One of the more controversial features of Anki is that there are no real options to take a day off from reviewing. Of course, one can simply not do the reviews scheduled for the day, but they will still end up in your silently growing review pile. The lack of a “pause” option is well explained in the FAQ1, but it doesn’t really answer the question of how to deal with an already acquired backlog.
Here I would like to explain my strategies of how I deal with breaks in my Anki studies.
How to not create a backlog
The best strategy to deal with backlogs is to prevent them in the first case, here are my three main strategies:
Do your reviews every day
It goes without saying that one should stick with the reviews every day. This means that you should be motivated to do them, intrinsically by having a goal that you want to reach and extrinsically by having content in your deck that appeals to you. There are many ways to create cards for language learning from native media these days, one of my preferred ways of mining texts is to use subs2srs, which creates bite-sized cards using subtitles, but there are many other useful tools out there as well.
Limit new cards ahead of time
If you know that there is an extraordinarily busy time ahead or that you’ll be on holidays for a while, you can also plan ahead: Limiting new cards or even setting them down to zero will reduce the time needed later on and will result in a more manageable review pile.
Use small downtimes
Last, but not least, it is still possible to do a couple reviews somewhere in-between, especially using the mobile versions of Anki. I personally did reviews in many places, while waiting for an appointment, during a flight or even when I had trouble falling asleep due to jet-lag.
I also feel like sometimes the process of reviewing cards is a bit similar to casual meditation, especially if you have set up your cards in a way that reduces friction.
Timeboxes
Timeboxing is a technique to help you focus by dividing a longer activity (such as a 30 minute study session) into smaller blocks. If you set the timebox time limit to a non-zero number of minutes, Anki will periodically show you how many cards you’ve managed to study during the prescribed time limit.
This quote from the Anki Documentation2 explains the concepts of timeboxes very well. I have set up Anki with a timebox limit of 10 minutes, which means that I can start a review session and don’t have to worry that a single uninterrupted session will take longer than 10 minutes. If a review sessions isn’t over by the 10-minute mark, something that rarely happens to me, Anki will pop up a reminder, asking if you want to continue or take a break for the time being.
Attacking a backlog
Real life obviously takes precedence to electronic flashcards, so it happens that you have a backlog that will take multiple timeboxes to clear, but you still want to keep on doing your reviews as normal.
In that case I usually divide my reviews into two parts:
- daily reviews “as usual”
- processing the backlog in small steps
Enabling “business as usual” for your daily reviews
A large backlog can seem daunting and may even prevent you from getting through your reviews every day.
I remove the backlog from the immediate review pile by setting up a dedicated filtered deck (shortcut: f),
using the query deck:"XY" is:due, selecting however many due cards are needed by random and
making sure to reschedule them back into the original deck after having reviewed them.
This empties the review queue for the specified deck, allowing for fairly quick reviews during the following days.
Processing the backlog
Once I have done my daily reviews in the “regular” deck, I can now process the piled up cards in the filtered backlog deck. Since I have timeboxes enabled by default, I can now bite into the pile without having to worry about it eating all my time.
I have successfully used this strategy many times after vacations with limited reviews or periods of crunch time that left me without much time or energy outside of work.