| Using e-mail in
SuperMemo |
E-mail grows to be the primary communication tool in business,
science and technology. SuperMemo includes a few simple options that help you
incorporate e-mail communication into your learning process as well as to
incorporate learning into your e-mail communication.
Important!
To use the presented options you will need MAPI installed and functional in your
Windows (e.g. as with Outlook Express or MS Outlook 2000)
Here are the most important uses of e-mail in SuperMemo:
- sending pieces of your learning process to others.
If you extract highly valuable material in your incremental reading process,
you can send it to your colleagues, friends, partners or family. For example,
while reading an article about decoding human genome, you find out that
Craig Venter of Celera comes from a Mormon family (his father was eventually
excommunicated). You can send such a note (or the whole article) from
SuperMemo to your Mormon friend with a click of a button
- introducing incoming e-mail to your
learning process. If you receive highly inspirational e-mail, you may
want to introduce it into incremental reading and memorize its portions to
ensure long-term retention. If
you paste e-mail along with its header, you can easily respond to processed
pieces. You can do it while reading or when new ideas come to your mind upon
review. You can use this for the purpose of creativity (e.g. reviewing an
inspiring idea or information in different contexts) or for the purpose of
recall (e.g. memorizing the name of the son of your cousin and/or the
university major of his brother)
- prioritizing e-mail. When you receive more e-mail than you are able
to effectively process, you can prioritize it with the help of tasklists.
You will immediately process only the most important pieces and proceed with
others according to their priority. Priority can be defined by value/length ratio or by
using your own criteria and tools of incremental reading (e.g. A-Factor,
interval, ordinal, etc.)
- using incremental reading.
You can treat most valuable pieces of e-mail as articles to read. You can
introduce them into the incremental reading as well as respond to individual
fragments incrementally
Sending texts from your
collection
- To send a given item or topic via e-mail, right click over the element
toolbar to open the element menu (or
press Alt+F10), and choose E-mail : Texts (to send the texts)
or E-mail : Q&A (to send a question-answer item). In the Addressee
dialog box type e-mail address or name of the person to whom you want to
send e-mail (or leave it empty and choose the address from Address Book
in your e-mail software)
- To send a selected fragment of an article via e-mail, right-click over the
selection (to open the component menu) and choose Reading : E-mail
(you can also click the mail icon on the Read toolbar; see: Incremental
reading)
Introducing e-mail to
the learning process
To paste a piece of e-mail for incremental reading, select the text to be
pasted in the e-mail body, copy this text to the clipboard and press Ctrl+Alt+E
in SuperMemo.
If you want to respond to the original sender while incrementally reading his or
her e-mail, paste the e-mail along with its header information (date, return
address, subject, etc.). For example, in MS Outlook 2000, click Forward and select
the whole text of the message. Ctrl+Alt+E will automatically convert your e-mail to
plain text (to save space, remove read-only attributes, etc.). It will also
format the header for you (if the default topic template is HTML-based). If you want to
retain some formatting, select the text and re-paste the formatted fragment
Incremental e-mail processing
You can process e-mail incrementally in SuperMemo in a process analogous to incremental
reading. Here are the pros and the cons:
Advantages:
- recall of important facts: if you learn new things from e-mail sent
by others, you can easily introduce the most valuable pieces into the
learning process (via standard Remember extract). Those pieces will
be reviewed as other pieces of knowledge in SuperMemo. If you decide to
respond to a given inspirational fragment, the sender address will
automatically be used when you click the e-mail button on the Read
toolbar
- prioritization: if you get more e-mail material than you are able
to process, you can use incremental reading for processing e-mail and
prioritizing e-mails and their fragments. Remember to inform everyone about
your system to prevent being accused of acting as an e-mail black hole
- handling overflow: you can use postpone and rescheduling tools to
resolve the excessive inflow of information without damage to your selected
priority criteria. If you work in a team, it is a great idea to delegate
some of your work; however, not all work can be delegated. Additionally, if
you delegate, you do not learn from e-mail that you delegate. To answer the
latter problem, you can choose a solution in the middle: delegate e-mail
jobs and process inflowing pieces stochastically by means of incremental
reading
Disadvantages:
- splintering e-mail: some people dislike splintered responses. They
prefer to have their e-mail analyzed as a whole and responded to as a whole.
As an act of kindness, try to remember people's preferences and do not use incremental e-mail
processing on those who do not like it
- incremental approach is not transitive: incremental e-mail
processing works best for longer e-mails, article forwards, etc. Importing
to SuperMemo and prioritizing may take very little time, but for very short
e-mail messages, incremental e-mail processing simply does not make sense. The
overhead will not be matched by the benefit. Consequently, if you optimally process e-mail with SuperMemo, you deny other
people a chance to use incremental processing over your own e-mail (unless
some of your responses are lengthy or particularly inspirational)
Incremental e-mail processing tips
- Create a separate collection for e-mail processing (unless you plan to
combine e-mail work with standard repetitions)
- Import e-mails to your e-mail collection. To paste a piece of e-mail to
SuperMemo, select its text (including the header), copy this text to the clipboard
(e.g. with Ctrl+C), and press Ctrl+Alt+E
in SuperMemo. Selecting text with the header will differ in various e-mail
programs. For example, in MS Outlook, click Forward on the selected
e-mail. This will make its text and its header available for easily
selecting and pasting to SuperMemo
- Differentiate between e-mail that must be processed and e-mail that you
want to but do not have to process. Introduce mail into the review process with an interval inversely
proportional to message priority. Use the default interval of one day
for messages that must be processed immediately. Try to process your
one-interval mail daily. Use Ctrl+J to increase the interval of less
important pieces. You may work on the assumption that you fully process
shortest-interval pieces ands stochastically pick longer-interval pieces for
processing. You can use View : Outstanding browser to sort mail by
interval, to postpone subset of mail, or reshuffle mail for random review
- Each day, sort the review material from shortest to longest intervals by
means of Sort : By interval and Tools : Save repetitions in View
: Outstanding
- Instead of using Mercy for handling overflow, consider using Postpone
on the outstanding material. Choose View : Outstanding and click the
blue Postpone icon (or press Ctrl+Alt+P). The assumption is
that the longer the interval, the lower the priority of a given e-mail or
its fragment. Consequently, intervals will increase the least on the most
important pieces of e-mail. For example, if you choose to postpone by a factor
of 1.2 (i.e. 20% increase in intervals), all pieces of e-mail with intervals of
7 days or less will be rescheduled for the next day (i.e. tomorrow)
- You can delay individual pieces of e-mail with Ctrl+J
- SuperMemo converts your e-mail to plain text on import (with Ctrl+Alt+E). If you need
to retain the formatting, select the pasted text and paste your richly formatted text
again
- SuperMemo picks the earliest [mailto:
tag from your e-mail text as the default addressee. If you would like to
send pieces of an article to a selected person, put this tag with the
address anywhere in the text. For example: [mailto:johndoe@hotmail.com].
You can also specify multiple recipients by separating their names with
a semicolon
- In the e-mail review process (initiated with Learn), do as follows:
- respond to the most important fragments with Send (on the Read
toolbar)
- schedule less important fragments with Schedule extract (on the
Read toolbar)
- pass unimportant fragments or mark them with Ignore (on the Read
toolbar)
- if you jump to the next e-mail element before completing the
reading, select the current read-point with Ctrl+F7 (Set
read-point)
- go to the next e-mail in the review process with Next repetition (bottom
of the element window)
- if you complete reading/processing a piece of e-mail, dismiss it with Ctrl+D.
You can also use Delete if you do not plan to archive e-mail. Be sure that the deleted e-mail does not have unprocessed
children (e.g. separate extracts in the review process). You can use Learning
: Done on the element menu to do
conditional delete, i.e. delete childless elements or choose dismiss
instead if the element has children
Frequently Asked Questions
Remember to copy header information to e-mail tasklist
Incremental e-mail review is subject to the same laws as standard topic review
You can sort e-mail review by interval
You can delay a review or repetition by choosing Learning : Reschedule
Change [mailto:] field to change the default e-mail address
You can creatively expand on a task by introducing it to incremental reading
Remember to copy header information to e-mail tasklist
Question:
Why do I have to type in sender information after pasting an e-mail to an e-mail tasklist? This makes e-mail tasklists unusable for most short messages!
Answer:
When using
Ctrl+Alt+E, remember to copy the entire e-mail to the clipboard, including its header. SuperMemo will parse header information and you will not have to type in anything
You can delay a review or repetition by choosing Learning : Reschedule
Question:
How can I postpone one element only instead of the whole branch or all outstanding pieces of e-mail in incremental review process?
Answer:
You can choose
Learning : Reschedule (e.g. by pressing Ctrl+J) and manually choose the date of the next review
Incremental e-mail review is subject to the same laws as standard topic review
Question:
After introducing an e-mail into an incremental review process, I tried to process e-mails with Learn. However, SuperMemo
told me there is no more material to process
Answer:
SuperMemo will not let you schedule a review with an interval less than one day. Consequently, if you import an e-mail today, the earliest incremental review will come tomorrow. To accelerate the review process you can: (1) review e-mail immediately upon importing, (2) locate it without the assistance of the review process (e.g. with
Search or in the contents window) or (3) use Mercy to schedule tomorrow's reviews for today (check
Consider future repetitions and select Gathering period of two days)
You can sort e-mail review by interval
Question:
How can I sort items from low to high intervals in incremental e-mail processing?
Answer:
You can sort your repetitions by the length of the interval using the following method:
- choose View : Outstanding
- click Interval twice at the top of the browser
window (to sort from the lowest to the highest intervals)
- choose Tools : Save repetitions (on the browser
menu)
You can use this method in e-mail processing in the same was as in the learning process
You can creatively expand on a task by introducing it to incremental reading
(TPS, Aug 07, 2001)
Question:
When should tasks be kept both on
the tasklist and in incremental
reading?
Answer:
Tasks may be kept in incremental review if you need to access them by priority
via the tasklist but still want to work with them using incremental reading techniques. This happens, for example, if you have an idea, and you want to
implement it according to its priority on the tasklist, but you still want to creatively expand it in the incremental reading
process. This could, for example, be a business plan, points for an article,
element of a new design, etc.
Change [mailto:] field to change the default e-mail address
(P.M., Saturday, September 22, 2001 1:22 PM)
Question:
I imported an e-mail to incremental reading. In the meantime the return address has changed. How can I make sure SuperMemo does not keep using the old address by default?
Answer:
Paste the new address in place of the old one in the
[mailto: ] field. You can use short names (e.g. [mailto:john]) if you have the name in your
Address Book. Unfortunately, you will have to manually paste the address to all splinter fragments generated in incremental reading.
Currently, there is no option that would do that automatically