If you’re an Anki user and having trouble with repetition overload, I (strongly, fiercely even!) recommend the below study options:
They’re only slightly different than the default settings, but they result in what amounts to a self-regulating system of repetitions. Here’s how (from the top of the settings to the bottom):
- Let Anki bring as many new cards into your repetition cycle as you can manage. If you have more time today, review more cards. If tomorrow you’re busy, review fewer.
- Split your review session into 10 minute blocks (see: timeboxing), and do as many of these blocks as you can. Don’t do them all at once — don’t kid yourself into thinking your attention span is somehow superhuman — but spread them out during the day. Do as many as you can, but no more.
- Don’t worry about the session question limit: just do as many as you can in the 10 minutes you have.
- Show new cards in random order. You don’t have to do this, but it makes things more interesting.
- Show new cards after all other cards. This setting is key. Crucial. Critical. By putting new cards after all of your reviews, if you don’t have time to finish your existing cards, you won’t add any more. This is important — the cards you’ve already added to your review cycle are more important than new cards, because you’ve already invested time into learning those.
- Review cards from largest interval. Basically, the cards you know the best should come first. The reason for this is that, because of the way that spaced repetition works, your intervals are spaced to the point that they appear right before you forget them. Since cards with the largest interval have had the most time invested into them, you don’t want to miss them because you were super busy and missed their review date by several days and forgot them. Update: In the comments, rm makes a good case for changing this setting to the opposite, where cards with the shortest interval are shown first. Depending on your conditions, this may well be the right move.
- Show failed cards soon. This is the default setting, and I’ve never seen a reason to change it.
These settings allow your repetition load to flex according to the amount of time you have. On days when you have plenty of time, you’ll be adding new cards, and when you’re busy you’ll just focus on cards that you’ve already studied. Over time, if you’re always flush with time, your daily repetitions will increase to fill that time, and if you’re always busy your daily repetitions will decrease as the space between your existing cards increases.
You still have to put in some minimum amount of work to keep your cards from piling up to the point that you’ll never be able to clear them, but these settings have been enough to keep me from the horrors of SRS burnout.
Related posts:
- Avoiding SRS burnout and repetition hell
- SRS == failure practice
- Maintaining one language while learning another
- Spaced repetition for beginners
- Tips for SRS success
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Isn’t there a more compelling argument for doing the shorter-interval questions first: if you are three days late answering something with a 3-month or 6-month interval, those three days are not likely to be crucial. But three days late on something with a one-day or two-day interval means that you’re much more likely to get it wrong. (And this of course means you’ll have to fail it, giving it the shortest possible interval, pushing it right to the end of the queue, meaning you mightn’t see it for days, meaning … that you will probably forget it completely, wasting the time you spent learning it in the first place.)
I know this sounds very smug but surely, if someone is regularly not finishing the reviews, isn’t it best to stop adding new cards for a while, to bring the daily reps down to a manageable level?
rm,
That’s true, there is a good case to be made for the other way around.
I suppose my suggestions are skewed toward people (like me) that eventually, normally in the space of a few days, catch up on their repetitions, so the problem of cards never appearing because their intervals remain too low doesn’t ever happen to me. I can see, though, for people that are really struggling to keep up, how this would be a problem. I’ll update the post!
I can’t believe I’ve missed point number 5. Making the switch now has set my deck in a spin, but after a couple of review sessions today I can already see how this is a critical setting. I can’t believe I missed this before. Thanks for this simple (but possibly life changing) post.
呵呵，about a year ago exactly the same discussion went back and forth on the anki forum, about which is best, focussing if you have to on the newer or the older. I would have thought that if someone was often getting through just 75% of their questions, the best bet would be to alternate the settings, one day to do the longest-interval ones, the next to do the shortest-interval ones. Though if the figure is closer to 50% this risks leaving a never-answered burger in the middle of the sandwich.
I spent a couple of weeks doing almost no Anki and ended up with almost 3000 to do … it took over a week to get back to normal: in retrospect the best bet would have been to have started with the longest-intervaled, but then at the start of every subsequent day begun with the shortest-interval questions, ie answering the just-failed cards from the previous day. Once those ran out (so before the cards I failed from two-weeks ago clicked in), then switch back to the longest-interval setting.
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Thanks, Jessica
This weekend I am, once again, trying to get caught up on my SRS reps, and I definitely needed to change my settings. I think this is going to help a lot. I’m also glad rm spoke up, because I often fall behind, so I think this is going to help me!
John, this weekend is much the same for me. What, on the face of it, seems such a simple settings change had really made a difference to my approach. Come Monday morning I’m determined to be back on top of my 汉字.
Whilst we are on the subject of Anki: The other day I had a look at the graphs it produces and didn’t fully understand several of them. I suspect many have never looked at them, but I was wondering if you’d found them useful at all in adjusting your approach.
I don’t really use them in any productive way. More than anything, they remind me of a poorly judged addition of new material that is going to make my life a pain once in a while (in the form of a sharp spike that slowly works its way backwards).
What I would really like is some sort of programming stat interface, that I could run custom queries on. I know that an .anki file is actually just an sqlite database, so it wouldn’t be hard to do.
Sometimes I think the emotional side of Anki is overlooked. But I’m coming from the point of view that says I should be Anki-ing every day, that missing one day is a big deal, missing two means there WILL be trouble ahead, and that not finishing my reps each day (although I try to avoid ‘reps’ ‘cos it speaks of weight-lifting and I don’t know how important testosterone is for Anki) should only happen very rarely.
But basically, if you buy into the whole SRS idea — which I do — then you are committing to, at least, say, six days a week (?), EVERY day answering ALL the questions Anki asks you.
The stress of this is, for me so far at least, easily offset by the fact that I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’m on top of my vocab. But Anki-ing every day, or really feeling it (guilty, nerves, whatever), when you don’t —– this to me is a real change from all my other study routines or whatever.
（sorry, to clarify an irrelevancy above, I meant to say: I try to avoid the WORD “reps” etc…)