Here’s what I do with a backlog – similar to what’s described in the manual. It allows you to push forward with your current studying while folding the backlog in at whatever pace you want.
- Set your daily New cards to 0
- Make a “Catch-up” Filtered Deck to siphon off the overdue cards – like
is:due prop:due<=-1(if you have subjects you want to keep separate, do this for each of those decks/subdecks). - A regular study-day would be –
- Study all of the due Review cards in your main deck, including graduating all Learn cards to Review.
- Then study X cards from the Catch-up deck – grading them honestly, and knowing that you’re likely to have more lapses than usual.
- When you’re done for the day, rebuild the Catch-up deck to kick any short interval cards back to your main deck for tomorrow.
- [As soon as you clear the backlog for a deck/subdeck, turn on a reasonable number of daily New cards for that deck.]
Update A:
Use “Descending Retrievability” as your Review sort order on your Filtered deck. It’s the most efficient sort order for managing a backlog.
Update B:
If you nest your Filtered catch-up deck inside an empty parent deck, you can use the daily max review limit to set an “allowance” of backlog cards for the day. Set it for “This Deck” only, and any day you want to tackle more backlog, you can increase that with a “Today Only” limit.
So, no more rebuilding needed (any leftover Learn/Relearn cards will automatically be a the front of the stack the next day) – and you can collapse the parent deck if you don’t want to look at the big scary backlog total number every day. Sit this alongside your other subdecks, so you can still do all your studying with one click on your main deck.
So that simplifies #3 above –
- A regular study-day would be – study all of the due Review cards in your main decks, and all of today’s catch-up cards, including graduating all Learn/Relearn cards to Review.