Analysing and classifying#

Before you can choose how to memorise something, you need to know what kind of thing it is. Remembering a list of capital cities is a different job from remembering how to land an aircraft, which is different again from being able to explain why lift happens. Treat them all the same and you’ll waste effort — drilling facts you only ever need to look up, or trying to memorise a skill you can only really learn by doing.

So the first step of arranging is to analyse your content: break it into chunks and classify each chunk. Once you’ve done that, choosing a technique stops being guesswork. This is the planning that strong self-regulated learners do before they study, rather than diving straight in (Zimmerman, 2002). You’re sorting your material so that, in the next step, you can match each pile to the technique that fits it.

I use two questions to classify each chunk: what type of knowledge is it? (how it’s stored) and how will I need to use it? (how it’s used). Let’s take each in turn, then combine them.

Long-term learning changes your brain

A short-lived memory and a lasting one aren’t just the same memory held for different lengths of time — broadly, they involve different changes in the brain. Brief memories largely tune the strength of signals between neurons. Durable memories also involve growing and reshaping the connections between neurons, a slower process that depends on repeated exposure and recall to take hold. The hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain, plays a central role in forming and consolidating many new memories before they settle into longer-term storage elsewhere. The detail is still an active area of research, but the practical message is settled: lasting learning is a physical change, and physical changes take repetition and time. That link between effort, repetition and structural change is part of why I borrowed athletics for the “Memletics” name.

What type of knowledge is it? (storage)#

I sort knowledge into five working types. This isn’t a law of nature — it’s a practical scheme I find useful for deciding how to study. The point isn’t to argue about borderline cases; it’s to recognise roughly what you’re dealing with, because each type rewards a different approach.

Facts. At their simplest, facts are associations between two or more things — capitals of countries, the names of the parts of an aircraft, a vocabulary item and its meaning. You show you know a fact by being able to state it. Facts respond well to association and spaced repetition.
Concepts and principles. Concepts group or define things (symmetry, force, justice); principles are relationships between concepts (force = mass × acceleration; lift comes from airflow, airfoil shape and angle of attack). Don’t agonise over the line between the two — just notice when material sits here. You show understanding by classifying examples, generating your own, or explaining how or why something happens. This type rewards self-explanation and elaboration, not rote drilling.
Sensory-motor skills. These coordinate physical movement with sensory feedback — most sports, keeping a car on the road, the physical handling of an aircraft. You show competence by performing the skill well enough. No amount of reading substitutes for practice here.
Procedures. A procedure is an ordered series of steps, usually with decisions along the way — starting a car, giving first aid, landing an aircraft. Competence means executing the steps in the right order. Procedures reward rehearsal and, often, a checklist.
Higher-order skills. These involve more demanding cognition: problem solving, judgement, self-monitoring, critical thinking, reflection, communication and creativity. They’re built mostly through worked examples, varied practice and feedback rather than memorising.

Notice that the type already hints at the technique — and that’s the whole reason for classifying. Different material genuinely needs different methods; there’s no single best study technique that works for everything (Dunlosky et al., 2013).

How will you use it? (usage)#

Knowing the type isn’t enough. The next question is how much you’ll need to carry in your own head versus look up when the moment comes. Ask: “Do I need to recall how to use this from memory, partly or fully?” Three categories help:

Automatic. You must recall or use it from memory with little or no prompting — there’s no time to look it up.
Working. You need to know how to apply it, but you may lean on a reference while you do.
Supporting. Useful background. You mainly just need to know how to find it later.

A couple of worked examples make this concrete. For presentation training: posture, eye contact and managing nerves are automatic; planning and writing the talk and setting up equipment are working; good quotes and anecdotes are supporting. For aviation training: controlling the aircraft, airspeeds and critical checklists are automatic; pre-flight planning and looking up radio frequencies are working; the principles of lift and drag or the history of aviation are supporting.

Combine the two and sort your content#

Now put the two questions together. Take a chunk, ask which storage type it is and which usage type it needs, and you’ve placed it. A chunk can be a fact you need automatically, or a concept you only need as supporting background — and those call for very different effort.

Draw a simple grid: storage types across the top (facts, concepts and principles, sensory-motor skills, procedures, higher-order skills), usage types down the side (automatic, working, supporting). Then sort the major chunks of your topic into the cells, or just label each chunk with its two tags.

A few practical notes:

If a chunk won’t fit one cell, break it down further. Wanting to file something in two places usually means it’s really two chunks. As a working rule of thumb, most of what you’ll meet fits somewhere in these five storage types — and the odd thing that doesn’t is a signal to look harder at what it actually is.
Use the grid to rank effort. The “automatic” rows are what you genuinely need to memorise and drill; “supporting” material rarely justifies repetition techniques — knowing where to find it is enough. This is how you spend your study time where it pays.
Re-rank when your situation changes. If an exam is forcing higher recall than the task itself needs, bump those chunks up temporarily. But remember the real goal is to perform the activity for the long term, not to clear an arbitrary test — so it’s worth relaxing those rankings again once the course is over.

Spend as long on this as the job deserves. A small learning goal might take a couple of minutes; a large, complex one repays a proper sort. Either way, you now have your material grouped — and in the next step, choosing techniques, each group tells you what to do with it.