Space your learning

- Tell me if this sounds familiar. You're trying to learn something new, but you feel like you don't have a solid afternoon to dedicate to mastering your new skill. After all, practice makes perfect, so surely you need to do something over and over again, back to back to really master it. Well, not exactly. We are often tempted to do things over and over again immediately until we feel comfortable with that skill before moving on to something else. There are music apps that let you loop specific measures and tablature for guitar to help you really focus in and play that tricky measure on repeat. A nurse might write notes several times in a row to master the new procedure until they feel confident they've learned the steps. However, this back to back and intensive practice is called massed practice, and it is not the best way to learn. Instead, the best way to learn something in the long term is to spread out your learning over time. Instead of cramming all the information into one long session, space your practice by breaking up the material into smaller parts with time between repetitions. Practicing something twice in a row without space in between will make you feel like you've learned something, but it's actually only inflating your metacognitive judgments. Consider this example. What is 174 plus 265? Got it? It's 439. Now let's do this problem. What is 174 plus 265? Do you see how that second time felt different? It felt much easier, but did you notice you weren't actually solving the problem again? Instead, you were simply repeating back the answer. Massed practice works like this. You get really fast and confident in the moment, but you won't see long-term gains. After a recent workshop on spacing, someone said to me, "I wonder how much I have forgotten I don't even know I've forgotten." When you use strategies to do well in the short term, you'll lose out in the long term. So next time you learn a new skill for the long run, try spacing your practice. Imagine you learn a new analysis or program at work that you'll need to do the first of every month. On Monday, you learn how to do it and are given 10 assignments. Rather than do all 10 assignments on Monday, do two each day that week. Doing them all on Monday may make you feel much more comfortable and confident, but spacing them out every day will help you do well next month and the month after. By refreshing these steps every few days or once a week, you'll develop a sustainable mental model that won't be forgotten next month when you need to run the analysis again. The initial startup cost will be higher, but it'll pay off for the rest of the year, and you won't need to ask someone to show you how to do it again.