Most people's geography plan is to stare at a world map until it goes in. It doesn't go in. I started as a near-total geography novice and got competent the boring, reliable way, and everything that worked falls under four ideas: test yourself instead of re-reading, space the repetition out, learn in regional chunks, and recall the same fact from more than one angle. The rest of this page is how to actually do that, plus which tools are worth your time.
Spaced repetition! Cramming 197 countries in a weekend feels productive but unfortunately is mostly forgotten within days. What sticks better is being tested on a fact right before you'd forget it, then again after a longer gap, then longer again. Every serious memorisation tool (Anki, language apps, Mind the Map) is built on spaced repetition. You don't need to manage the schedule yourself; you need a tool that does it for you, and about 15 minutes a day. Consistency beats session length by a wide margin.
By region, without question. 194 of anything is a wall; a region is a manageable handful, and it gives every fact a neighbourhood: once you know Peru borders Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia and Chile, each of those anchors the others. Start with a region you already half-know from news and travel; for most people that's Europe, a natural first block. Save the obscure regions for last. Flags reward the same thinking through flag families: the Nordic crosses, the pan-African green-yellow-red, the pan-Arab colours. Learn the family, then just the detail that separates its members.
Two moves. First, mix your question types: locate a country on the map one day, name its capital the next, pick its flag the day after. Recalling the same country from different angles builds far stronger memory than drilling one list, and it's exactly the confusable pairs that this exposes. Second, for the genuine twins (Slovakia and Slovenia, Chad and Romania, Australia and New Zealand's flags), attach a deliberate story or rule to the difference. One memorable sentence beats fifty repetitions of two facts your brain files as identical.
The following tools all complement each other very well, depending on the specific focus:
At around 15 minutes a day with spaced repetition, most people can hold all the flags or all the map locations inside a couple of months, capitals a bit longer. One caveat to note: the last 30 obscure countries take about as long as the first 160, because nothing in daily life reinforces them. That's where the scheduled review really shines!