I like to time travel. As I’ve written before, I send letters to my future self. But I get messages from the past too. Every few days an email lands in my inbox: Two years agao, you wrote… My online journaling app Penzu automatically sends me entries from exactly one, two, three or four years ago. Reading these is fascinating, it gives me glimpses into my past.

Facebook does something similar. It surfaces an old entry from the days when we still posted about our lives on there: On this day – 1 year ago. We love to share those, as they often seem to induce a moment of nostalgia or reflection. If you think of it, these throwbacks help you become more connected with your own history.

That’s good, since our memory is infamously unreliable. Countless studies have proven that we retrospectively correct our memories to make them fit to who we are now. In short: We change more than we realise. A friend recently told me that he was shocked to see text messages he wrote five years ago. They seemed like from another person.

Having the same idea twice

Our brains can be so ineffective. We’re probably thinking through the same problems again and again, jumping back a few squares each time we’re coming back to deal with them. Writing down your thoughts in a journal can help. But if you’re anything like me, you don’t spend a lot of time reading through old journal entries.

But I discovered a great solution for this: spaced repetition. Traditionally, students use spaced repetition with flashcards as learning technique to prepare for exams. New and difficult cards are shown more frequently so you can focus on the material that needs your attention the most. Apps like Quizlet and Anki have built in algorithms for spaced repetition. That means you make flashcards with questions and then, every day, you try to answer some of them. You then click to say if you knew the answer or if you didn’t. The more often you do know, the less the system will show the card to you.

More than just memorisation

I basically hacked my way through my multiple choice tests with a simple method: I would turn information from lectures into questions, put those onto digital flashcards and then try to answer some of them every day, usually in the train to or from work. It works amazingly well – and I never had to make mind maps, summaries or paint book pages in bright yellow.

Now, what if we used spaced repetition for more than hammering facts into our brains?

We could make flashcards with memories to reflect on our journey, lessons we learnt, questions we’re pondering and all sorts of other stuff we’d like to have more present in life. This is an idea by the interaction designer Andy Matuschak.

A Spaced repetition memory system like Anki is primarily designed to help people memorize a lot of declarative knowledge, like vocabulary. But the same mechanisms can be used to create relatively unorthodox cards which prompt application, synthesis, and creation.

In our digital environments we’re bombarded with messages trying to hijack our attention: E-mails, social media posts, app alerts. They all come from the outside. How beautiful would it be if at least some of that unexpected information was curated by your past self?

Imagine you have a spaced repetition practice where you go through your cards for ten minutes every day. Those will contain a bouquet of ideas, and you can pick the ones you want to engage with. Then you hit a button to say how soon you want to see this bit again.

Questions, songs, people

Here are some ideas how I could use such a system:

• Books from the reading list: I only open my list of books to add a new one I want to read. Like this, some of the books on the list would be presented to me and I could decide if I was in the mood to start reading it.
• Music: Since there are no physical CD shelves any more, my music consumption has been relying heavily on Spotify algorithms and what playlists I have made. By putting old albums I don’t want to forget and new albums I want to give a listen into the system, every morning I would get unexpected ideas for what I could listen to that day.
• People to contact: Just throw names of people you like on the cards. When I see them and feel like getting in touch, I can call or write a message.
• Songs to play on the guitar: I have a list of songs that I can play but I never play them. It’s so old that I’ve forgotten most of these songs. But this system could help surface some old songs and save them from total oblivion.
• Writing prompts for journaling: This could be general questions to start the writing process. But it can also be for very specific questions that I’m pondering and that can only be answered over time. They might need more thinking to develop.
• Valules, Visions, Affirmations: I could write favorite quotes, important personal values, learnt lessions and affirmations on these cards. Getting reminded regularly could help keeping them present, and reflect on them and my current life.

What it could look like

And these are just the first ones that come to mind. Let’s assume I already have a set of digital cards with amazing thinking prompts that are showed to me randomly. This is what I would see on a random morning:

Have you been in touch with your mom lately?

No, I should text her, actually. Remind me of this soon, it’s important.

Frank Turner: “If there’s one that punk rock should ever really mean, it’s not sitting round and waiting for the lights to go green.”

I love this quote. I’ll take that with me today and it might help me not to overthink things and start doing. Remind me of this in a while.

If you encounter a human and a dog, do you have to greet them both?

Great question! I think you should always greet the dog first. I have an answer for now, but who knows if my thinking changes over time. Remind me of this in the far future.

Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen

Amazing album, but I’m way too cheerful to listen to it today. Maybe I’ll be in the mood soon? Remind me of this in a while.

An orbit full of ideas

I’ve been pondering how I could make this work for myself for a while when I found out that Andy Matuschak is actually working on a software for exactly this: It’s called Orbit, and it would operate on the level of the operating system. This means it isn’t confined to one app, you can connect it to all your programs: Your e-mail client, microsoft word, your note tool, whatever else.

Central to what I’m imagining here is a daily practice habit somewhat akin to meditation: you open this thing up and engage with whatever microtasks it presents. You’ll work on your memory, maybe do some self-authorship with reflection questions, do some quick physics problems, some quick writing, etc. Then ten minutes later, the train arrives, you board, and that’s it for the day. The next day’s different.

In summary, this system is about giving you a way to bring ideas into your orbit. When something seems interesting, you can tie a string to it and throw it up in a lazy arc. It’ll swing back around at some point, but you’re not terribly concerned with when. You’ll give its string more or less slack over time. Floating above your head, then, is an ever-shifting constellation of inklings, facts, questions, prompts, obsessions. Every day you stare up at the slice of sky above you and respond to what’s there.

Andy plans to release the first version of Orbit this summer and I’m oh so delighted. It holds the promise of giving me the power to be more in charge of my personal journey, not having to come up with an idea more than once, being more connected to my past, having more serendipity in my life.

And, of course, to travel through time even more.

If you’ve read this far: What kind of information would you shoot into your orbit, so it would show up periodically and randomly?