Anki is incredibly unforgiving. If you miss your reviews for one day, they will be there for you the next day. And the day after that. It’s like having a loan with 100% interest per day. I think this is why many people struggle to use Anki consistently. It’s an incredible memorization aid, but you have to use it religiously to see the benefits.
I’ve been using Anki for over an hour per day since I started medical school five years ago. Now, I’m addicted to the feeling when I remember something I made a flashcard for, and someone says “How did you know that?” To get to that point, I had to learn how to get myself to do my reviews every single day. Here’s my top five tips for how you can crush your reviews, every single day.
1. Use a single, massive deck.
Doing your Anki reviews is about making a number go to zero. If you split your reviews into multiple decks, it’s psychologically easier to give up partway through. Because it feels good to finish the reviews for each individual deck, there’s a diminishing sense of accomplishment for each additional deck you finish. In contrast, when you’re studying a single deck, there’s just a single, massive reward when you finish all your reviews for the day. This stronger reward will help to reinforce the habit of finishing all your cards every day.
2. Take one planned day off each week.
Your body needs periods of rest to recover from a workout and build strength. Your mind needs periods of rest, too. I currently use this add-on to reschedule reviews so that I have Sundays off. (I actually tell it to give me Saturdays and Sundays off because it’s not perfect at rescheduling. I get about 50% of the normal daily load of reviews on Saturday and Sunday and then I do them all on Saturday, for a full day’s worth of reviews.) The key is that I’m not skipping or postponing any reviews – I’m front-loading them into the first six days of my week. (This other add-on caught my attention as another way to manage days off, but I haven’t gotten a chance to try it yet.)
Besides giving yourself a recovery period, the planned day off gives you a buffer if something goes wrong. If there’s a day you were unable to do your reviews, you can use the day off to catch up on the reviews from the day you missed. Without the planned day off, you wouldn’t be able to avoid having to do extra cards to get rid of your backlog.
Finally, someone might object to this tactic as going against the goal of “crushing your anki reviews every single day.” This is not so! When you schedule a day off, you just have a day where the scheduled number of reviews is zero. It’s a day when you reach your goal by doing nothing.
3. Be ruthless about eliminating bad cards.
Entering a state of flow will help you do your reviews much more quickly and with less conscious effort.. Bad cards will break your flow and make your practice sessions take longer.
Here are some common failure modes:
- Cards with too many clozes. My rule of thumb is that you should never have to recall more than three things at a time, and if you ever have to recall multiple things, they need to “make sense” as a group.
- Clozes with too many words in them. Short clozes transfer to long-term memory more quickly because it’s easier to remember exactly what they say.
- Cards with more than one correct answer. This is a killer because it creates interfering memories. You need to make 100% certain that every card in your deck has one and only one correct answer.
I find the ‘leech’ tag to be fairly useful. I don’t delete or edit every card that gets tagged as a leech, but I certainly take it as a signal to reevaluate the card and try to improve it.
4. Split your reviews up over the course of the day.
The maximum amount of time that I can spend doing Anki in a single sitting is about an hour, and even that is pretty rare. More often than not, I do my reviews in between other tasks. Anki is sufficiently novel/interesting that I can use it as a kind of distraction from whatever I just finished working on, until I in turn get bored with Anki and switch to my next task. Your mileage may vary, but if you have hundreds of reviews per day (which likely translates into at least 30 minutes of Anki), try splitting it up. Even short elevator rides or time spent waiting for a meeting or presentation to start could turn into a couple dozen reviews.
5. Make changes gradually, not all at once.
I used to have a backlog of over 2,000 suspended cards. I don’t anymore. The way I overcame it was by unsuspending 100 cards per day (when I could) over a period of several months. It wasn’t glamorous, but I got it done. There seems to be a temptation with Anki to just download the biggest, most comprehensive deck you can find for whatever subject you want to master, and then attack it. It’s easy to lose steam with that kind of approach because the goal you set for yourself can’t be accomplished in a couple of days. Anki is about building habits. So, whatever your study goal is, or if you have a backlog of overdue or suspended cards, focus on making small changes every day.