My email quizzes me daily…

… and I’m not taking about the latest personality quiz.

A while back I found a little gmail add on that’s just fantastic.

It’s called boomerang, and it does just that. 

You can say “send this back to me” and fill in the blank for when. 

I put all my reminders into it too so I have one system for alerting myself about what matters.

Anyways, I quickly realized it’s a great way to accelerate learning.  

For example, I send myself definitions of words that I want to learn and see if I can remember the word the next day. 

I boomerang the question email daily until I feel confident that I know the word and then I change to boomeranging for two days, a week, two weeks, etc based on how confident I am. 

This helps me learn things without any effort on my part except to answer a few questions each day.

And it’s fun. 

Most of the time I remember the word. And I love it when I don’t because it’s a challenge for tomorrow. And then I feel good when I finally get it! 

After a few weeks I realized that the emails alone weren’t helping me use the words. Which is my end. 

And that’s when I realized that I just need to remember some of the ones I’m learning when I get time to write these blog posts. 

Which is the final step, to put the word to use and it’ll stick. 

Another “use it” opportunity is when watching the news as of late I can’t help but remember a new favorite word: intransigence

So using these words in real life to describe something, especially something that has emotional significance. 

All of this works because of the periodic interruption to infuse words–and other knowledge–into my day. 

So what are you wanting to learn and what email could you send to yourself tomorrow to get started?