Effective Spaced Repetition

Choose one of these and stick with it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_system

Both are good.

You can train mnemonics via Anki deck:

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2032755489

I also have adhd and struggled with this through multiple iterations of trying to integrate Anki into my daily routine.

What finally helped was that I first learned the habit of reviewing the cards daily, before I trained the habit of adding new cards. I always fell into the trap of picking up Anki (maybe because an exam came up, or because I was otherwise motivated to learn a specific topic) and immediately writing lots of cards. This gave me a dopamine boost (thus reinforcing the habit), but quickly became overwhelming.

It only stuck when I learned to integrate the review process into my daily life, without actually having anything to create flashcards about. I went days without creating new cards and then every once in a while I thought of something that was a good fit for Anki and that I was unlikely to remember otherwise.

As a result the review process was just a handful of cards every day, able to be reviewed in under a minute. Eventually (I'd say after a month or two), the habit settled and I didn't need to think about it anymore. And because I wasn't fixated on creating new cards I was able to enjoy a gradual increase in creating flashcards as I got better at writing them and recognising when they were a good fit.

To be clear, this took maybe four or five failed tries, even though I read articles like this one. I had to make most of the mistakes covered in this (and other) articles myself, before I got better at writing cards. The tips still helped me arrive quicker at the solution, but it was hard to grasp why they were right, without experiencing the mistakes with my own cards.

I don't think this really makes much of a difference. At least for me it didn't. Sometimes I remove cards that are too easy, sometimes I see that the next time to review them would be 6 months down the line and I leave it in, because the cost of leaving it is so small.

What has made a difference though is thinking about wether I still actually want to remember the contents of a card. Sometimes a card comes up that I haven't seen in months and I think "you know what, I haven't thought about this at all outside of Anki and I don't think that'll change." and then I just remove it. Sometimes I create a nearly identical card again later on, sometimes I really didn't need to know something.

The real answer to this is to regularly create good cards during your semester. This drastically reduces the amount of cards you need to create a week before your exam which in turn reduces the amount of cramming you have to do.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly well aware that the knowledge required for exams isn't representative of the knowledge required to be well versed in a topic outside of exams, and Anki can still help you learn stuff that you specifically want to remember for exams, but you can remove those cards afterwards. You don't actually need (and probably don't want) to remember much of the stuff that instructors want you to remember for exams. So after the exam you just keep reviewing as normal, but radically delete/suspend cards that were exam specific.

This way you start learning a lot of the things that you actually want to remember longterm during the semester, while also avoiding a lot of clutter from exam specific cards.

(IMO, non scientific blathering follows)

Two big things that people seem to forget, or not realize:

1. Anki (etc) isn't really there to help you remember, it's there to schedule and optimize your time so you can do more in less time; to avoid the (ad absurdum) case of studying every card, every day. That's effective, but wasteful. To help you remember you use other tricks like the Major system, the Loci system, mnemonics, etc. I recommend either Higbee's book on memory, or Lorayne's, for a array of help there.

2. It's not even close to "perfect", because your brain isn't. SO MANY THINGS affect whether or not you're going to remember a card on a day; what you ate, how you slept, other stuff going on in your brain/life, your context when you added the card, your context now, what you have been thinking about ... It's just not possible for software to nail it _to the day_ of when you can see a card. Anki can only tell you when you should PROBABLY see the card and that probability's standard deviation is high indeed.

To your question, what works for me (I've been using Anki for years, and am now approaching a ~1200 day continuous streak) is to be honest with yourself on how many cards per day you can actually do. 10? 100? 1000? For me I'm comfortable with about 150 to keep up the streak. Some days I can probably do a lot more, some days I want to do less but I can power through. But 150 is my happy spot.

Then, set your max cards per day setting to that. Then do those. And stop sweating it. (Optionally, with more recent versions of Anki using the V3 scheduler, set the review sorting to "by most relative dueness")

This does a few things:

* It keeps your workload manageable based on your own notion of "manageable" * It shows you the cards needed to be reviewed kind of by priority * It "hides" the fact that there might be more due

Kind of related is also to be HONEST about your use of the 1, 2, 3, 4 keys. Some people ONLY use 1 or 3. I think this is a mistake because it games the "ease factor" to never go up. Be honest; if the card was basically easy, use 4. It'll up the ease factor and you won't see the card as often. If it's too much you'll eventually miss it and restart the learning steps. (Optionally here, use a plugin light "straight rewards" which will also up the ease factor even on a 3. This is what I do and prefer it.)