Only count days I study or log in

Anki Suggestions
1

I have gotten so frustrated with Anki that I’m almost ready to call it quits.

I have abundant reason to believe that I have ADHD. I also have a lot going on right now. This amounts to issues with creating and maintaining habits, scheduling things, or doing anything on a consistent basis.

So I don’t get on Anki every day. Often a week or more goes by without starting it up. And when I do get on, I get the same damn cards pretty much every time.

I confess I don’t yet understand enough about Anki to know which features I’m overlooking, but I looked at the buttons I was pressing today, saw “four days” under Easy, and realized that it would certainly be more than four days before I come back to the program. So it’s probably exactly the same as pressing “hard” and having it add the card right back to the list.

This is incredibly disheartening and demotivating. I struggle with focusing on anything that my brain classifies as “information I already know,” so when there’s no distinction between cards I found easy and cards I found difficult, it’s just one big mess that doesn’t make it through to my brain. And I’m not seeing any new cards in my sessions – only the old ones, which is another demotivator.

What I think is happening is:
It’s been a week since I went through the deck, so Anki throws together all the cards I studied last, since they’re all “due”, and I never make it out the other side of the swamp to find new interesting exciting cards to help motivate me to keep trying.

The Options I would like to have (as in, things I could toggle in the Options Menu):

  1. Anki only judges by login days, not calendar days.
  2. Anki only judges by days I studied that particular deck.
  3. Include a color-coded marker somewhere on each card that shows whether I last marked the card Hard, Normal, Easy, or Bury.
  4. Outright exclude cards I marked Easy and/or Bury, or let me study only those cards I marked Hard or Normal, etc. Or like, leave the Easy/Bury cards out until I trigger a Refresher Mode study session where it does go through the whole thing.
  5. Include a color-coded marker of whether I edited the card during my last session (since I’ve been doing that a lot, and it changes how relevant the card is compared to what I was studying prior to editing it – e.g. I’ll change the displayed Kanji to a Kanji compound).

This would improve my experience by ensuring that cards I marked “Easy” only show up four SESSIONS later, not four DAYS later, and, ideally, that if I don’t study a given deck for a month or more, when I come back it’s been kinda frozen in state until I’m ready to get back to it, instead of resetting to a frustrating mode that I can never push past.

I realize that this is suboptimal as far as the science behind how often one needs to study in order to memorize, but that science doesn’t matter if I’m demotivated to even use the program to begin with, above and beyond any sort of issues I have with actually logging on on a regular basis.

1 Like
2

A few of those things would required code changes to Anki that are unlikely to happen. While they might make it easier for you to use Anki, they will make it harder for you to use it productively. Some of the others you could do yourself, but they might be complicated or a bother to set up.

So I’m going to suggest something completely different that is easy, and I think will help you get going – Enable FSRS. [SM-2 is the default scheduling algorithm that you’re using right now; FSRS is the newer and superior algorithm.]

The benefits that I think you’ll get out of FSRS right away are (1) longer intervals, and (2) easier to control intervals. For instance, the default starting interval for a Good card will extend to ~3 days and for an Easy card, to ~2 weeks. That alone may give you the breathing room you need to gain some momentum.

But if that’s not enough breathing room you can easily turn down your Desired Retention (DR) from the default of 90% and get even longer intervals. It’s the first thing I thought of when you talked about giving up what’s optimal in memory science for a chance to get motivated. You can trade an ideal retention (how many answers you get correct) for longer intervals/lower workload/more flexibility.

You can enable FSRS in just a few steps – Deck Options - Anki Manual . I’ll recommend that you don’t Optimize yet and just stick with the default parameters for now. In the Deck Options for the parent deck you click to study, set the Review Sort Order to “Descending Retrievability.” I think that will give you the best chance of getting on your feet.

For anyone with focus issues, it can help to associate Anki with something you do every day anyway – morning coffee, lunchtime, etc. – or to just set a daily do-Anki-now alarm. Give that a try for a week or two and see if it makes a difference.

2 Likes
3

I appreciate the info and will give this a try. It sounds like it might at least improve upon the situation as it is.

I have thought up one new possibility, though I anticipate the same answer of “this would require too much to implement”:
Instead of marking each card as “you last marked this Easy” or whatever, have a section marker card crop up between the sections. “You’ve completed the Hard cards; ready to start the Normal cards?” kinda thing.

Again, I doubt it’s likely to be implemented, but I have wanted this sort of section marker capability while crafting my own deck, because it would make for an easier mental distinction between layers of the course. At present I’m just using a different style of card, but that’s suboptimal as it winds up showing up repeatedly.

But having triggers for certain “title cards” to show up would be useful; there could be default ones that Anki uses that could be overwritten by the deck crafter’s unique designs.

4

I can’t tell you whether that would require too much to implement, but having demarcation lines and historical information like that can “poison the well” a bit for you grading the card honestly and accurately based on how you did answering it today. Your grade this time should be based only on studying it now, not on what grade you gave the card last time. And if you see that information on before answering the card, it’s even worse, because it can cause you to skew your effort or give you too big a clue to the answer.

That said – there are certainly add-ons that will display historical grading information for you when you study. You can look into those if you’re really interested.

If you want to mimic the section markers, you can break your cards into chunks using Filtered decks and study easier cards separately from harder cards – based on any number of different criteria you can search for: grades in the past X days, Difficulty, # of Lapses, etc. [This approach would work for some of the things you asked for initially too.] Again, this all seems quite counterproductive to me, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

2 Likes
5

Hmm, that’s a good point. Extra info unrelated to the card contents might indeed skew the memory curve.

I appreciate the info about the capabilities of the Filtered function. That’s an aspect I haven’t yet delved into. Thank you.

2 Likes