Earlier I spoke of a method for maintaining a more-or-less constant number of daily SRS reviews. That method did prevent an excessive number of reviews (my goal at the time) while maintaining a minimum daily progress. But as my business interests get more complex and diversified, I’m finding that I have less and less time time available for SRS reviews, and I’m also becoming more and more distracted as I do my reviews.
My solution is to move back to how jMemorize does its reviews: a fixed time per day on a stopwatch timer. Number of reviews does not matter. Size of expired deck and number of added cards does not matter. Just X-minutes of completely focused time split into 15- or 20-minute chunks. If you run out of time with unfinished cards, forget it and move on. If you run out of cards with the stopwatch still running, start adding new cards. Progress will be made just as consistently as before, but the smaller, fixed goals will eliminate distraction and allow for effective time management.
This is an experiment in progress (just a few days old), but already I am pleased with the results.
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March 4, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Alyks
I do it within a half hour of getting up while eating breakfast. It’s easier that way.
What I do is set the timer for five minutes. It’s much easier to start with only five minutes. When I first started, I did barely 20-30 a session when trying really hard. Now I regularly do 40-50 without trying very hard. I can do 70-80 if I do try really hard, and my max record for amount of reps in a single five minute session is 87.
It’s a game, treat it like one.
October 18, 2009 at 7:23 am
Sandra
Anki has a built in session limits, either number of minutes or number of questions.
October 18, 2009 at 6:45 pm
jinsei
It does indeed, although that feature was added after I wrote this post. I made heavy use of it while I was still using an SRS.