How to learn something new every day in 5 minutes

Five minutes is enough for one new idea and one look back at an older one, as long as part of the time goes on answering questions. The routine below is built that way, with a 30-day plan that rotates through eight subjects. You need a pen or a notes app and a source of short explanations: an encyclopedia, a book of short essays, this site’s free fact of the day, or an app such as Scroll, which we make.

Learning something new is a common resolution, and more so among younger adults. In a YouGov poll of 1,104 US adult citizens taken December 9 to 11, 2025, 31% said they’d make a New Year’s resolution or set a goal for 2026, and adults under 45 were more likely than those over 45 to resolve to learn something new (23% against 9%). Starting in mid-October leaves about 11 weeks to try the routine before January.

The routine, minute by minute

1. For the first minute, read one short explanation of one idea. At the average adult reading speed for nonfiction, about 238 words per minute in Brysbaert’s 2019 review of 190 studies, a minute covers roughly the opening paragraphs of an encyclopedia article. A Scroll lesson is 21 to 115 words.
2. In the second minute, close the source, write one question about what you read and answer it from memory. Then open the source again and check.
3. Spend minutes 3 and 4 answering the question you wrote three days ago, without looking. Check the answer, and correct it if you got it wrong.
4. Use the last minute to write one sentence about today’s idea in your own words, or say it out loud to someone.

That adds up to 5 minutes. On days 1 to 3 there’s nothing to review yet, so the routine takes about 3 minutes.

Write questions that make you produce the idea, such as “What does an anchor do to the estimate that follows it?” or “Why does the Rule of 72 work for debt as well as savings?” A question you can answer by spotting one word is too easy. Keep all the questions in one list, numbered by day, so that on day 4 you can find day 1’s question in a few seconds.

Why a question, and why three days later

The question takes the least time of the four steps and has the most evidence behind it. In Roediger and Karpicke’s 2006 experiment, students who read a passage and then recalled it remembered 56% of it a week later, against 42% for students who read it twice, even though the rereaders felt more confident. Rowland’s 2014 meta-analysis of 159 comparisons found the same pattern on average (g = 0.50, meaning the average person who practiced recall beat about 69% of those who restudied) and a larger effect when people checked the right answer afterward (g = 0.73). That’s why the second step ends with opening the source again.

The three-day gap comes from research on spacing. In a 2008 study of more than 1,350 people learning trivia-style facts, Cepeda and colleagues found the best gap between two study sessions was about 20% to 40% of the time until the test, when the test was a week away. For a week, that’s about 1.4 to 2.8 days, so a review two or three days later fits; the plan uses three because it’s easy to count. When the test was a year away, the best gap fell to about 5% to 10%, which is roughly 18 to 37 days. These were experiments with two study sessions and simple facts, so treat the numbers as a starting point.

A 2013 review that rated 10 study techniques gave its top rating, high utility, to only two of them: practice testing and spacing out study. Here’s Scroll’s own lesson on spacing, with the question it ends on.

Psychology38s read

The Spacing Effect

Studying for one hour spread across three days beats three hours in one sitting. Spaced repetition, reviewing material at increasing intervals, exploits how memory consolidation works during sleep. Forgetting and re-learning is not a bug; it is how the brain builds durable memory.

Source Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). Über das Gedächtnis.

Quick quiz

Which study schedule is most effective for an exam in 3 weeks?

• AA 9-hour marathon session the week before the exam
• BThree 3-hour sessions spread over one day
• CReviewing material immediately before bed for the final three nights
• DOne hour per day spread across all three weeks

The last step, putting the idea in your own words, is a looser version of what the generation-effect studies tested. In a 2007 meta-analysis of 86 studies, Bertsch and colleagues found that coming up with an answer yourself, instead of reading it, improved later memory by about 0.4 standard deviations, mostly in word-list experiments.

A 30-day plan across eight topics

The plan goes through Scroll’s eight categories in the app’s order, so no subject comes up two days running. Psychology, Tech & Internet, Business, Money and History appear four times each, and Science, Philosophy and Productivity three times. Day 30 is a review day.

Each topic names a real lesson in the app. Without the app, look the topic up in an encyclopedia or a book and read for a minute. The first eight, plus days 9, 12, 13 and 14, were also free to read and answer on this site’s topic pages when we checked on October 17, 2026.

Day	Category	Topic	Also answer the question from
1	Psychology	Anchoring bias	Nothing yet
2	Tech & Internet	Two-factor authentication	Nothing yet
3	Business	Network effects	Nothing yet
4	Money	The Rule of 72	Day 1
5	History	The origin of “OK”	Day 2
6	Science	Why you can’t tickle yourself	Day 3
7	Philosophy	The Stoic split between what you control and what you don’t	Day 4
8	Productivity	Parkinson’s law	Day 5
9	Psychology	The spotlight effect	Day 6
10	Tech & Internet	How GPS works out where you are	Day 7
11	Business	The principal-agent problem	Day 8
12	Money	Mental accounting	Day 9
13	History	The Columbian exchange	Day 10
14	Science	The Fermi paradox	Day 11
15	Philosophy	The ship of Theseus	Day 12
16	Productivity	The planning fallacy	Day 13
17	Psychology	The peak-end rule	Day 14
18	Tech & Internet	How public-key encryption works	Day 15
19	Business	Loss leader pricing	Day 16
20	Money	Central banks and interest rates	Day 17
21	History	The Meiji Restoration	Day 18
22	Science	Tectonic plates	Day 19
23	Philosophy	Hume and the problem of induction	Day 20
24	Productivity	The pre-mortem technique	Day 21
25	Psychology	The curse of knowledge	Day 22
26	Tech & Internet	How Wi-Fi differs from the internet	Day 23
27	Business	Economies of scale	Day 24
28	Money	The yield curve	Day 25
29	History	The Marshall Plan	Day 26
30	Review	No new topic	Days 1 to 29

On day 30, answer all 29 questions without looking, then check each one against your notes or the source you read it in. It’s the one day that takes longer than five minutes. The questions you miss point to the topics worth bringing back in next month’s rotation.

With an app or without one

Without an app, you need a source of short explanations and somewhere to keep the questions. The opening paragraphs of an encyclopedia article fit the first minute, and so does a page from a book of short essays.

This site has two free options. The fact of the day shows one lesson from the app each day, with its source and a question. It draws on a pool of 120 lessons, 15 from each category, and changes at midnight in your time zone. The topic pages under Lessons each have a few lessons you can read and answer.

Scroll, the app we make, covers the first two steps: each lesson ends with one question with four options. For the review step, you can save a lesson and open it again days later. The free plan includes 5 lessons a day, and at the median reading time of 44 seconds, five lessons take about 3.7 minutes. Premium costs $3.99 a month or $19.99 a year in the US (checked October 17, 2026). Scroll has no audio and no book summaries, and it’s in English only.

For what the research does and doesn’t show about short lessons as a format, see our guide to microlearning.

How to keep the routine going

Attach the routine to something you already do at the same time every day, such as pouring the first coffee or sitting down on the train. The cue is already there, and you’re adding five minutes to it.

It may not feel automatic by day 30. In Lally and colleagues’ 2010 study, people repeating a new daily behavior took from 18 to 254 days to come close to automatic (the study ran 84 days, so the longest times are projections), and the same research group later put the average at about 66 days. Missing a single day didn’t derail the process. In the plan, count the days you’ve done instead of calendar dates, so a missed day shifts everything by one.

How long a habit takes to form covers that research in more detail, and the calculator below estimates when a new daily habit is likely to feel automatic.

Day 1 is anchoring bias. Read about it for a minute, close the page and write your first question.

Drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed on October 17, 2026. The 30-day plan uses lesson titles from the app's catalog as it stood that day.