Two years of a five box paper system for medical terminology, about 900 cards, and it works. Everyone tells me to move to an app for the scheduling. The boxes already space things out, and the app adds a phone in my hand during the exact hour I am trying to keep a phone out of my hand. What specifically does the software do that a box of cards cannot?
The efficiency gap is mostly about the top end. With five boxes, a card you have known perfectly for a year still comes back on the box five rotation, whereas software will push it out far enough that it costs you a handful of reviews a year. At 900 cards that is a meaningful number of minutes a week - not life changing, but it compounds as the deck grows, and it is the reason big decks are painful on paper.
I migrated about 900 paper cards, spent two evenings typing, and quit six weeks later. The typing was not the problem - the problem was that my paper cards had diagrams and my own handwriting on them and the typed versions were somehow flatter to review. If you do move, photograph the cards rather than retyping them, at least for anything visual.
Counterpoint: keep the box. You have a system with two years of evidence behind it, and the phone cost you named is real and is not measured in any comparison anyone will show you. If you want the top end benefit without the phone, add a sixth and seventh box on longer cycles and you have captured most of it. Migrating a working habit to chase an efficiency gain is how people end up not studying at all for a month.
The extra boxes trick is a good compromise and I have seen people run it with a monthly and a quarterly box. You lose per-card adaptivity and keep almost everything else.
One thing nobody mentions: a box cannot be reviewed on a train, and an app cannot be reviewed when the battery is dead. Whichever failure mode you hit more often is your answer.
@budget_bruno · 5mo ago · 2 replies
Three concrete things. It gives every card its own interval based on your history with that card, rather than five shared buckets, so the one you always fumble gets seen more often than its neighbours. It has no ceiling - a paper box stops at box five and the software keeps stretching cards out to months and years, which is where the real time saving lives. And it remembers cards you would have quietly stopped rotating, which is the failure mode of every paper system I have run.
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@tbr_theo · 5mo ago
The quiet stop is the one that got me. My box five became an archive I never opened, and I did not notice for months because nothing in a cardboard box complains.
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