Hey everyone!
I have a deck that I have finished all the new cards and have 60% mature cards. The problem is that I am still getting 400 reviews everyday which is unsustainable for me with having to do my other decks too. My solution to this is just to limit reviews to 200 a day however I was wondering what setting to put review order in? Should I leave it at due date or should I swap over to overdueness?
Thanks!
I wonder if there is someting else going on in your Deck Options that is causing this logjam.
If you’re getting 400 reviews/day, most of which are mature – how many total/active cards do you have? What’s your mature retention like? What are the rest of your Deck Options?
This is the data, Im currently using FSRS. I do think 400 reviews is a bit excessive and I’m not sure why it’s happening. The only thing I can think of is that I use FSRS easy days on Sunday with the load balancing but even then I don’t remember doing this many reviews last year!:
For 400-reviews-per-day, I was thinking you must have 10K+ cards. Since you really have less than 4K cards, something’s definitely off track! That’s great that you’re using FSRS already though, because I was going to suggest that anyway! Thank you for posting so many stats, so we’d have a fuller picture.
I see that you set your Desired Retention at the default 90%, but your True Retention looks very low in comparison to that – you’ve been lapsing 20% of your mature cards over the past week/month. That appears to be why FSRS is scheduling your cards more frequently – to try to make up the gap between an 82%-ish retention, and a 90% desired retention. If your goal is to reduce your daily study load, your fastest path is to lower your desired retention. But I understand why that might be undesirable for other reasons!
I think you’ve got the FSRS Helper add-on, right? Do you have load-balancing turned on? How long since you last optimized your FSRS parameters?
You didn’t post the rest of your Deck Options, which are determining a lot of what Anki does with your cards day-to-day, particularly the lapses. I’m interested in knowing what your learning steps are because if they are fighting with FSRS, that might be another pain point. I’d also like to know how much of a backlog you have (how many due/overdue cards you really have, without the 200 cap), and what your intervals are like. Carrying a backlog makes it harder to succeed on the cards you’re studying, beacuse they get pushed out of the way in favor of the backlog.
It’s weird though I feel like most of my cards I do know, a habit of mine is to just again cards that I’m too lazy to learn that day although those arent many and they’re not mature. Would you say a 90% retention rate is the norm? I remember being in a similar situation last year with a similar amount of cards and never having to do this many until I enabled FSTS weirdly.
FSRS load balancing is on and a Re-optimised a couple days ago.
There isn’t really a backlog, only from one day which is shown here:
Here are the rest of the deck settings:
If you cap your reviews at 200 and there are more than 200 cards due, you’ll always have a backlog. Since overdue cards are going to be prioritized, that means that your “short interval” review cards, like recent lapses, are going to be consistently delayed. Even your “easy” day today is overwhelmed with overdue cards from yesterday.
I can see that you have load balancing on, but your Future Due doesn’t look balanced at all, right? 
I see multiple things that can be compounding to make the problem, so I’m not sure there is one magical fix.
We’ve all got our own bad habits, but I’m wondering if that’s skewed your optimization, because your initial values look pretty low to me. [I’m going to move this thread to FSRS to see if anyone has suggestions about that.]
I had only put the cap on the day previous cause I just accepted that 400+ reviews in that deck a day is unsustainable so didn’t really know what else to do.
I was also wondering about the load balancing because I noticed that but just thought that might just be how the addon works? (I can confirm that on my other deck with no backlog the load balancing isn’t working either)
I was also suspicious if pressing again for those cards was affecting my optimisation, because for some cards that does mean pressing again 5-10 times before I’m through my reviews, although before FSRS it didn’t seem to affect the whole deck just those cards I did it too. Maybe I should just bury them instead now? Because I do feel like I know the cards well and that retention rate seems low for me but I’m not sure what going on. I wonder what my retention rate for my previous deck last year was. Ill try to disable the easy days too to see if that does anything.
My other thought is maybe it is because I am doing 50 new cards a day and so the retention rate for those is quite low?
**I have just disabled the easy days, but realised it doesn’t reverse the current ones, is there any way on reverting back to the scheduling before easy days was turned on?
I recommend setting your desired retention to 0.82.
Did you have any ideas about why load-balancing doesn’t seem to be doing much balancing?
I thought that you were done with your New cards? But yes, if you are overloading yourself with too many New cards to learn each day, and Again-ing/Burying them to get through today, then those will absolutely be a problem for you tomorrow. And it will just keep compounding.
Load balance only works when the user reschedules cards. The more cards that are rescheduled, the better the effect of load balancing. The feature reschedule cards reviewed in the last X days will help.
Is there any way to revert the Easy days addon or is the rescheduling permanent?
Yep new cards are all done but was just thinking it could be causing some of the problem
Ctrl+Z is all you need.
As in:
This is from the easy days. Is there a way to stop the Sundays from being easy anymore and going back to how it is normally?
You can reschedule all cards after unchecking Sunday in the easy days.
Ohhhh I see! How often should I reschedule the cards then with the reschedule function is this something that I am meant to do everytime I change the settings such as retention rate? Or before applying easy days everytime? Should I reschedule in the last 7 days everyday before applying the easy days or after applying them? Or should I just reschedule everyday and not press the apply easy days now button here:
As I have just rescheduled and it took my reviews way down from the larger deck.
This might have been the issue all along as I have never pressed the reschedule button since swapping to FSRS!
These are what my curves look like now for the 2 different decks:
Only when rescheduling? Huh. For some reason I thought load balancing played a role every time FSRS schedules a card as well, using fuzz to keep things relatively even.
