Having talked briefly about SRS and tips for incorporating SRS into your study, a comment from Adam reminded me that I hadn’t touched on one pretty important point: how to avoid SRS burnout.
SRS burnout and repetition hell
One of spaced repetition’s best features is that your work every day is scheduled for you, so you don’t have to worry about what to review and when to review it. The problem with this, though, is that the work is scheduled for you by a computer, a computer that has no sympathy for your pathetic human weaknesses. It schedules things when it thinks they are due, and it’s your responsibility to do them.
This is a good thing — you should indeed trust the machine — but unless you’re careful it’s pretty easy to get stuck in repetition hell.
rep•e•ti•tion hell | ˌrepəˈti sh ən hel | [noun] a state in which you have so many repetitions due that you’re overcome with work, and end up abandoning your reviews altogether and instead zoning out to an entire season of 24 while munching on Doritos.
Repetition hell comes when you’ve pushed far too many cards into your review queue, and now, a few days later, all of those cards come due again, and, on top of your existing scheduled reviews, it just becomes too much. I think that this is the #1 reason people abandon SRS — the instantaneous workload suddenly spikes, people feel demotivated, and they quit.
Moderation in all things
The key to avoiding repetition hell is to practice moderation in reviewing new material. If you’re using Anki (and you should be), there are built in limiters (the default is 20 new cards per day) that I would strongly recommend you use. You may well find that 20 new cards per day is too little (or too much), so feel free to change the limit, but change the limit slowly so not as to flood yourself with new material. I personally have Anki feeding me 50 new cards per day, and I find thatspeed to be sustainable. YMMV.
So now you tell me!
If you’re already mired in repetition hell, what should you do? Here’s how to get yourself unstuck, in two easy steps:
- Stop reviewing new material. If you’re in the fires of repetition hell, the last thing you want to do is keeping pouring on more gasoline. Don’t feel like you have to keep adding new content every day. You don’t. Nobody is going to yell at you. I promise.
- Do as much as you can, and no more. Ideally you would do every repetition at the exact moment it is due, but that’s not realistic in the best of times, and certainly not in the midst of repetition hell. Break your study sessions into manageable chunks, get as much as you can done every day, and don’t sweat not finishing everything. It’s not the end of the world.
Persevere
The most important thing is that you persevere. As long as you stop adding new material, repetition hell will sort itself out quite quickly. A few months ago on a rainy, boring Spring day I reviewed almost 1000 new cards, knowing full well that it was a horrible idea, and two days later feel deep into the depths of repetition hell. It under two weeks, though, my daily workload was back to just a blip more than my daily workload before the influx of new material, and I had 1000 new cards of content under my belt.
Should I have practiced more moderation? Of course. Was repetition hell the end of the world? Of course not. Studying a foreign language is a long-term commitment, and so short-term fluctuations in workload tend to average themselves out over years of study. As long as you don’t give up and use (more) common sense (than I have), you’ll make gains, suck less, and come out the other end stronger than when you began.
Related posts:
- Self-regulating Anki settings
- Spaced repetition for beginners
- Maintaining one language while learning another
- Tips for SRS success
- The messy in-between
