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Comment by tiagod | Hacker News Reader

>A common failure mode (and I did this more than once, before I got the hang of it) is to use Anki for two weeks, then drop it, and pick it back up six months later only to find you have 600 cards due for review. This is not encouraging, and it defeats the point of spaced repetition, which is to review the cards on the intervals the algorithm chooses. >I don’t have much advice in this area, except that if you have persistent problems with conscientiousness, untreated ADHD etc. you should address that first.

This keeps happening to me, and I have somewhat treated (but severe) ADHD.

Does anyone have recommendations to make this easier? Either Anki settings, or using another app.

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> pick it back up six months later only to find you have 600 cards due for review.

Just do the amount you feel like doing. Backlogs don't matter, the system will just show you the highest priority cards (highest risk of forgetting) first, and even give you extra credit (i.e. a longer review interval) for those cards that you do still recall despite the backlog.

If you don't touch it for that long, just throw away the scorefile and start from new. It probably doesn't fit the degree you actually remember any of the things that you learned.

Here's what worked for me, but probably only works for people in a narrow set of circumstances.

I read a lot of technical books and articles. I used to make notes on the interesting/relevant stuff I came across, in case I would forget about it after I had used it and need it again in the future, so I would be able to look it up.

Now I make flashcards instead. Since I keep reading new things, and keep wanting to make new notes, I also keep adding flashcards. And it feels silly to add flashcards without also reviewing them, so I end up doing that too.

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But yes, as another person wrote in their comment, part of it is also resigning to/accepting your condition for the effects it will have on the things you want to do. Sometimes you'll stop reviewing and you'll get a backlog. The important thing is not that you consistently review, but that you consistently pick up reviewing again once you've stopped.

The SM algorithms, trying to predict the perfect time for reviewing a question, seem like overengineering to me (and also not very well supported by research afaik - we have evidence that repetitions help, but much less what the perfect spacing is). Just randomly sample questions with probabilities proportional to how 'urgently' you need to see them, seems like the most intuitive approach to me. No daily quotas, no running out of questions, just do a few when you feel like it and don't worry about whether you're doing too much or too little repetition.

Is there an app/plugin that works like that? I know you could use Anki like that by just not worrying about the backlog, but in my experience it doesn't work like that.

It may have been linked already from this thread, but ebisu seems to be just that (it has a really great website detailing the math behind, plus a Python implementation)

I use this service to hold me accountable to “Anki zero” every day:

https://bossasaservice.com/

The issue you're having is due to the fact that Anki "Accumulates" cards if you skip one day, which can build up and create such a large amount of scheduled cards for a day that you end up dropping the thing. I'm working on a spaced repetition algorithm that solves this issue by letting you review when you have time and letting you skip the days you can't do the reviews.

I'm interested! I've noticed exactly this. But also even with regular use I've had times where the stack and thus required study time was just ever increasing. This is probably a mix of too many new cards plus high difficulty resulting too many reset cards. It would be great if I could determine when and how long I'd study and the algorithm would just offer me the cards best to study next, being repeats or new ones. That would combine nicely with a 'dont brake the chain' or other habbit forming technique. I'd prefer a daily n minutes above something that may take increasingly longer.

I also have adhd and struggled with this through multiple iterations of trying to integrate Anki into my daily routine.

What finally helped was that I first learned the habit of reviewing the cards daily, before I trained the habit of adding new cards. I always fell into the trap of picking up Anki (maybe because an exam came up, or because I was otherwise motivated to learn a specific topic) and immediately writing lots of cards. This gave me a dopamine boost (thus reinforcing the habit), but quickly became overwhelming.

It only stuck when I learned to integrate the review process into my daily life, without actually having anything to create flashcards about. I went days without creating new cards and then every once in a while I thought of something that was a good fit for Anki and that I was unlikely to remember otherwise.

As a result the review process was just a handful of cards every day, able to be reviewed in under a minute. Eventually (I'd say after a month or two), the habit settled and I didn't need to think about it anymore. And because I wasn't fixated on creating new cards I was able to enjoy a gradual increase in creating flashcards as I got better at writing them and recognising when they were a good fit.

To be clear, this took maybe four or five failed tries, even though I read articles like this one. I had to make most of the mistakes covered in this (and other) articles myself, before I got better at writing cards. The tips still helped me arrive quicker at the solution, but it was hard to grasp why they were right, without experiencing the mistakes with my own cards.

The only thing that worked for me (also ADHD) is to have fixed study sessions, typically in the morning ("Kanji before breakfast") or during my train commute.

Beyond that, I wouldn't worry about backlog too much. I use a custom deck that gives me my maximally doable number of cards per day and completely ignore the rest. It's not like the actual repetition frequency is critical - many people change those settings quite drastically and still manage to memorize their cards fine.

The way I did this was I added a daily task to my todo list to do spaced repetition.

And I started small. Add a few flashcards, review. Don't add more than 5-20 cards per day (Anki and Mochi have new card limits to enforce this for you).

If you use it daily, and add cards at a slow trickle, they won't pile up and you won't get discouraged.

(IMO, non scientific blathering follows)

Two big things that people seem to forget, or not realize:

1. Anki (etc) isn't really there to help you remember, it's there to schedule and optimize your time so you can do more in less time; to avoid the (ad absurdum) case of studying every card, every day. That's effective, but wasteful. To help you remember you use other tricks like the Major system, the Loci system, mnemonics, etc. I recommend either Higbee's book on memory, or Lorayne's, for a array of help there.

2. It's not even close to "perfect", because your brain isn't. SO MANY THINGS affect whether or not you're going to remember a card on a day; what you ate, how you slept, other stuff going on in your brain/life, your context when you added the card, your context now, what you have been thinking about ... It's just not possible for software to nail it _to the day_ of when you can see a card. Anki can only tell you when you should PROBABLY see the card and that probability's standard deviation is high indeed.

To your question, what works for me (I've been using Anki for years, and am now approaching a ~1200 day continuous streak) is to be honest with yourself on how many cards per day you can actually do. 10? 100? 1000? For me I'm comfortable with about 150 to keep up the streak. Some days I can probably do a lot more, some days I want to do less but I can power through. But 150 is my happy spot.

Then, set your max cards per day setting to that. Then do those. And stop sweating it. (Optionally, with more recent versions of Anki using the V3 scheduler, set the review sorting to "by most relative dueness")

This does a few things:

* It keeps your workload manageable based on your own notion of "manageable" * It shows you the cards needed to be reviewed kind of by priority * It "hides" the fact that there might be more due

Kind of related is also to be HONEST about your use of the 1, 2, 3, 4 keys. Some people ONLY use 1 or 3. I think this is a mistake because it games the "ease factor" to never go up. Be honest; if the card was basically easy, use 4. It'll up the ease factor and you won't see the card as often. If it's too much you'll eventually miss it and restart the learning steps. (Optionally here, use a plugin light "straight rewards" which will also up the ease factor even on a 3. This is what I do and prefer it.)

> Then, set your max cards per day setting to that. Then do those. And stop sweating it.

I agree with this, but I'd argue that this alone isn't sufficient. You should also try (as best as possible) to keep the number of new cards per day at a level where you will hit your max total cards per day on average in the long run. It's no good setting a cap of 150 cards per day if Anki wants you to review 1000 per day - you'll be severely interfering with the SRS algorithm if you do that. On the other hand, having a cap of 150 per day and an average of 150 a day is fine for those days where the review count is higher than average because it will work out roughly correctly in the long run.

> you'll be severely interfering with the SRS algorithm if you do that

My assertion is that "no, you won't", from a practical standpoint. One of the reasons people lapse on these things is the "overwhelming" issue. If you keep the max to what you can ACTUALLY DO, you'll be more likely to actually do them.

What you're referring to is an optimization issue; although doing less than what it thinks isn't "optimal" FOR ANKI, its way, WAY better than getting overwhelmed and not doing them at all.

And 150 vs 1000, if done regularly, WILL calm down and you'll chip away at that backlog.

And I also firmly believe that people focus way, WAY too much on "the card has to be done on this day or it's lost". No, it isn't. There is no "proper" time for a card because our brains and memory is SO variable that Anki just is a VERY crude guess at proper. Miss it by a day, or 10, or 90 isn't (IMO) that much a difference in the long run.

I see this over and over in /r/anki; people are getting WAY overtuned in trying to keep the software happy rather than the goal of remembering more things in less time.

Instead of setting a goal of getting through some number of cards, have you considered spending a maximum amount of time per day?

Like say you block of 30 minutes per day for Anki. Most days you'll probably have time left over, but some days you may have cards left to review by the end of the 30 minutes. But that's okay. You can just do them tomorrow. The point is to be consistent, not to be a completionist.

It would probably help to start reviewing old cards before learning new ones as well.

And of course you can start with whatever small block of time feels like it would be easy to complete like 15 minutes or 5 minutes. Maybe even 1 minute; you can always gradually increase the duration as you rack up a streak.

Assuming you use a computer daily, it should be easy to script Anki to open itself at startup at some point during the day, letting you effortlessly have a habit of sitting down and doing 5 minutes of review before your other tasks.

You could maybe use an alarm/reminder.

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