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I use Anki for studying. I add 20 new facts each day. Over the past few months, I have noticed that each day, I have slightly more words to review than the previous day. Over time, this is adding up, and it takes several hours to finish all of the reviews.

  • Is it normal for the number of daily reviews to steadily increase?
  • Will the number of daily reviews eventually reach balance?
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1 Answer

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Yes, it will sort of balance out, but it will take a while. I'm using Anki as well, and as soon as cards are getting into the mature state, and are steadily spreading away further and further, they will ease on your workload. When your workload gets too much, it often helps to take some kind of digestion break, to allow the bulk of cards to spread into the future as you're getting more confident with them. Meaning that you stop introducing new cards, while continuing to review the old ones on a daily base.

It may be that 20 new cards/day on a steady base is too high a load to take into your active deck, so don't feel guilty if you ease that load and reduce it. With Anki, steady gets you further than digging through immense workloads.

In such an overload situation, it also helps not to do the full workload - Anki doesn't really punish you if you're not managing all cards at once. When you're reviewing a card that had actually been due a few days ago, and you manage to recall it, the spacing algorithm will take into account that you have been able to remember it at a greater interval than anticipated, and offer a longer interval for the next review as well, thus easing your load.

The only thing to keep in mind when you don't meet your goal due to high workload would be to avoid introducing too many new cards, and to keep reviewing.

For motivation and to view your progress, watch how the cards spread out in the "Intervals" report. This one will also show you when you are ready to start introducing new cards again (as soon as the high peak of cards with a less-than-a-week interval evens out).

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When I used Anki, I decided upon how many cards I could reasonably do in a day and only added new cards if my reviews were less than that. So if I set a limit of 50 and had 45 reviews, then I added 5 new cards. But if I had 60 reviews, no new cards. That helped a lot to keep things reasonable. – Belisama Jun 9 '12 at 11:45

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