Productive Practice: How to Make Helpful Information Actually Change You
Why the mind resists change—and how to take control of what you actually learn.
We are constantly told that we can transform ourselves by reading more, listening more, watching more. We assume we will remember, understand, and apply what we take in. In educational psychology, these are called illusions of learning (discussed in Cognitive Productivity with macOS). Most people believe that re-reading is an effective learning strategy. In fact, research shows that the mind does not easily transform itself by re-reading.
We live in an environment saturated with information—books, podcasts, articles, films, conversations. We take in far more than we could ever meaningfully integrate. And so, for good reason, the mind–brain system exhibits what I call cognitive inertia: a resistance to being changed by most of what it processes. This inertia is not a flaw. It is a feature.
If every idea we encountered reshaped our beliefs, our skills, or our dispositions, we would be cognitively unstable. The system must therefore decide: What is worth changing myself for?
Most of what we read, hear, or see does not pass that test. The question, then, is not simply how to expose ourselves to information. It is: how does the mind decide what to transform itself with?
One powerful cue is this:
Information that you try to recall is treated as more relevant than information you merely encounter.
This leads to a simple but powerful idea: if we want to learn effectively, we need to practice using the most valuable information we take in.
Enter Productive Practice: Overcoming Cognitive Inertia
If the mind resists transformation, then practice must do more than expose us to information. It must overcome cognitive inertia.
This is where productive practice comes in. As I describe in Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective, productive practice is based on research in cognitive science on expertise (in particular on deliberate practice), memory (testing effects), and test-enhanced learning.
Many students recognize that practice is important. But after graduation, most people stop practicing. In knowledge work, practice is almost a taboo subject.
People consume information—but rarely practice because unlike students, they don’t expect to be tested on the content — unless they are preparing to give a presentation on it. In contrast, I view life as the test.
I advocate for, and engage daily in using flashcard software, productive practice. More precisely, practice is productive if it:
produces or modifies mindware, and
leverages principles of human learning
Test-enhanced learning, including productive practice, is much more effective than re-reading or even than mind-mapping (though mind-mapping can be done as test-enhanced learning, by repeatedly mapping the same content).
What software do you use to master knowledge gems that you process? Most people to whom I’ve asked this question answered “what do you mean?”. They have no app for mastery. That’s represents a huge gap in their cognitive productivity workflows. I recommend using Anki mobile or Remnote, as described below.
From Mere Familiarity to Mastery
A reading list (or more precisely a delving list) helps you decide what to process. It does not help you decide what to master. (“Delving” is about processing information in depth. Delving sources includes all kinds of media beyond articles and books, like podcasts, videos and audiobooks.)
In contrast, a mastering list is about content you have decided to learn deeply, meaning with which to transform yourself. The goal here is to develop expertise with the knowledge gems you’ve delved and selected for self-transformation.
While delving ask “Is there anything here I want to remember and apply?” When yes, capture it as a knowledge gem. Add it to a mastering list, a list of things to master, or add it directly to your flashcard software.
Creating such lists is part of Principle 2 of Cognitive Productivity with macOS.
Taking Control of What You Learn
Wouldn’t it be great to engage in a practice that boosts your IQ? The problem is that general intelligence is relatively stable and partly innate. A component of intelligence is the ability to retrieve information from long-term memory — controlled retrieval. The good news is that you can become smarter with knowledge — better able to retrieve specific knowledge gems. Productive practice is a way to do it.
Information you cannot retrieve is, for practical purposes, unusable. By default, we forget even information we’d like to remember. However, controlled retrieval can be improved. Through productive practice, you can take direct control over what you actually master. I discovered this decades ago as a high school student using flashcards to test myself. It helped me score nearly 100% on my entire year-long history course. Ever since then, I’ve used the power of self-testing. I eventually generalized this into the concept of productive practice.
In A Q & A Brain Game on Brain Games and Self Improvement (about a Global TV interview of me) and Cognitive Productivity, I discuss how to use productive practice to become smarter.
The Productive Practice Loop
A simplified version of the workflow in terms of the principles specified in Cognitive Productivity with macOS: 7 Principles for Getting Smarter with Knowledge:
Encounter information (Principles 1–2)
Assess and select knowledge gems (Principle 3)
Surf and manage sources (Principle 2 and principle 4)
Delve selected information (Principle 5)
Add to mastering list and instillers (Principle 6)
Practice productively (Principle 6)
Apply knowledge in context (Principle 7)
The following figure, part of Cognitive Productivity with macOS elaborates on this.
The key point is that reading is not enough, one requires a system which includes practice and is focused on being able and disposed to select and apply knowledge gems.
When and How to Practice
Who has time for this? Most people do not have an accurate notion of where their time is going. To address this, I developed a method and spreadsheet to quantify how time is actually spent, called mySelfQuantifier. It is described online and also in Principle 2 of Cognitive Productivity with macOS. Here is a free Excel workbook that I developed which one can use to implement the mySelfQuantifier system (I use it daily).
To make better use of one’s time, productive practice can be done in parallel with other activities:
waiting in line
on public transit
walking
waiting for appointments
light exercise
Personally I practice productively every day for about 20 minutes using Anki mobile. I have thousands of Anki “notes” (instillers).
I find it takes only a few “repetitions” to instill a particular knowledge gem. Gems that take longer to instill are lists. That is due to the “cue overload” effect. One can mitigate it by using a reconstructable, discriminative cue mnemonic, as described in Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective. I described this more briefly in a blog post 10 years ago: Tea, Zen, Creativity and Taking Mental Notes with the Method of Loci.
At CogSci Apps, we explored building an audio-based system for practicing via headphones, but flashcard tools like Anki and RemNote are so advanced that competing with them is not feasible. (Instead, we developed Hookmark which is the world’s first contextual information retrieval app, based on my Cognitive Productivity books.) I’ve asked the developer of Anki to add a feature that would convert questions and answers to audio, and enable answering ‘on the go’ via AirPods.
Tools for Productive Practice
The following may seem technical, but it reflects an important shift: from studying information to designing systems that shape the mind.
I’ve developed terminology to describe tools for productive practice in a manner that aligns more with cognitive science.
We refer to prompts as challenges, not questions. This is because some challenges involve more than answering questions, they can involve performing actions.
We use the term instiller instead of notes, because they instill mindware. Mindware is a term coined by David Perkins in his book Outsmarting IQ. It was taken up by Keith Stanovich, in his book What intelligence tests miss: The psychology of rational thought.. It refers to the software of the brain. Mindware is not merely declarative knowledge. It includes procedural knowledge, norms, attitudes and habits. (See chapter 2 of Cognitive Productivity.)
Anki templates allow a single instiller automatically to generate multiple challenges.
In my Cognitive Productivity books, I describe several Anki templates one can construct for productive practice, such as a generic Q/A templates, a concept template, and a template for learning names.
Anki templates consist of several fields. In my Cognitive Productivity books, I recommend creating the following fields in addition to several challenge and answer fields:
mnemonic
reference, to keep track of the source of the instiller,
source notes, for additional information about the information to learn,
instiller notes, for information about how the questions and answers are constructed. For instance for cross-reference purposes , since Anki is not a link-friendly app app, one can generate unique IDs for each instiller.
In the conclusion I list several videos I’ve made about using Anki for productive practice.
A recent example
Here is what this looks like in practice. I plan to attend the 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) conference this year and present in panels on topics related to productive practice.
Rachel Horst’s panel accepted for the 4S conference (panel 198) on “Fictopoeisis - Fiction as Research for Sociotechnical Futures” contains a lot of information that I was not yet familiar with, including the concepts of fictopoiesis, mythopoiesis, and hyperstition. I read her recent related substack article, Machining Friction which expounded on these terms. I also got some help from chatGPT regarding these concepts.
But if I had stopped there, I’m sure I would soon forget most of this. To instill the knowledge, I created several instillers including instillers for the terms fictopoeisis, mythopoiesis, and hyperstition.
Example instiller (concept)
Here’s an example of an instiller I created in Anki mobile:
Term:
fictopoiesis
Definition (excerpt):
The creation of fiction as fiction for navigating contemporary sociotechnical worlds… … ________ names the deliberate making of imagined worlds - without the intention that they take root as consensual mythology (mythopoeisis) or nonconsensual collective delusion (hyperstition).
It is a practice of holding fiction open to itself, making palpable the fictional dimensions of the systems we inhabit.
From this instiller, Anki generated two challenges (flashcards):
“What term means _____?” (where the blank is filled with the definition)
“What is the definition of _____?” (where the blank is the term)
I’ve practiced with these instillers a few times, and the information is already accessible in intermediate memory. I’m confident the information will be instilled in the long haul (i.e., long-term memory) because Anki will play me these challenges at spaced intervals in the future.
This is not just rote knowledge. With this knowledge in place, just two days in, I’ve already been able to frame my proposed paper for this panel. Its working title is: “Psychological fictopoeisis: modern transfer of learning from stories requires gamified productive practice.”
The idea is that humans evolved to develop, share and learn from stories — whether truth or fiction and regardles of the medium (oral, written, song, poem, novel, film, etc.) But just as we process too much factual and practical information to easily learn from it, we process too many stories to easily learn from them. Yet stories high in “CUP’A” (high caliber, utility, potency and appeal —i.e., high in helpfulness) are worth learning from. For example, the film Fatal Attraction can help us learn about the dangers of infidelity. The films What’s Love Got to Do and Gaslight warn about staying too long in an abusive relationship. Requiem for a Dream depicts addiction as progressive narrowing rather than escape. Potentially these films can help one avoid affairs, leave abusive relationshipos and avoid addiction. I will argue that productive practice can help, but it needs to be fun — it calls for gamified software.
The framing of my learning from stories project as fictopoiesis emerged directly from the process of instilling and working with the concepts. Practicing with challenges leads to repetition priming, making it accessible in intermediate memory for further reflection outside the context of the app. Practicing also has the advantage of letting you realize what you have not mastered—calibrating your judgments of learning motivates further effort.
In my panel presentation, I would propose that there are two levels of fictopoiesis:
a sociological level, which Rachel’s work explores
a psychological level, which my work on productive practice and learning from stories develops
If accepted, I will develop the concept of psychological fictopoiesis.
Without productive practice, I would likely forgot the concepts of fictopoiesis, mythopoiesis and hyperstition.
With it, I am already using them to generate new ideas.
Why bother doing this?
Productive practice is for that small percentage of people who have sufficient effectance —motivation for learning. See my article on On the Need for New Cognitive Motivational Concepts: Response to Julia Galef’s Why We Need a New Word for “Lazy”, which provides an integrative design-oriented update to Robert White concept of effectance. Learning to practice with knowledge boosts one’s meta-effectiveness, which is the skills and dispositions (effectance) to become a more effective person. I’m not suggesting people should seek to be more effectant — more motivated to learn — but if they want to learn more and more productively, productive practice can help.
Productive practice does not just boost meta-effectiveness. It also makes life more enjoyable. It’s very satsifying to be able to recall and use knowledge gems. As one grows older, it’s easier to forget. Productive practice is a joyful antidote. Productive practice also has personal relevance because it enables us to revisit one’s favorite knowledge gems.
Productive practice is also a very powerful tool for self-help, as we will see next.
One does not need to spend hours doing practicing: 10-20 minutes a day should be enough. Only a small percentage of information we process is worth mastering, per the image below. But if that percentage is zero, one is wasting time (reading too much, mastering nothing).
Productive Practice as Self Help
In the final chapter of Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective I argued that productive practice can be used a potent tool for self-help and psychotherapy. CBT ( cognitive-behavioral therapy) and ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy) therapists often assign homework. Unfortunately, this is usually merely done with pen and paper, unaided by software. Better is to deliver some of this homework as productive practice where one can leverage potent, transformational tools like Anki and Remnote.
As an example, one can develop instillers to instill therapeutic metaphors. ACT is particularly rich in metaphors, but clients don’t tend to absorb them efficiently because they don’t use productive practice software. As a result, metaphors remain cognitivewithout penetrating in to the affective (motivational, emotional and attitudinal) layers of their minds. Yet metaphors, if instilled, can help one deal with repetitive thought — rumination and worry, which I refer to as mental perturbance. Rumination and worry is at the heart of anxiety and depression. Here are some examples for which ACT and CBT instillers can be developed:
Metaphors to counter one’s worries as reflecting an overactive protection system, such as “Worries are like a car alarm triggered by a passing truck.” (False positives; noisy but not informative).
Metaphors to instill the “control paradox”, such as “Worrying is like treading in Quicksand—the more you struggle, the deeper you sink.”
Metaphors to instill the fact that thoughts are not facts (cognitive defusion), such as “Thoughts are like pop-up ads—you don’t have to click them.” (Intrusive, ignorable)
We at CogSci Apps (my software company) are developing a new pack for mySleepButton that will help people instill these concepts.
This illustrates that with productive practice one doesn’t just learn new facts, one learns to think and perceive with high CUP’A concepts. I.e., concepts high in caliber, utility, potency and appeal. Potency is the ability of software or knowledge to transform one’s mind. CUP’A is described in this brief, accessible chapter.
In Sum
In this article I’ve introduced the concept of productive practice and several related concepts which I expounded upon in my Cognitive Productivity books: knowledge gems, mySelfQuantifier, cognitive productivity, effectance, meta-effectiveness CUP’A (caliber, utility, potency, appeal), delving, mastery lists, instillers, knowledge gems, challenges and productive practice. (See Glossary of Cognitive Productivity Terms and On the Need for New Cognitive Motivational Concepts.) To learn them, you could create instillers for them using Anki or Remnote.
Productive practice is not just a study technique. It is a way of deciding what will shape your mind—and ensuring that it does. In a world saturated with information, the advantage will go to those who practice more productively.
Are you ready to start practicing productively?
Let me know in the comments ↓
Learn More
These ideas are developed further in:
Cognitive Productivity (Chapters 7, 13, 14)
Cognitive Productivity with macOS (Principle 6)
Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind, which describes how to transform oneself with stories and other forms of art.
A Q & A Brain Game on Brain Games and Self Improvement, including a link to a Global TV interview of myself on the topic of brain games, intelligence and productive practice.
Here are some screencasts I’ve recorded about using Anki for productive practice: