Add calendar reminder

Email reminders are one way to intentionally form a new habit, if you’ve ruled out better alternatives.

Cost

Forced practiced

One alternative is forced practice. Force yourself to practice rather than passively read. For example, can you disable keys to force yourself to learn some other keys?

Constant editing

Every time you see a reminder you should be able to make it a little shorter; reminders should always be links to a plain text document. Would it be better to see these reminders as you come to the topic, though? Requiring practice through a reminder is much less natural (less self-motivated).

Memory Loss

See Want to Improve Your Memory? A Decade-Long Stanford Study Suggests You Should Stop Doing This 1 Thing | Inc.com. The one thing is multitasking. For example, answering your emails, texts, etc. while in a meeting.

Writing

Quiz yourself so you’re forced to recall the answer. This is the “forced” alternative to letting nature take its course. In many cases you’ll also develop a habit naturally as you are repeatedly quizzed by nature and your actions.

Incorrect prioritization

If you have a weekly reminder and don’t want to make it less frequent, it’s by definition more important to you than less frequent reminders. Publish it before other reminders; set the TODo priority to the reciprocal of the frequency (in days) to remain consistent. Still, it’s hard to have a global view of all your calendar items and set all their reminder frequencies inversely proportional to their current priority.

Time Cost

Small emails prevent you from getting into focused work faster. When you have a commute it is more OK to have some small tasks to do on e.g. the train, though if you have a commute you should aim to come off the train (95% of the time) with zero emails and keep notes. Without a commute, every small email directly affects how long it takes to get into focused work on a daily basis.

Is the time you’re going to put into reading this reminder justified in terms of VNTE? The E is very high when a reminder comes every week. It’s easier to assess this when reminders are grouped into a learning document.

News Feeds

New feeds are addictive, like emails. We are already addicted to short summaries of complicated topics; we can feel like we understand when we don’t (e.g. the monad fallacy).