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About learnyou.me

It began with a book club.

The first idea was small: keep up with the book club’s reading, so the night before a meeting isn’t spent cramming the last two hundred pages.

Pick a book and a date, and the reading becomes a few pages each day, sized to how fast you actually read. From there it was a short step to the bigger question: what if you could name any subject and get a course of study made of real works, paced the same way?

The approach

Steady over sudden. Research on study habits finds that spreading work out tends to beat cramming it into one night.1,2 learnyou.me spreads a book across the days you have, so there’s no night-before cram.

Specific targets. “Pages 212–240 today” tends to work better than “read more”.3 Each sitting names the pages or minutes.

Habits take time. They tend to form through repetition, and how long that takes varies a great deal between people.4 Streaks and records are there as feedback, and a bookmark lets you miss a day without losing your streak.

Only you on the page. Progress compares you with your own past weeks. There are no rankings and no other people.

Honest about the AI. Course reading lists are suggested by an AI model. Books are looked up in the Open Library catalogue, and any book we couldn’t confirm says so; other kinds of work aren’t checked yet.

Version one is about keeping pace. Help with remembering what you read is designed but not built yet. See the questions page for more.

Notes

  1. Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354 ↩
  2. Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. doi:10.1177/1529100612453266 ↩
  3. Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705 ↩
  4. Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. doi:10.1002/ejsp.674 ↩