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You are here: Home / Tips / Using Notion as a Spaced Repetition System (SRS)

Using Notion as a Spaced Repetition System (SRS)

September 20, 2019 By greenmellen 30 Comments

I love Spaced Repetition Systems like Anki and SuperMemo, but here is how you can use Notion to somewhat replicate that algorithm.

You can view and download this Notion template here.

Filed Under: Tips

Comments

  1. Psalm Pueblos says

    October 23, 2019 at 1:36 am

    How do you make spaced repetition if the question part is text instead of images as you put it?

    Reply
    • greenmellen says

      October 23, 2019 at 6:40 am

      In that case, I’d make the main column of your database the question and then change the properties to allow it to show under the (blank?) cards. The answer to the question could be another field in your database or the body of the card.

      So the questions could look like this: https://www.screencast.com/t/OtRFv0tDe

      And then clicking for an answer would look like this (along with the other fields for tracking timing): https://www.screencast.com/t/d65KT2DPQL

      Reply
      • Katressl says

        November 13, 2019 at 1:03 pm

        I tried doing this, but the card is showing up blank instead of showing the question (in this case a single word for language learning). Is there a setting I’m missing?

        Reply
        • greenmellen says

          November 13, 2019 at 9:55 pm

          I think so, yes. If you look at the “properties” for your gallery, be sure that you enable the main “name” field (or whatever you call it in your case), as seen here:
          https://www.screencast.com/t/cJJojgtq

          Does that do the trick?

          Reply
          • W says

            December 6, 2019 at 4:15 pm

            This was all very helpful, especially being able to copy the formula from template. For language review (in the Gallery view) I would also go into Properties and set Card Size to Small and Card Preview to None.

            Is there a keyboard shortcut for flipping through cards quickly?

          • greenmellen says

            December 6, 2019 at 4:40 pm

            Good tips!

            As for flipping through quickly, I don’t know of any way. For now, I go in and out of each card. That would certainly be helpful.

      • John says

        December 16, 2019 at 7:40 pm

        You have a really nice voice

        Reply
  2. Philippe Hebert says

    February 24, 2020 at 9:52 am

    Hey there!

    I wrote a more succinct version of the formula:

    if(toNumber(prop(“Level”)) <= 1, prop("Date wrong"), dateAdd(prop("Date wrong"), floor(pow(2.2, toNumber(prop("Level")) – 1)), "days"))

    You can change the base of the power to regulate the spaced repetition to your needs.

    Cheers!

    Reply
    • greenmellen says

      February 24, 2020 at 9:59 am

      Wow, very impressive! Thanks for sharing.

      Reply
    • Ashish says

      April 2, 2020 at 11:11 am

      This formula doesnot work when i copy paste. please help !!!!

      Reply
      • greenmellen says

        April 2, 2020 at 12:41 pm

        The formula is based on having the other columns named exactly the same as in the demo. You can either rename the columns to match, or tweak the formula to match your column names. Does that fix it for you?

        Reply
        • e0 says

          April 14, 2020 at 1:46 pm

          In addition to this, some of the characters are “wrong”. For example the quotation marks around Level and the minus sign at the end needed to be manually corrected (Just delete the mentioned characters and type it again by hand).

          The working version is pasted below but in case that still gets messed up just try editing it manually and it should be fine.

          if(toNumber(prop(“Level”)) <= 1, prop("Date Wrong"), dateAdd(prop("Date Wrong"), floor(pow(2.2, toNumber(prop("Level")) – 1)), "days"))

          Reply
          • Danny B says

            July 7, 2020 at 1:34 pm

            Quick note: when copying the formula into Notion some of the symbols aren’t copied exactly. If you’re still facing errors, try manually retyping the quotes and the hyphens in Notion. They make look very similar but when you type the symbols you will actually change them to the ‘correct’ version for Notion to read.

    • Björn says

      April 25, 2020 at 4:05 am

      Hi there!
      I named the fields as it says, but I get som kind of syntax error and can’t save the formula.

      Reply
      • greenmellen says

        April 25, 2020 at 10:06 am

        Email me a screenshot and I’ll take a look.

        Reply
        • Björn says

          April 25, 2020 at 6:57 pm

          Ah, I saw the solution in the thread just above.

          Thanks anyways 😀

          Reply
  3. Philip Ljung says

    April 16, 2020 at 12:28 pm

    If you want in to include a makeshift reminder function to this you could first add a column (formula) that plots the current date,

    now()

    Then do the same thing again but this time add the following formula,

    prop(“Next Review Date”) < prop("Today")

    ,which will fill out a checkbox when the current day is past the "Next Review Date".

    Remember to match the names of the columns with the ones used in the formula!

    Reply
  4. Kurt says

    May 5, 2020 at 11:44 am

    Hi there,
    I’ve encountered a problem, when I tried to replicate this srs template. I copied the formula shown in the video and Notion said “too few arguments”. I also tried the formula mentioned in the comment section, with the same result “too few arguments”. What do I have to do to fix this?

    Thanks in advance

    Kurt

    Reply
    • greenmellen says

      May 5, 2020 at 11:48 am

      Email me a screenshot and I’ll take a look.

      Reply
  5. Paulette says

    May 31, 2020 at 12:47 am

    This is truly fantastic — thank you. I’ve been looking for a way to use Notion more effectively in my language learning, and this is an unexpectedly fantastic workaround for the lack of built-in SRS functions. Anki is marvellous of course, but this allows me to do some useful review right in Notion (where I have a lot of other language learning material) and the efficiency is worth losing the power of Anki features that I mostly don’t make full use of anyway.

    Reply
    • greenmellen says

      May 31, 2020 at 11:07 am

      Awesome, I’m glad it helped! I still use Anki quite a bit as well, but it’s nice to have both.

      Reply
      • Rose says

        July 3, 2020 at 8:27 pm

        Hi!
        Thanks so much for the template 🙂 I messed around with it to add some more functionality/things relevant to me, and I’m excited to see how it works!

        I’m wondering (re: this comment thread) how you use Anki + Notion together? Do you use them for different things? Do you integrate them?
        I’m determining if I should just stick to Notion (would be the simplest/most streamlined as my entire life is in Notion) or if it’s worth adding another platform to organize my language learning (incl. Anki as well as platforms like or Roam/RemNote).
        A further narrowing of the question may be: what are the main features of Anki/roametc. not possible in this template/Notion that would be a reason to use them?

        Thanks!

        Reply
        • greenmellen says

          July 3, 2020 at 8:58 pm

          I really liked having the people SRS in Notion, but I ultimately moved it back to Anki. I couldn’t shake Anki for some of the other decks I had (geography, etc), and Anki was easier on mobile, so it’s all back in there for now. Still playing with it though…

          Reply
  6. Ajay raj says

    September 4, 2020 at 12:21 pm

    space repetition formula. Label 1 to 25.
    Formula repet 25 times. Then after page full, not shown done button, page full. How to edit this formula after page has been full.

    Reply
  7. Irina says

    September 14, 2020 at 9:37 am

    Thank you so much for this! I love the template and your explanation for using it. I tweaked it a little bit to make it more suitable for my learning styles and am super happy with it.

    Reply
  8. Dinesh says

    October 19, 2020 at 9:29 am

    can you please provide the screenshot of your remainder column.

    Reply
  9. tomas says

    December 21, 2020 at 5:20 pm

    Hi,

    thanks so much for putting this together. I am a 1st year PT student and trying to organize my study methods to be more efficient.

    I do have a question. Is there anyway to group the different questions or pics as in your video description together with another field?

    Essentially I am trying to group my questions by topic matter without having to make a truckload of pages.

    Thanks in advance!

    Reply
    • greenmellen says

      December 21, 2020 at 5:21 pm

      Good question! To be honest, Anki is a much better solution for most folks (and it’s still what I use most of the time). The fact that you can do this in Notion is really neat, and it could be useful if you’re pulling in info that is already in Notion, but Anki is just perfect for it without weird tweaks.

      Reply
  10. prasad says

    December 24, 2020 at 11:23 pm

    You are superb brother… Thank you for this awesome work… GBU… ans santa claus too…:P

    Reply
    • greenmellen says

      December 25, 2020 at 1:12 pm

      You’re welcome! I’m glad you found it helpful.

      Reply

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