The background for this is a suggestion made in other threads. The goal for this thread is to conduct a poll and learn where the community consensus lies. I’ll include a poll at the end after giving a summary of the discussion.
Which Stat?
To find the relevant stat:
- Open statistics screen.
- Find the “Reviews” graph (second from top).
- Check the “Time” box.
It’ll show you the “Total time” which measures the total amount of time you’ve spent studying.
Suggestion
Currently, this stat uses a mix of clock units (hours, seconds) and calendar units (days, months, years).
The suggestion is that we use hours as the sole unit so instead of 1 month users see 720 hours.
Arguments in Opposition
Most people don’t intuitively grasp how long something is when expressed in clock For example, “The average man lives 579036 hours”. On the other hand, we know very well how long 2.5 months.
Arguments in Favour
Reasons why we should do this:
- Some have noted that calendar units feel very unnatural when we count absolute duration. So, for example if you say “I studied this for 1 week” it normally means couple of hours of study for 7 days. People also talk about learning something for 10,000 hours, not 13 months.
- It is more precise to use hours than units like months. For example, 2.31 months ranges from 1552.32 hours to 1718.64 hours. Also, note that it’s not very clear what “1 month” means in the current calculation.
- Sites like steam display the time played in hours and some users might want to compare between “gaming” and “study” time.
- Calendar units also make comparison among and between Anki users more difficult. For instance, is it obvious here that 29d is half of 1.9m? Or, is it more obvious that 2102h is half of 4204h?
Poll
Here is the poll:
- Use hours
- Use hours + months + …
- Not sure
- Use hours = “Display in hours (2747.26 hours)”
- Use hours + months + … = “Stay with the current format (3.82 months)”