Explain the concepts in your own words. Note the main ideas, think about what they mean, see if you can come up with a metaphor (our warehouse concept is a metaphor) or an analogy (similar but less immersive). A metaphor describes something as if it was something else (your brain is a warehouse), an analogy describes something as ‘like’ something else (good encoding is like having a general search term for finding information).
      • Do this in writing - it will make it more concrete and you’ll be able to re-use it.
    • Explain it like you’re making a YouTube video (the Feynman technique)
      • See if you can simplify the concepts enough to teach someone with no previous experience. You’ll have to organize the information (simple to complex), have great examples, and good questions to check the class for understanding. You’ll also have to make it as short as possible. Again, do this in writing. Start with an outline and flesh it out into a complete lesson.
    • Practice
      • If you have a textbook, answer all the questions, do all the problems. Make sure you understand each step. Focus on how to do it, why you’re doing it, and why you’re doing it in this order. Ask yourself why not do it differently, would it work in a different order? Ask yourself what’s the purpose, what’s the point? Where does this concept apply and where does it not. Find the edges.
      • If you don’t have a textbook, make up your own questions or ask AI to quiz you or provide you with suitable problems.
      • Check your answers with an answer key or AI. If you got it wrong, figure out why and how. Review that part of the problem/concept until you think you understand, then check your understanding by trying again. If using AI, check your understanding with a prompt like “Would it be accurate to say that …”. You can also ask it to check a whole section of notes. When I made my warehouse metaphor, I used this: “Please review my finished metaphor. Let me know if I’ve made any factual or misleading errors: …” After adjusting a few things based on it’s recommendations, I checked it again: “Great suggestions, Please check out this revision: …”
      • Again - write this out, do each step of every problem. Write the answers to every question.
  • Chunking is just a group of small pieces of information that you’ve practiced until they work like a single unit.
    • What it’s not
      • It’s not the related information - storing fractions next to pizza is encoding.
      • It’s not the details of the related information: the bottom number is the Denominator, and it is the size of the slices, the numerator is on top, and it’s how many slices you have - this is understanding.
    • Chunking is the things that make up a whole. In fractions, the things that define the process of adding fractions. For language learning, the vocabulary and grammar it takes to form a complete sentence.
      • For Fractions: instead of learning adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing all as separate things, chunking groups them together.
        • Group 1: Adding and Subtracting (The slices have to be the same size, they need a “Common Denominator”).
        • Group 2: Multiplying and Dividing (These don’t care about size; they are “Straight Across” math).
        • Result: You’ve just turned 4 confusing operations into 2 simple Kits.
        • In this example, your understanding has already cemented the ‘size of slices’ and ‘number of slices’ understanding. The chunk comes when you put that understanding to work in a process (adding fractions). That you can easily describe: To add fractions, make the slices the same size, then add the tops.
        • Over time, the adding and subtracting chunks will merge together. You don’t have to think about whether it’s adding or subtracting - you just make the slices the same size, then add or subtract the tops.
      • Another example, think of learning a new language. You’re trying to say “I walk the small dog”.
        • At first, your working memory is full. You have four slots, One of them is trying to remember the verb (sacar) which is literally ‘to take out’ but in spanish it’s how you describe taking a dog for a walk. You’ve already chunked the verb with the conjugation for I (saco). The next has the word for dog, (perro), which you’ve already chunked with it’s gender (masculine.) Next, you need to remember the word for small, and how to modify for a masculine noun (pequeño), Finally you need to remember the grammar that says the adjective comes after the noun. Finally, you can produce the sentence “Saco el perro pequeño”
        • With practice, you can pack this whole thing into a single box so that eventually “Saco el perro pequeño.” Is a single chunk. Now you can use the other slots of your working memory to say something else.
      • Practice: like understanding, it takes practice for chunks to come together. Practice until you can do the problem without checking the steps. Or until you can say the sentence without puzzling over each word and it’s placement first.
• Elaboration and Encoding (moving to the aisles)
  • Elaboration: this is where you explicitly think about the things you already know that are similar. It’s where the pizza comes in. The more things you can think of that are related to your information, the better. And, the more emotional or personal attachments you can make, the better. For fractions - Pizza, Quarters (money), or teams in a league (parts of a whole) might be good connections. To make this a process:
    • Write a label of the idea: fractions
    • then list as many things you can think of that relate to the idea: Pizza, Money, Teams in a league, classes in a school, Semesters in a year, math, parts and pieces, etc.
  • Encoding: this is where we have another really good, really concrete technique - Flashcards. Take your notes, especially the things you struggled with and make your cards. If possible, use Anki - it’s a free flashcard program that you can use on any device, and it has some powerful tools built in.
    • To use Anki
      • download and install Anki on one or more devices (you can also use the web version if you must use shared computers). Create a deck (ie Math). Now you’re ready to make flashcards
    • Make Flashcards
      • Choose the type:
        • Basic has a front and a back, and you’re always going to get the front as a prompt. This is appropriate for things like math, where you’re always going to want the problem, not the solution.
        • Basic (And Reversed Card) allows you to get either the front or the back as a prompt. It’s appropriate for things like language learning, where you’ll want to study from both sides
        • Cloze Deletion allows you to type a sentence, and then black out certain words. It is best for learning facts in context, long definitions, or formulas.
        • Image Occlusion allows you to do the same thing, but with an image. It allows you to take an image (like a diagram of the human heart) and draw boxes over the labels to hide them.
      • Enter info for the front and back (or complete / deletions). Use images whenever possible. The funnier or more shocking the image, the better. Don’t put too much information on one flashcard - one fact per card.
      • If you’re doing complicated math, don’t futz with the formatting. Use screen grabs or photos of the problem / solution. (you may get to be a wiz with this later, but for starters, just use images)
      • Add tags: Using tags, you can categorize things in lots of different ways. You can give the specific name of the class (so a ‘math’ card might have an ‘algebra’ tag, a ‘2026’ tag for the year you took the class, and even a semester, quarter, unit or lesson tag to get more granular.)
    • After you make your flashcards, give them a go - review them right away, and if can, review them again in an hour, and again right before you go to sleep
• Discrimination and Recall (Order desk and Pickers)
  • Why do we use flashcards? They make great exercises for our Order Desk Clerk and Pickers. Anki has a built in spaced repetition algorithm. This makes it easy to practice our flashcards with excellent efficiency. We want it to be difficult (deliberate practice) to complete each exercise, and we want the card to come up just about when we’re about to forget it (spaced repetition) (Cepeda et al., 2008). If you’re using Anki, you don’t have to plan this, it just happens.
  • Interleaved practice: Another super effective technique is shuffling your decks a bit. Doing the same kinds of problems over and over isn’t effective. Having 4 or 5 different kinds of problems shuffled together is extremely effective (Rohrer and Taylor, 2007). It forces our order desk to figure out what kind of problem it is (discrimination) before sending the picker off to get the right box to remember how to work the solution. This is a powerful way to use tags. If you have a textbook, an abbreviation of the title, along with unit, chapter, and section numbers allows you to combine different types of problems together.
  • How to use flashcards: Write down the answers. Don’t just picture it in your head, write it out. If it’s math, do the problem.
  • Celebrate your wins - and your losses. Seriously. Research has shown that trying and failing to recall something is a powerful performance enhancer (Kornell, Hays, and Bjork, 2009). Next time it’s stored, it’s like your pickers are stomping their feet back to down the aisle to help them remember next time.
• Fluency, Mastery, and Lifelong learning
  • If you learn and use the techniques above, you will achieve fluency and mastery of your subjects in less time, and you’ll set yourself on a path to life-long learning.

Everything in this toolkit is research-backed. None of it is intuitive - which is exactly why most people don’t do it naturally, and why the approaches that feel productive (re-reading, highlighting, cramming) mostly aren’t. If you work through the stages as described, whether you’re the one learning or the one teaching, you should see real results. Learning is a skill. This is how you build it.