- What people say
- "Day 1, day 3, day 7" is the schedule
- What is actually established
- The best gap depends on when you will be tested (Cepeda et al., 2008)
mibuki / Topics
Topics
What we looked up while building the products, published as we found it.
What people say, and what is actually established
One row lifted from the "what is not established" section of each page.
- What people say
- 25 minutes is the scientifically optimal interval
- What is actually established
- No peer-reviewed basis. It is the kitchen timer its inventor happened to use
- What people say
- 21 days to form a habit
- What is actually established
- Median 66 days to automaticity, range 18–254. The 21-day claim is not from habit research (Lally et al., 2010)
- What people say
- Listening sticks better than reading
- What is actually established
- In adults, no significant difference was found. Neither is better (Rogowsky et al., 2016)
Four topics
01
What is spaced repetition?
Spaced repetition (distributed practice) means returning to the same material several times with gaps in between, rather than studying it all at once, in order to retain it for longer.
02
What is the Pomodoro Technique?
The Pomodoro Technique is a time-management method in which you work for 25 minutes, take a short break, and repeat. Francesco Cirillo devised it in the late 1980s and named it after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer he used (pomodoro is Italian for tomato).
03
What is habit formation?
Habit formation means getting to the point where a behaviour runs without a conscious decision. In the study that measured it, the median time for an everyday behaviour to become automatic was 66 days, and the range across people was 18 to 254 days (Lally et al., 2010).
04
Reading a book by listening to it
An audiobook is a book delivered as audio. In a study comparing adults who read, listened, or did both, no significant difference in comprehension was found between the groups (Rogowsky et al., 2016).
What gets published here
- 01
Citations are limited to peer-reviewed work. Author, year, venue, volume and pages were checked one by one against Crossref.
- 02
What is not established is stated as plainly as what is. That section is the reason these pages exist.
- 03
The product appears only under "How mibuki implements it". We never write that a cited study demonstrates a product works.
Last updated: July 2026