It seems that this question hasn’t been asked before but I think it has the most value for every user of Anki. I have been spending several months learning about Anki so that I can work smarter and not just dive straight into using the program without knowing how to use it effectively. However, it makes no sense to try to learn everything there is to know about Anki (this would take an eternity) but never use the actual program. So when it comes to learning about Anki, what is worth my time and what isn’t? In other words, what are the most high yield topics I should be focused on when it comes to optimizing Anki?
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Well, Anki is not that complicated and you certainly don’t need months of study before being able to use it.
I don’t know at what level you’re regarding knowledge of Anki, but maybe just learn the basic concepts and maybe some other things like the general meaning of the different deck options and start using it.
You can look things up in the manual or ask when you’re stuck and need to go more advanced.
More importantly, you should concentrate on honing your knowledge formulation skills because Anki won’t magically make you learn if your cards are poorly-formulated.
As always, read this if you have not already: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/20_rules_of_knowledge_formulation
You’ll always make mistakes and you may make horrible cards at first (like someone who used to learn vocabulary by scraping whole dictionary pages from the web and putting them in Anki 
) and you’ll never be perfect,
so don’t waste your time trying to be 100% effective and just keep learning (about Anki, and more importantly, about whatever you’re using Anki for).
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You don’t have to learn Anki in order to use it. Little child don’t have to learn brain structure in order to learn language and new ideas.
So stick with Anki’s default settings as long as possible, change it when absolutely necessary, because these default settings are defined by Anki’s designer who know Anki inside out.
I have used Anki for 3 years and have about 10k cards, learn 7 new cards/day, review 150~200 cards/day. And all my cards are typed and added by myself.
I have just one deck and organize cards by Hierarchical Tags.
I wish I can use Anki for another 30 years.
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