I was away for 16 days and did zero reviews. The queue now says 912 due and I get maybe 40 minutes a day before work. I did 100 yesterday and the number went down by 60, which is demoralising. Is there a sane way to drain this without nuking my scheduling history?
Turn the daily limit off for a moment and look at what the 912 actually are. If 600 of them are cards you have seen twenty times and always pass, you can honestly push them out to a longer interval. If 600 of them are cards you have never once got right, that is a card design problem and no scheduling trick fixes it.
Two thirds of my own backlog turned out to be nine cloze deletions from the same paragraph that I could not answer in isolation. Deleting them was the fix.
Filtered deck of the most overdue cards, capped at 100, review that, rebuild it tomorrow. Keeps the main deck untouched and gives you a finish line each day, which is most of the battle.
I reset a 2000 card backlog once because a forum post told me to. I lost every interval I had built over eight months and spent the next three re-learning cards I already knew. It felt great for one evening and bad for a season.
Forty minutes a day is fine, you just cannot also add new material this week. Pick one.
@interval_ida · 7mo ago · 3 replies
Do not reset anything. Set new cards per day to 0, set a maximum reviews per day you can actually finish - 120 is about right for 40 minutes if your cards are small - and sort the backlog oldest first instead of random.
The reason the number only dropped by 60 is that the cards you failed came straight back the same session. That stops once the genuinely leeched cards are flushed out, usually in the first three days. A mature card that was due 16 days ago is still mostly intact; two weeks of overdue on a 45 day interval is noise, and you will pass most of them and push them back out past a month. My last 900 card backlog took nine days at 120 a day.
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@interval_ida · 7mo ago
Nine days of no new cards costs you about 200 cards you would have added. Nine weeks of a permanently scary queue costs you the habit. Take the smaller loss.
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@thesis_wrangler · 7mo ago
Zero new cards for nine days is the bit I keep flinching at. Does that not set me back on the material I have not learned yet?
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