Remember Everything You Want and Manage the Rest: Improve your Memory and Learning, Organize Your Brain, and Effectively Manage Your Knowledge by Helmut Sachs
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Disclaimer: The author gave me the book for free suggesting that I write a review once I am finished.
THE GOOD:
This book is exactly what I was needing. I am interested in the brain and exploring memory and learning techniques. This book has a bit of everything and it is just EXCELLENT for people who want to get acquainted with ways to improve their efficiency in the management of information and time. The book is full of links and references to other websites and tools that are extremely useful. As a student writing a thesis for my second master’s degree and an avid learner of Japanese, the discovery of Zotero and Anki proved to be worthy enough of reading this book, but you will surely get even more.
THE UNAVOIDABLE:
It is precisely because of the many topics that the author presents, that there is no deep exploration of only one. In other words, this book will get you started and familiar with areas that you can research further later, but do not expect to have complete knowledge about any of the areas.
THE BAD:
The author definitely needs to update his screenshots. Most of the illustrations come from Windows XP and look old. On the other hand, a significant part of the software is only Windows-compatible and not everything can be applied for Mac users. Also, I found it the examples to be a bit repetitive sometimes. I feel that the section on memorization of numbers could have been shorter or drafted in a more didactic way. Finally, after starting to use Evernote, I noticed that the author uses the same font and extends the same sentence “Remember Everything…” I think this is a gimmick trying to catch attention to the book, and yet I feel the good is good enough not to need anything like that.
CONCLUSION:
Definitely recommendable. After reading it you will be challenged to apply some of the principles to improve your workflow. Anki, Zotero, time blocks and Mind-mapping are some of the things that I am using now on a daily basis and I would not have known if it is not through this book. This is already good enough to overcome its flows. Still I would suggest the author to release an updated revision to make the book even better.
Human After All 