How can I force more reviews during the holidays to clear-up my anki for the next school year?

Anki Scheduling
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Hi ! First and foremost, i’m french, so please be forgiving of my typing mistakes (and i admit i am very not proud of the formulation of my topic, but couldn’t bother to do better).

I’m currently studying engineering, and have come to find myself with a lot of free time during those holidays. So i intended to try and review as much cards as possible to minimize the amount of this year’s cards i will face next year, in order to relieve me of as much workload as possible to start the year on a nice foot.

To do that, i intended to repetedly use the fsrs rescheduler as, in my experience, it tended to diminish the amount of future due and diminish the average due cards number. I don’t know if i’m being clear but for me, it usually tended to make the “cards due” curve go from a linear-like decay to an exponantial one, and thus was kind of perfect for what i wanted to do.

However, the last times i tried, it did not diminish the average cards/day but rather increased it, and i have learned the correct usage of the functionality, which is not what i used it like at all.

Hence, is there any way for me to reproduce the effect i got by chance from the “reschedule all” with another tool ? I don’t know what to use and how to use it. I’ve occasionally seen people using filtered deck to cram before exams and thought maybe i could sort of “cram every day” to artificially decrease my future number of card due, but i don’t know how to manipulate filtered decks and i’m not sure this is recommended at all, so i’m seeking guidance in this forum.

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Have you got any new, or unseen cards? Or are you only looking at reviewing cards, which are currently under review?

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I have some new cards remaining but no i’m mostly looking at reviewing faster cards that are currently under review. In class periods, i do 80-100 flashcards a day, and since the beginning of the holidays i’ve fallen to 40-50 as i’m not starting as much new ones as before. So i would like to review more cards during thoses holidays (would be great to go up to 120/day) in order to reduce the amount of this year cards i will have to do next year. Tell me if I’m not being clear

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You can use custom study review ahead.

Alternatively, make a backup first. Then enable “Reschedule cards on change” and increase your desired retention to 99%. You’ll probably see a lot of new reviews. Also, you’ll see cards more often; effectively making reviewing “faster”. Once you’re satisfied with your true retention, you can lower the desired retention back.

That said, I’d rather self study next year’s material and that would be more helpful.

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Thank you very much for your tips. Firstly in my case self studying next year’s material is not recommended, as my cursus is quite intensive/fast-moving and teachers especially told us not to try to take any advance, as they labeled it as “utterly useless”. They emphasised more on the need to be on page with this year’s program as it will not be seen again (they gave us noted homework to do so).

This out of the way, i’ve looked into

but found this : " If your search included cards that are not due, Anki will show the reviews ahead of time.

Anki uses a special algorithm for these reviews that takes into account how early you are reviewing. If the cards were almost due to be shown, they will be given a new delay similar to what they would have received if you had reviewed them on time. If the cards are reviewed soon after they were scheduled however, their new delay will be similar to their previous delay. This calculation works on a sliding scale.

Because reviewing a card shortly after it is scheduled has little impact on scheduling (e.g. a card due tomorrow with a one day interval will remain due tomorrow if reviewed early), the “review ahead” custom study setting is not appropriate for repeated use. If used to go through a week’s worth of cards before a trip, the mature cards will be rescheduled into the future and the new cards will remain at small intervals, because you don’t know them well enough for them to be rescheduled further. If you review ahead again the next day, all you’ll end up doing is going through those same new cards again, to little benefit.". As stated, the functionnality doesn’t seem to fit my use case but i’ll try tweaking it anyway and i think it can still help me.

So I think I’ll have to go with tweaking my retention back and forth as you suggested. For instance if i put my desired retention at 99% until satisfactory results, and then tweak it back to my currents number (87-90% depending on presets) something like two weeks before the start of the school year will my intervals be longer than if i kept everything at my currents number ? Or will the impact be solely on my knowledge of the cards. Because if it does cause longer intervals, it would be ideal for my use case. Then i could use, as you suggested, use the custom study ahead to clear up my first two weeks and it would be ideal !

Yet this solution isn’t perfect, so thanks for your help and i’ll try what you suggested, but if anyone has another more adapted method feel free to reach out !

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You’d have to ask the FSRS experts for that one, but from my experience when I lower the desired retention from my usual high DR to something like 80%, the next interval of a card with a review history like 4d 12d 1.6m shoots up to 9 months!

Another approach you could try is to review every card that you haven’t reviewed in the past, say, 30 days using the filter -rated:30 -is:new.

1 Like
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I think this is a better version (if i understood well) of the “custom study ahead” for my case, so thanks for that i’ll try it out tomorrow as I have 10h or car to kill, and if it works well i’ll do it too at the end of the holidays as i suggested i would do with the custom study ahead function.

Your experience really looks like what i’m willing to achieve, so it’s quite helpful, i’ll for sure try it that way now.

And you’re right, asking the FSRS experts doesn’t hurt so maybe i’ll make another post on their sub if i feel the need to.

Thanks for your help !

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Hi. This question results from my first post here : ANK FORUMS (Anki/Scheduling): how can i force more reviews during the holidays to clear up my anki for the next school year/63862. I will try and compile the questionning we had there but feel free to read it too if you want a broader understanding of the question/issue.

So : First and foremost, i’m french, so please be forgiving of my typing mistakes (and i admit i am very not proud of the formulation of my topic, but couldn’t bother to do better).

I’m currently studying engineering, and have come to find myself with a lot of free time during those holidays. So i intended to try and review as much cards as possible to minimize the amount of this year’s cards i will face next year, in order to relieve me of as much workload as possible to start the year on a nice foot.

In brief (look at my first post), i’m trying to increase current reviews/day to decrease reviews/day in 2 months. I tried doing that using the “reschedule all” function but failed.

So it was suggested to me to tweak retention back and forth : “Alternatively, make a backup first. Then enable “Reschedule cards on change” and increase your desired retention to 99%. You’ll probably see a lot of new reviews. Also, you’ll see cards more often; effectively making reviewing “faster”. Once you’re satisfied with your true retention, you can lower the desired retention back.”
And i was planning to use this along with the “custom study ahead” function just after driving back the retention in order to give back a large intervall to most of the cards before the school year.

In details, i planned to do something like this : " For instance if i put my desired retention at 99% until satisfactory results, and then tweak it back to my currents number (87-90% depending on presets) something like two weeks before the start of the school year. Then i could use, as you suggested, use the custom study ahead to clear up my first two weeks and it would be ideal !" (copied from other post)

But i was wondering : will, by doing so, my intervals be longer than if i kept everything at my currents number ? Or will the impact be solely on my knowledge of the cards ? Because if it does cause longer intervals, it is something i strive to do, but if it isn’t, this is not the right method for me. So I’m asking the FSRS experts to enlighten me on the effects doing what i suggested would actually have and I pray it does what i want, because (other post) there doesn’t seem to exist another method to do that. Additionally is it a good idea to use “study in advance” as i suggested, or will just using the “reschedule all cards” function after rediminushing retention do the job ?

Thanks in advance, sorry for the lenght.

1 Like
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There are Easy Days, available natively in newest versions of Anki

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But that’s for days of the week
You can also use Advance/Postpone of the FSRS Helper add-on

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[I merged your posts together because they are more related than they are separate.]

I think you can use the FSRS Helper add-on’s “Advance” for a start. And if that’s not enough, you can use Filtered decks as well.

I just want to adjust your expectations on that. Studying cards early (and getting them correct) means they won’t be scheduled on that day anymore – but they will be scheduled on another day in the future. How far they will move depends on how early you are studying them. So what your planning isn’t really reducing the cards, it’s just creating more room between them.

I don’t agree that you should increase your Desired Retention (DR) – that seems like the opposite of what you want. If these cards/decks are going to be a lower priority for you next year (“on the back burner” if that translates), you should decrease your DR for them. You’ll need these decks to be in a separate preset to have a different DR.

You can do that now without rescheduling, if you want to study the cards one more time this summer before they shift to longer intervals. Or after you lower your DR, you can use the Helper add-on’s “reschedule all cards” to shift them to longer intervals right away.

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Sorry if i wasn’t clear but this has no link to what i want to do. All my days are already on normal.

That’s what i already talked about when speaking of the “study in advance function”

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Firstly thank you for taking the time, i know i didn’t make myself very clear.

This is what i talked about with the “study in advance” but is seems (as i copied and pasted on the previous post from the anki guide) doing it too much is not recommended, so i was thinking about using it soon to kind of test it and only using it 1-2 days before the beginning of classes to do a “last clean up” kind of thing. Maybe filtered decks are less disruptive but “Advance” seemed not fit to use repeteadly.

Yes sorry for the misleading sentences but this is ?i think? what i want to do as more room between means less reviews/day and this is my goal. I tried drawing it if it helps :

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So following my drawing, those cards are a “back burner” yes but i don’t want to lower my retention as they are still in the program. What i planned to do was increase my DR temporarily, for the brunt of the holidays to then reduce it back to normal or slightly inferior DR 1-2 weeks before the start of the year, in order to review most of them before the new year to put them back in longer intervals (but maybe this has no interest with the “reschedule all” function wich would do that in my place) and then i would eventually use “Advance” to further improve the effects of my tweakings.

So this is what i pretty much planned to do at the end of the holidays.

My question is : does the ~45 days up here :

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With higher DR will, by studying all cards more regularely, increase their knowledge % and cause the cards/day after rescheduling to be lower than if i just did my reviews with a normal DR all summer ? I planned on the fact that it does but i fear that the “reschedule all” fucntion’s mode of functioning will negates my efforts (if i increase DR)

Thanks in advance.

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The FSRS Helper “Advance” feature and Custom Study “Review Ahead” aren’t the same thing.

  • “Review Ahead” pulls cards together from a certain number of future days, without regard for whether it’s going to be useful to study them early.

  • “Advance” selects a certain number of cards from the future, without regard for what days they are scheduled. It chooses cards where rescheduling them to today will have the least impact on retention – i.e., the cards that are most sensible to move forward. [You can do something similar by crafting a Filtered deck that carefully applies certain criteria – but why waste time doing that on your own.]

Unfortunately, I can’t make head nor tail of your drawings and handwriting, so let’s just stick with text. If you have another plan that you think will work for you – go for it. You certainly don’t need the approval of anyone here.

I still believe that increasing your DR is a mistake [and increasing it to 99% is ridiculous]. There’s no reason to reschedule your cards to a fake schedule that you don’t actually want them to follow – especially when you’re just going to schedule them back later on.

Rescheduling the cards to a higher DR just means they’ll be due more often. That’s it.

So [1] picture a card that is on a 60d interval at your 90% DR. Sure, if you want to, you can reschedule that to a 99% DR and it will be due for you to study every week instead. But all of that weekly study is unnecessary to maintain 90% retention – FSRS is only scheduling the card because you asked it to increase your retention to 99%. When you reschedule the card back to 90% DR, FSRS will look at that review history and wonder why you studied that card so much more often than you needed to. It might not have as much effect on the future scheduling of the card as you think.

  1. [mocked up numbers for purposes of illustration] ↩︎

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Thank you for the clarification I lack knowledge on the subject. I would rather use “Advance” then.

Sorry then, i thought it’d help. I wanted to ask for approval because you clearly know more about FSRS than i do and you just saced me from losing time : you proved me below that increasing DR is a mistake [i’ll quote again] and 99% is i agree ridiculous. I planned to rather go to 92-95 but it was a misleading example [wich i think wasn’t brought up by me ?].

So maybe kind of an effect but not what i hoped. Go it, thank you very much. I had the wrong idea about retention.

So it seems there is no reliable way to achieve what i want, but as you said :

So i think i’ll try and increase DR by 1-3% still just for the sake of it, i’ve grown curious of what it can do, and otherwise i’ll stick to using “Advance” from time to time. Thank you very much for your time.

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