Ali Abdaal’s Retrospective Revision Timetable in Ahmni
Ali Abdaal advocates for a Retrospective Revision Timetable, a simple way of tracking:
What you studied
When you studied it
How well you know it
The Schedule Board
Ahmni’s Schedule tab lets us track Revision, record dates, color by mastery, and generally schedule and prioritize. Let’s take a look.
In this example we’ve organized different topics. A topic could be a whole class or a few chapters depending on how much material we will review in one day. We can organize topics by:
Column: When to do revision
Row: The priority of a topic within a column
Additionally each topic has:
Color: Denotes how well we know the material
Date: When we last reviewed the topic
Subtitle: The type of revision we plan on doing next
The Topic Card
Clicking on a topic in the board brings up a more detailed view.
Within a card we can edit the topic title, the next revision text, the color, and the date.
Additionally, we can create and link infinite canvases. In this example we have infinite canvases for our mindmap, our class notes, and two forms of active recall revision.
For notes to ourself, such as dates of specific revision, or ideas on what revision worked well, there is also a freeform text field denoted by the keyboard button.
How to use Colors
Ali Abdaal uses the “Traffic Light Method” of color coding.
Green: Know it pretty well
Yellow: Okay, not perfect
Red: Needs work
Customizing: You can use this method or come up with your own — Ahmni lets you choose any color.
How to use Dates
Ali Abdaal advocates for “retrospective” date recording. This means recording the last time we studied something instead of when we want to study it next.
Customizing: You can use dates however you want in Ahmni, or not use them at all. Click the “X” to remove a date from a card.
How to use Columns
By default the columns are set up for Spaced Repetition following a One Day - One Week - One Month schedule. However, if a card is red, it probably shouldn’t be in the One Month column. We should probably keep red and yellow cards in earlier columns until they become green.
Customizing: Ahmni Columns can be created, deleted, and renamed. If the default schedule doesn’t work for you, make your own!
How to decide what to review
Ali Abdaal talks about looking over the whole timetable when deciding what to review and revise. This is a wholistic, flexible approach compared to automatically scheduling spaced revision in an app like Anki.
In the Ahmni revision board, we can take into consideration the color of a topic, the last time we studied it, and how long the planned revision method will take to make the best decision for revision that day.