Using it regularly is the most important thing by far. I don’t use it anymore, the costs to starting back up seem too high (in that I try and fail to re-activate that habit), I wish I hadn’t let that happen. Don’t be me; make Anki a hardcore habit.
Why not just restart from scratch with empty decks? It should be less daunting at first...
My strategy to avoid losing the habit is having decks I care less about than others, so that when I stopped using Anki for a few weeks, I only had to catch up on the “important” decks first, which was less daunging than catching up with everything (I eventually catched up with all the decks, somewhat to my surprise).
I’m also more careful than before in what I let in—if content seems too unimportant, it gets deleted. If it’s difficult, it gets split up or rewritten. And I avoid adding too many new cards.
Continuing with your current deck should be strictly superior to starting from scratch, because you will remember a substantial portion of your cards despite being late. Anki even takes this into account in its scheduling, adjusting the difficulty of cards you remembered in that way. If motivation is a problem, Anki 2.x series includes a daily card limit beyond which it will hide your late reviews. Set this to something reasonable and pretend you don’t have any late cards. Your learning effectiveness will be reduced but still better than abandoning the deck.
I’ve previously let Anki build up a backlog of many thousand unanswered cards. I cleared it gradually over several months, using Beeminder for motivation.
I think when restarting a deck after a long time it’s important to use the delete button a lot. There might be cards that you just don’t want to learn and it’s okay to delete them.
You could also gather the cards you think are really cool and move them into a new deck and then focus on learning that new deck.
Using it regularly is the most important thing by far. I don’t use it anymore, the costs to starting back up seem too high (in that I try and fail to re-activate that habit), I wish I hadn’t let that happen. Don’t be me; make Anki a hardcore habit.
Why not just restart from scratch with empty decks? It should be less daunting at first...
My strategy to avoid losing the habit is having decks I care less about than others, so that when I stopped using Anki for a few weeks, I only had to catch up on the “important” decks first, which was less daunging than catching up with everything (I eventually catched up with all the decks, somewhat to my surprise).
I’m also more careful than before in what I let in—if content seems too unimportant, it gets deleted. If it’s difficult, it gets split up or rewritten. And I avoid adding too many new cards.
Continuing with your current deck should be strictly superior to starting from scratch, because you will remember a substantial portion of your cards despite being late. Anki even takes this into account in its scheduling, adjusting the difficulty of cards you remembered in that way. If motivation is a problem, Anki 2.x series includes a daily card limit beyond which it will hide your late reviews. Set this to something reasonable and pretend you don’t have any late cards. Your learning effectiveness will be reduced but still better than abandoning the deck.
I’ve previously let Anki build up a backlog of many thousand unanswered cards. I cleared it gradually over several months, using Beeminder for motivation.
True, I forgot about that option—I actually discovered it after I had cleared my backlog, and thought “hm, that could’ve been useful too...”
I think when restarting a deck after a long time it’s important to use the delete button a lot. There might be cards that you just don’t want to learn and it’s okay to delete them.
You could also gather the cards you think are really cool and move them into a new deck and then focus on learning that new deck.