I’m not sure this is the right category to ask this question but let’s try.
Since September and for many months I was crunching way too many new cards daily for my Chinese classes and I got up to certain point to review 400 or 500 cards a day. This is obviously not manageable, and gets in the way of review quality.
After classes ended in May I kept reviewing as seriously as possible but forbid myself to add new cards. I’m back down to a more manageable 200 reviews a day and I hope it can keep going down (maybe 100-150) before adding more materials again in a much more restrained way.
Now my problem is the following. I use stats to keep track of that decrease and also plan my days ahead, when I’m completely done with a day of reviews.
BUT for some reason the amount of reviews for tomorrow is never what it really is when tomorrow comes…
Here’s an example :
for the last few days, after I’m completely done with reviews, “tomorrow” shows around 195-200 reviews. I don’t have any backlog, even the backlog button is not showing anymore.
But the next day, the amount of reviews comes around 240-250, the backlog button is back, with about 30-50 cards not shown previously. I really can’t figure out why.
I was using scheduler V2 until a few months ago, and switched to V3 hoping this would fix it. It feels a bit better overall (I guess), but doesn’t help with hidden backlog. I get the exact same result on Anki Mobile and Anki Desktop. Not sure if this is a bug or a feature… tweaking my decks options didn’t do the trick.
Here are some screenshots on Anki Mobile to try to illustrate
It can be related to “bury siblings” feature. If you do reviews, siblings are buried. Next day, siblings are unburied and shown as backlog. More info here: Studying - Anki Manual
All your cards may have siblings, but not all of those siblings will be due that day. You can search for is:buried in the browse screen to see the cards that are currently buried.
Thanks @dae for the explanation, I think I get a feel for why now.
I perfectly understand why those cards are buried, I asked for it, to avoid redundancy and unnecessary clues from different sides of a card.
What I find confusing maybe is why some of those are unburied in a backlog that was empty the night before…?
Perhaps it’s just a psychological thing. My problem is that the amount of reviews anticipated for tomorrow, shown in “future due”, is not representative of the amount of work I’ll actually have to provide the next day.
It’s not far from the real number of course (10 to 50 more reviews a day), but I find it frustrating for instance when I go below the bar of 200 (“wow I made it, the load is finally getting lighter”) and the next day I’m back at 250. It feels like Anki is mocking me every morning .
Basically I wish that some other part of the stats would give an accurate, reliable number of actual reviews Anki will ask me tomorrow, from start to “congratulations !”, that takes into account how many cards will be unburied when the next day starts. Is there a way to do that?
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