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Comment by chriskanan | Hacker News Reader

Have you thought about a strategy for when someone starts having many cards to review? I used Anki daily throughout my PhD to never forget a ton of machine learning and math. I used it for about 7 years daily (PhD + postdoc + 1.5 years) and I had around 20,000 cards. I just had to review them every day and I basically seemed like a fountain of knowledge.

But a year into my professorship, I just didn't have time to do all of them daily and this compounded to disencentivize me as the number of cards to review piled up into the thousands. I still have Anki installed but I haven't used it much since 2016.

One of the best things about Anki is it is free. I wouldn't want to subscribe with a recurring payments, and I like having a non-web app to ensure I could use it indefinitely even if the product dies.

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Because I apparently watch youtube videos about anki plugins, I recently heard about Load Balancer (https://www.britvsjapan.com/top-20-anki-add-ons/#load) to solve this exact problem. Hopefully this helps you continue to be a fountain of knowledge. Good luck!

Out of curiosity, have you found yourself getting rusty on the information that had seemed long-term locked-in when you were a regular user?

It depends. The stuff I used often, I don't forget. Having to teach forces me to regularly recall a lot of things.

However, there are a lot of things I don't use regularly.

1. Regarding the problem of having to review a lot of cards, this is actually somewhat inevitable. Still, Note Garden made several attempts to alleviate this problem as much as possible. For example, you can choose which range to learn very flexibly on demand exploiting a tree structure. In addition to this, we plan to make the content that the user already know not appear in the learning course as much as possible by connecting each other's difficulty measurement between the notes.

2. Regarding the issue of when the product dies, we are also considering making it open source to minimize the harm to learners when the Note Garden can no longer be maintained. And we have already been developing Note Garden for over 3 years. It won't die right away

I'm going to guess that some/many of your cards have a high cognitive load - not just a question of recall, but perhaps solving a problem/proving a theorem. Or even stating a complex theorem can take time.

I solved this problem by having two separate decks. One that is purely quick recall, where if you know the answer you'll flip through the card in seconds. The other deck is the high cognitive load one, where it may take, say, a minute or longer for some cards.

I review the "quick" deck daily - it takes perhaps 5 minutes. It's hard to convince yourself you can't spare 5 minutes.

The other deck I do less frequently - perhaps target once a week, and block out time on your calendar for it?

> as the number of cards to review piled up into the thousands.

As far I remember there was a feature to address this in SuperMemo.

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