Some people in the Anki community advocate getting rid of the cap entirely. My advice is to not mess too much with this cap. Thankfully, by default Anki caps the number of cards it tells you to review to 150 cards per day, meaning that even if the algorithm decides that it would be best for you to review a thousand cards in a day, Anki will only show you 150 of them - you can afterward decide to review the remaining or stop there.
If the algorithm decides that today is the optimal day for you to review a card, then Anki will show it to you.īut what if Anki decides today is the perfect day for you to review a thousand cards? That doesn’t seem that optimal to me. The algorithms that drive Anki’s choice of which cards you review each day were created with the goal of optimizing retention in mind. Limit the number of cards you review per day I hope that they will help you in making sure you don’t fall off the bandwagon and that you continue to feel the joy of learning that Anki makes possible. To help people make sure they keep using Anki, here are five strategies that have helped me turn Anki into a habit I don’t fall out of and avoid burning out of doing my daily reviews. Everything else is of secondary importance to this. Making Anki a part of your life is one of the most impactful investments you can make, but it’s all for nothing if you don’t continue to use it.Īs I’ve pointed out before, the most important thing is to continue using Anki. The very thought fills you with dread and a little bit of shame for not having been able to stick to it once more.ĭoing your daily reviews becomes a thankless Sysyphean task, and so you call it quits. That’s when you start forgetting to do your daily reviews.ĭays go by without you once thinking about it, and when it does cross your mind that you have your daily review to do, you still don’t do it. The joy of learning you once felt is now gone and you are left with a strange mix of hopelessness and desperation as you see your dreams of having a perfect memory slip through your fingers. No matter how many times you encounter them you keep forgetting them. That’s when the fun stops, and the struggle begins. They become more of a chore as more and more cards start becoming like strangers to you and you stop answering them as successfully as you previously did. Your daily reviews become a little less exciting with each passing day. The only thing I had to do was stick with doing my daily reviews in Anki. My mind would bubble in excitement, filled with fantasies of having a perfect memory, fantasies that had me never forgetting things and using this new superpower to achieve my wildest dreams. I would open Anki fresh with the excitement that this time I would stick to it, that this time was different from all the others. Even though I have known about Anki and spaced repetition for close to a decade now, there have been long spells of time where I did not use it. It is not surprising then that a lot of people stop using Anki. Each day you have to call forth on all your mental discipline to persevere through your daily review, and then you have to do it all over again the day after. Doing the daily reviews can sometimes feel like a chore, especially when you open the program and have hundreds of cards waiting for you. Talk of burnout is common among those that use Anki. Why, then, is it so hard to stick with it?
Starting to use Anki is one of the most impactful decisions you can make in your life.Įven though Anki cannot guarantee that you will develop a perfect memory, it can get you damn close. 5 Simple Tips to Turn Anki into a Habit You Don't Fall Out Of