Spaced repetition, inside your notes

You already know spaced repetition works — decades of memory research and a million med students agree. The reason you don't use it for your own notes is the pipeline: read here, write notes there, then restate everything as flashcards in a third place. Every step leaks, and within weeks the system is archaeology.

AnyMind's bet: reviews belong where the note already lives. (For the algorithmic background, see our deep dive on FSRS.)

The loop, end to end

1. Write normally. Notes land in your tree the way they always do — meeting notes, book notes, decisions, definitions.
2. Card the keepers. When a node earns permanence, type /card on it. The node stays exactly where it is; it just gains a schedule. One keystroke instead of a pipeline.
3. Review when due. The review surface shows due cards one at a time. Grade yourself — again, hard, good, easy — and FSRS computes the next interval from how your memory actually behaves, not from a fixed multiplier.
4. Roam when curious. A second mode shuffles through all your cards with no schedule and no grades — pure serendipity, old ideas colliding with current problems.

Cards keep their context

A flashcard app strips facts bare: question, answer, void. In AnyMind a card is a node in a tree. When a review surprises you — why did I think this mattered? — the answer is one zoom away, in the parents and siblings the card grew up with. Context is not an attachment; it's the address.

What this is for (and not for)

Built-in review shines for the knowledge your work actually runs on: arguments from books you don't want to re-read, decisions and their reasons, hard-won debugging lessons, people and their projects, the vocabulary of a new domain. It is not trying to replace a dedicated tool for high-volume curriculum grinding — if you're memorizing three thousand anatomy terms by August, use the specialized machine. For everything you write and want to keep, the cheapest pipeline wins, and the cheapest pipeline is no pipeline.

A realistic cadence

Card two or three nodes a day — atoms, not essays. Review with your morning coffee; most days it's under five minutes, because FSRS spaces aggressively once a memory proves stable. Prune cards that stop earning their time. After a few months you will notice the strange new default: things you wrote down once, still in your head when you need them — which was, after all, the point of writing them down.