srfa

Been using for around 2 years, not that long compared to some others.

I mainly study maths and also find Anki useful for learning things like vim shortcuts (Q: Move the cursor to the middle of the screen, A: 'M').

Getting the right level of depth in a maths card is tricky and I don't think I've completely figured it out yet. Too much information in a question or answer and it becomes a 1+ minute problem every time the card appears; but not enough information and it's hard to learn the hard stuff.

So I try and break the problem down into chunks to learn the detail, and also have cards for the higher-level intuition.

I've been in a similar boat - wanted to share what I found worked for me, perhaps it helps.

I constantly found myself in the following loop:

1) Motivated to study, study productively

2) Several days / weeks later productivity stops (for any number of reasons)

3) Quickly forget everything I learnt over the next month or so

4) Back at stage 1, feeling I have 'wasted' the last few months.

My big problem was the _forgetting_. Life is always going to get in the way, and I needed to 'drop anchor' when this happened, so I could resume where I left off, not start over.

I use Anki [1] to do this. I learn things, make flashcards, and spend dead time on public transport keeping up with them. As Anki uses spaced repetition, you can input a LOT of cards without this becoming overwhelming.

This gave me a sense of progress even when I did not study for a month, and massivly increased my motivation.

[1] https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Could use a similar technique remotely using a random number generator. Provided there are enough passengers the sum would approximately equal the true total weight.

There might be behavioural issues here though - perhaps people would keep generating a random number until they are provided one that makes their weight look 'better' (and 'better' probably means 'smaller' for most people).

Edit: comicjk made a great point about large numbers. Perhaps using large random numbers (eg a normal distribution with a mean of 4550 and a std deviation of 20-30) would help reduce the behavioural issue.