The two uses of faces in Anki

I’ve talked about my use of Anki for years now, and it’s a tool I’ve used on-and-off for nearly a decade and one I’ve used every single day for almost five years.

While I use it for a lot of different purposes, one of the early uses was to better remember names and faces. It’s something I often have struggled with and as I find myself in more situations with lots of people who I should know, such as a couple of boards that I’m on, it’s a wildly helpful tool.

Remembering the names of people that you meet isn’t necessarily difficult, but it takes a bit of effort. When people say they’re bad at remembering names, I don’t buy it — they just don’t care enough to do anything about it.

However, I’m finding that I put two very different kinds of people in Anki and both are helpful.

In person

The main type of card I add is for people that I know personally, will see personally, and it’d be great if I could always remember their name. This is probably 90% of the people I store in there and it’s fantastic.

I’ll never meet them in person

However, I also add in cards for people that I might never meet in person, generally clients that are out-of-state. This is of lesser value, but I’m finding it worthwhile. While most of our…