You want to forget the wrong way to do things, but you also want to remember the right way. We already learned a few ways to lock in the learning. Here’s one more: repeat it three times.
Okay, there’s more to it than that, but not much more. We already learned about how spaced repetition helps us to remember. What we’ll do today is just shorten the spacing.
What we do here is to try something new that is just beyond our current skill set – something of a stretch. When we succeed in doing that, we do the following steps:
- Stop and do something else for about ten minutes
- Come back and redo your new activity again
- Stop and do something else for about ten minutes
- Come back and redo your new activity one last time
Earlier we discussed the idea of neuroplasticity and how our brains optimize the connections for things we do more often. What this process does is – to over-simplify it – first lays the original connection. The time away lets things get a little fuzzy, so returning to it lays the connection that much more firmly. So stepping away again and returning one more time builds up the connection even stronger.
Now, Ideally, you will come back and repeat this activity again a few times over the coming days, but likely you learned this activity so you could make it a part of your daily processes. So that will begin to happen naturally. But it will happen more quickly and easily if you follow the above steps.
What is something you would like to learn well enough to implement it easily without having to Google it every time?