What's the difference between suspending and deleting a leech card?

Suspending removes the card from your active reviews but keeps it saved in Anki, so you can reintroduce it later if you want to try a different approach. Deleting removes it permanently. Since you might want to revisit a difficult card later, suspension is almost always the better choice.

How long does it take to feel the impact of changing my new-card rate?

It takes about two weeks for a change in your daily new-card count to fully show up in your review load. If you drop from 20 new cards per day to 5, you will not notice immediate relief because you will still see the old cards coming up for review for another two weeks. Patience is key.

Is it normal to forget cards in Anki?

Yes. Anki's algorithm targets a 90% recall rate by design, which means forgetting roughly 1 out of every 10 cards is expected and normal. Trying to achieve 100% recall would require reviewing cards so often that it wastes your time. The system is built around this forgetting rate.

What grading buttons should I use in Anki?

Use only Good and Again. Press Good when you recognize or understand the target content, and Again when you do not. The Hard and Easy buttons distort Anki's scheduling intervals and can cause problems over time. Keeping it to two buttons keeps the algorithm predictable.

How to Overcome Anki Burnout: Clear Your Review Backlog and Study Sustainably

Anki burnout starts the same way for almost everyone. You set an ambitious pace, 20 new cards a day for a language or a medical exam, and two weeks later you open the app to 400 reviews waiting. Skipping a day feels like relief. It is the exact moment the debt starts compounding, because tomorrow’s queue absorbs everything you postponed.

Willpower will not fix this. The scheduling math will: review every day, grade with only Good or Again, and cap new cards at a rate your future self can absorb. Each of those choices follows from how Anki’s algorithm actually schedules cards, which is what makes them adjustable to your life rather than rules you obey blindly.

Where This Guide’s Anki Advice Comes From

Everything below comes from Anki’s scheduling engine, not from general study advice. The algorithm has specific rules about how often cards resurface, how much forgetting it expects, and what each grading button does to an interval. Once you know those rules, the daily-review requirement stops feeling arbitrary and your backlog becomes a problem you can diagnose instead of guess at.

Understanding Anki’s Retention Algorithm

Anki targets roughly 90% recall, not 100%, and that gap is deliberate. Forgetting about 1 card in every 10 is the expected outcome, because chasing perfect recall means reviewing everything so often that the time cost swallows the benefit. The algorithm is buying you efficiency with a small, planned amount of forgetting.

So a retention rate above 90% in your stats is not a gold star. It means cards are coming back sooner than they need to, and you are spending review minutes on material that already stuck. Raise the interval modifier in Anki’s stats preferences to push those cards further apart.

Daily Review Habits That Prevent Burnout

The strongest defense against SRS debt is reviewing every day, no exceptions. The algorithm assumes you will, so skipping one day doubles the next day’s count: yesterday’s cards are still sitting in the queue alongside today’s. Skip twice and the number stops looking survivable, which is where most people quit for a week and turn a bad day into a genuine backlog.

Showing up matters more than doing it well. You do not need a clean session or a perfect grade on every card, you just need to work through the deck. Fifteen minutes daily beats a 90-minute blitz every Sunday, and it beats it by a wide margin.

Clearing an Existing Backlog

If overdue reviews have already piled up, deleting them is the wrong instinct. Move them aside instead, so you can rebuild the daily habit against a deck that is actually finishable.

Create a deck called ‘backlog’ and move every overdue card into it, leaving your main deck alone. Each day, finish your main deck reviews first, and treat that as non-negotiable. Only after the main deck is clear do you pull a modest batch out of the backlog, maybe 10 to 20 cards depending on your pace, and review those. Because you control the reintroduction rate, the main deck never doubles on you again while the backlog drains.

Grading Cards Correctly to Avoid Scheduling Chaos

Anki gives you four buttons: Again, Hard, Good, Easy. That looks like useful nuance and it mostly is not, at least while you are still learning how the system behaves. Hard and Easy distort your intervals in ways that compound quietly over hundreds of cards.

Use two buttons and ignore the rest. Good when you recognize or understand the content, Again when you do not. Binary grading keeps scheduling predictable, whereas the other two introduce exceptions that multiply over time, skew your interval modifier, and leave cards resurfacing on erratic schedules you cannot reason about.

Managing Leeches and Unwanted Cards

A leech is a card you have failed over and over. Anki marks it and pulls it out of your daily rotation, which is the system admitting the card is not working and handing you back the time.

You can delete a leech or suspend it. Deletion is permanent, while suspension takes the card out of the active deck but keeps it and its history intact, so you can bring it back later with a better formulation or when the surrounding knowledge has caught up. Suspend by default, because the option to revisit costs you nothing.

Setting a Sustainable New Card Pace

Adding new cards faster than you can absorb them is the most common route into Anki burnout. Ten a day sounds trivial on the day you set it, which is the trap: you are not feeling that decision yet.

Every new card comes back several times over the following two weeks as the algorithm works it into your schedule. Multiply new cards per day by 7 for a rough estimate of the daily review load it will settle into, so 10 new cards a day lands you around 70 reviews a day. That full effect takes about two weeks to show up, which is why the pace feels fine right up until it does not.

Start at about 5 new cards a day and raise it once the habit is stable. You genuinely cannot tell whether a pace is sustainable in the first week. For scale, 10 a day gets you through roughly 1,000 cards in under three months, which is a serious amount of material for any subject.

Order is worth tuning too. In preferences, under the Scheduling tab, you can put new cards before reviews, after them, or mixed in. Some people want the new material done while they are fresh, others want the reviews cleared first, and neither is correct in general, so try both and keep whichever one you actually stick with.

Balancing SRS Study With Immersion

Spaced repetition solidifies knowledge, it does not supply it. Hours spent reading, watching, and using the skill count for more than hours spent drilling cards. Learning a language means books and conversations, prepping for an exam means practice problems and lectures, and Anki’s role is keeping what you already absorbed from slipping away.

That ordering matters when your review queue starts eating the evening. If reviews are crowding out the reading and practice that produced the cards in the first place, the queue is too big and the fix is upstream, at your new-card rate.

Studying Without Rebuilding Your Deck Every Week

Even with the settings dialed in, the manual work does not go away. You still write every card by hand, decide what deserves a card and what does not, tune interval modifiers, and hunt down leeches. That authoring overhead is why decks get abandoned: the maintenance cost arrives before the payoff does.

Picture the same week without that overhead. You take notes as you read or watch, and the cards, quizzes, and summaries come out of the material you already wrote, sized to what you actually studied.

Fluxo is built around that: rich-text notes organized into spaces and topics, AI-generated flashcards, quizzes, and summaries built from your own notes, and spaced-repetition scheduling that resurfaces them over time. It does not ship ready-made courses or shared decks, since the notes are yours to write. https://fluxo.today