SAFMEDS stands for “Say All Fast a Minute Each Day Shuffled.” It’s a flashcard-based study method designed to build not just accuracy but speed, pushing learners to recall information quickly and automatically rather than slowly piecing together an answer. The technique comes from Precision Teaching, a branch of behavioral science focused on measuring learning through the rate of correct responses over time.
How SAFMEDS Differs From Regular Flashcards
Most people use flashcards casually: flip through a stack, check answers, move on. SAFMEDS adds structure and a clock. The core idea is that knowing something accurately isn’t enough. If you have to pause and think hard before recalling a definition, you haven’t truly mastered it. The method’s creator, Ogden Lindsley’s colleague Eric Haughton, argued that students should never practice slowly and accurately with the plan to build speed later. Speed and accuracy need to develop together from the start.
This principle rests on a straightforward observation: skills mastered to a certain speed tend to stick in long-term memory far better than skills mastered only for accuracy. If you can rattle off a term’s definition in under two seconds, you’re far less likely to forget it a month later than if you needed ten seconds of deliberation to get it right.
The Step-by-Step Procedure
A SAFMEDS session follows a specific chain of actions, and each step matters:
- Shuffle the deck. Before every timed session, you randomize the card order. This prevents you from memorizing the sequence of cards rather than the actual content.
- Start a one-minute timer. Sessions are intentionally brief. One minute is the standard, though other durations can work.
- Look at the front of a card and say your answer out loud. The “see-say” format is central: you see a term, then speak the response. Saying it aloud forces a more active recall than silently thinking of the answer.
- Flip the card and check. Compare what you said to the correct answer on the back.
- Sort into two piles. Cards you got right go into a “corrects” pile. Cards you got wrong, or had to skip, go into an “incorrects” pile.
- Repeat until the timer sounds. Move through cards as quickly as you can while maintaining accuracy.
When the minute ends, you count the cards in each pile. Those two numbers, corrects per minute and incorrects per minute, are your performance data for that session. You repeat this every day, which is where the “Each Day” part of the acronym comes in.
What “Fluency” Looks Like
SAFMEDS uses concrete performance targets rather than vague goals like “know the material.” The standard fluency aim is at least 40 correct responses and no more than 2 incorrect responses in one minute. Hitting that benchmark means you can move through roughly one card every 1.5 seconds, flipping, checking, and sorting included, while making almost no errors.
That target isn’t arbitrary. It reflects the point at which recall becomes automatic enough to support more complex tasks built on top of that knowledge. A nursing student who can define pharmacology terms at that speed, for example, will have an easier time applying those concepts during clinical reasoning than a student who technically knows the definitions but retrieves them slowly.
Tracking Progress Over Time
A key feature of SAFMEDS is that you don’t just practice. You record and chart your results. After each timed session, you plot your correct and incorrect counts on a chart. Traditionally, practitioners use a tool called the Standard Celeration Chart, a semi-logarithmic graph that displays daily performance across weeks. The chart makes trends visible at a glance: you can see whether your correct rate is climbing, whether errors are dropping, and how quickly improvement is happening.
This data-driven approach lets you make decisions about your study strategy based on actual numbers. If your correct rate plateaus for several days, that’s a signal to change something, perhaps breaking a large deck into smaller subsets or adding an error correction step. If errors on certain cards persist, you might pull those cards out for extra practice, repeating the correct answer three times after each miss before returning them to the deck.
Handling Errors During Practice
During a timed session, if you don’t know the answer to a card, the standard rule is to skip it and place it in the incorrects pile. No pausing to figure it out. The timing is meant to measure fluent recall, not problem-solving under pressure.
Error correction happens between timings, not during them. A common approach is to take the incorrects pile after a session and repeat the correct response for each missed card several times. In more structured settings, a teacher or partner might provide verbal feedback and encouragement after each timing, helping the learner focus on specific trouble spots. The goal is to keep errors from becoming habitual while still keeping the timed practice itself fast and uninterrupted.
Physical Cards vs. Digital Options
SAFMEDS was originally designed around physical index cards, and many practitioners still prefer them. The tactile process of flipping, sorting into piles, and shuffling a physical deck is built into the procedure’s design. Physical cards also make the “corrects” and “incorrects” piles visually obvious, which provides immediate feedback on how a session went.
Digital flashcard platforms like Anki have become popular alternatives, especially among students who want the convenience of studying on a phone or laptop. Research with medical students has found that electronic flashcards are used significantly more often than physical ones, and students generally perceive them as effective. Digital platforms also offer practical advantages: cards are easy to edit, share, and reorganize without reprinting anything.
That said, most digital flashcard apps aren’t designed around the specific SAFMEDS protocol. Standard spaced-repetition software controls when you see each card and doesn’t emphasize one-minute timings or daily charting of response rates. To do SAFMEDS digitally, you’d need an app that supports timed sessions with rate-based scoring, or you’d need to adapt the method manually by timing yourself and recording counts separately.
Where SAFMEDS Is Used
SAFMEDS is most commonly used in behavior analysis training programs, where students need to master large sets of technical terminology. It’s also found in special education, speech-language pathology training, and increasingly in medical education. The method works well for any subject that involves a large body of factual knowledge: anatomy terms, foreign language vocabulary, historical dates, legal definitions, or scientific formulas.
The technique has even been applied outside traditional academics. In one study, researchers used a modified SAFMEDS procedure to help a stage actor memorize lines, tracking correct and incorrect recall rates across daily practice sessions. The same principles applied: short daily timings, sorting responses, charting progress, and building toward automatic recall.
For self-directed learners, SAFMEDS requires minimal equipment (cards, a timer, and a chart) but demands consistency. The “each day” component is non-negotiable. Sporadic practice defeats the purpose. The method works precisely because frequent, brief, timed sessions create a steady accumulation of fluency that occasional marathon study sessions cannot replicate.