I have just come back to Anki after a long period of absence and I cannot face the hundreds of card reviews that I now have in front of me!
So my strategy is to create a new deck and gradually transfer cards from my old deck into it on a daily or weekly basis, treating them as new cards since it’s been so long. Two quick questions I have are:
Is this the best way to go about doing things? Or is there a way of doing something similar within the old deck itself.
Are there any heuristics for figuring out how many cards I should give myself per day? Ideally I want to be spending no more than 45 mins per day reviewing cards and new cards take me anywhere from 15-30 seconds on average. I know this is probably a perennial topic, so would be very happy to be directed to any other articles or posts on the topic that are considered valuable.
Thank you in advance to anyone who can help with these queries - I really appreciate it!
For #1, first thoughts are either reset everything like sprvlcn mentioned or slowly incorporate like you’ve suggested. I imagine that if you find yourself failing most of the cards you may just start over completely, but I think it’s worth it to try (mostly because new cards have a big toll).
For #2, I’d just take stock of how you’re feeling, does it feel like a drag? Take a break for a bit. No sense beating yourself to death, that doesn’t sound sustainable.
It sounds like a great way of catching up. I use something similar to this catch-up technique whenever I find myself with a backlog. Mine is a bit simpler – I only create one Filtered Deck with all of the overdue cards (usually something like prop:due<=-1 -is:learn -is:buried).
The nice thing about a system like this is that I can spend as much or little time as I have available working through a portion of my overdue deck. (At the end of that, I rebuild it, to kick any lapsed/re-learning cards back to the main deck.) Of course, the priority is to keep current with my main deck, so every day I get the reward of a “you have finished” in my main deck, plus the bonus of watching the size of my backlog drop. I mostly treat my backlog like new cards (but without resetting them to be new) – that’s a good guide for me about how many cards I can do there each day. If I have a lot of lapses, I might not get through as much of my backlog as on a successful day.
I think I added that at one point to fix an issue I was having – cards that were already in the filtered deck, and then buried when I studied their sibling in my main deck, were still being shown. I think I added that to explicitly kick buried cards out, because rebuilding wasn’t accomplishing that for some reason. I might not have the details quite right (and I can’t reproduce it right now, because I’m backlog-free! Yay!), but it was something like that.
Thank you Danika, this seems like a super helpful response! I’m going to take a deeper look at it tomorow, I also need to re-familiarise myself with some of the terms/ideas you mentioned. I’ll let you know if I have any follow-up questions, but really appreciate this!