Daily review limits

Jens‭ 5 days ago

Daily review limits

Just read this guide: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7Q7DPSk4iGFJd8DRk/an-opinionated-guide-to-using-anki-correctly

20 cards a day — Having too many cards and staggering review buildups is the main reason why no one ever sticks with Anki. Setting your review count to 20 daily (in deck settings) is the single most important thing you can do to stick with Anki long-term.

Is it possible to do this in Mochi? I've also struggled with reaching staggering number of reviews which kills motivation, and having some sort of limit (which also needs to include new cards somehow) seems useful.

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Matt‭ Admin 4 days ago

This comes up from time to time but I have not added such a feature to Mochi because I can't see how it works with the spaced repetition system. If you were to enable such a function, the longer you use it the more "backlogged" your cards become (the less likely you are to remember them).

Most spaced repetition systems aim for a 90% recall rate across the board. Any lower and it's not doing its job (remembering things), any higher and you're reviewing more frequently than you need to (inefficiency).

Say you have 30 cards due per day on average but limit your reviews to just 20 per day. Now you have 10 extra cards that are "past due" for the next day. Repeat that again and now you have 20 cards that are past due. Continue on long enough and your entire collection will become more and more past due, dropping well below the 90% recall threshold.

The only way, I think, to solve this issue is to simply limit the new cards you add per day, which you can already do in Mochi through Settings → Review settings.

TL;DR: There's no such thing as a free lunch. Things like review limits and vacation mode are simply incompatible with spaced repetition.

Sayed‭ 3 days ago

SuperMemo deals with this problem using the concept of Priority Queue. The user assigns a priority value from 1 to 10 at the time of adding a new card. Then, during review, higher priority cards that are due on that day are shown first. This way, you can be sure that the most important cards are reviewed on their scheduled (optimal) date, while lower priority ones get pushed away.

Another solution would be to automatically balance the load across several days. The app can monitor cards that are due for the next 7 or 20 or whatever days, and spread the load evenly. This balancing should only be done for old cards, those with an interval of, let's say, 90 days or more. For these cards it won't matter if they were to be reviewed at the 85th or 100th day.

Jens‭ 18 hours ago

The only way, I think, to solve this issue is to simply limit the new cards you add per day, which you can already do in Mochi through Settings → Review settings.

Let's say I set this limit to 5. If I've added 10 new cards that day, will the setting cause only 5 to be added to today's review, and then the other 5 will appear tomorrow?

I can see this being a useful feature for achieving a lower number of reviews on any given day. Essentially spacing out new additions over several days as opposed to adding them all in one go.

Matt‭ Admin 11 hours ago

Let's say I set this limit to 5. If I've added 10 new cards that day, will the setting cause only 5 to be added to today's review, and then the other 5 will appear tomorrow?

@Jens‭ This option only limits the amount of cards that are shown on the "New cards" screen. It doesn't actually prevent you from adding new cards to the review queue manually, and it doesn't do any kind of deferred adding like that.

Sayed‭ 4 days ago

I think Mochi only has "Limit new cards" function. I've seen Matt talk about this on reddit (I think). He said he wanted to balance reviews between old overdue cards and fresh due cards. As of now, there is no way to adjust this.