Consider texts like the Bible and the Analects of Confucius. People integrate ideas from those books into their lives over time—but not because authors designed them that way. Those books work because they’re surrounded by rich cultural activity. Weekly sermons and communities of practice keep ideas fresh in readers’ minds and facilitate ongoing connections to lived experiences. This is a powerful approach for powerful texts, requiring extensive investment from readers and organizers. We can’t build cathedrals for every book. Sophisticated readers adopt similar methods to study less exalted texts, but most people lack the necessary skills, drive, and cultural contexts. How might we design texts to more widely enable such practices?

spaced repetition is just one approach for writing timeful texts. What other powerful tools might it be possible to create, making future books into artifacts that transcend their pages, as they slowly help readers shape their lives?