Is it possible to increase the upper limit of the maximum display time for Anki’s timer?
Now it displays only up to 10:00. I want to expand it to 180:00 for some reasons.
It is currently not possible and, indeed, when you increase too much Anki’s timer limit, there is an infobox telling you that Anki works best by keeping the review time of each card quite short (maximum a few minutes). Taking three hours to review a single card would completely defeat Anki’s purpose. Unless you have a very valid reason for it to be increased, I don’t think it will be.
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Thank you for your response. Yes, while what you pointed out is reasonable, I use Anki not only to memorize words but also to solve problems for a proper interval. And guess it is not only me.
Anki is not fit for this kind of learning. You have to understand that Anki primarily does not help you learning, but memorizing, the difference being that Anki’s purpose is not to make you understand what you are reviewing, it assumes you already do (memorizing something you haven’t understood is much harder).
For this reason, even if you achieved using Anki to solve problems at spaced intervals, you would be in fact memorizing their solution, not learning how to solve them. It’s the first time you solve an exercise that it’s making you learn something; maybe the second or third time, depending on how complex that exercise is, and how much you were paying attention beforehand. But sooner or later (and usually sooner than later) you’re not going to get anything out of it.
This doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be applications of what you are requesting: for instance, if I wanted to learn to play an instrument, I may want to use Anki for its spaced repetition algorithm applied to repetition of that instrument, to train muscle memory. And, in that case, every “review” would last from about ten minutes to a few hours, so it would make sense to increase the timer. Unfortunately, Anki is currently not fine-tuned for this kind of learning, and just increasing the timer would not be enough to make it work “out of the box”.
For these kind of situations, I would say your best bet, currently, is just to do it the “old way”.
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To answer your question, recent releases do let you extend the timer length longer. But as @BlackBeans has mentioned, such long cards are difficult to schedule well, and they are better off broken into smaller parts where possible.
Thanks! I got it. And I’ll try to apply suggestions.