You say you’ve been using Anki for ~3 years and have 37k cards. Assuming you’ve been adding cards at a roughly constant rate over this period, that’s ~12.3k cards per year, or ~34 cards per day. Relying on Piotr Wozniak’s formula for approximating the daily time costs of studying a single card in a given year
1500×year−1.5+130000
we can see that it costs 2.03E-03 mins to study a card the 1st year, 7.40E-04 mins the 2nd year, and 4.18E-04 mins the 3rd year. Multiplying by 12.3k, we get about 25, 9 and 5 minutes for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd years, respectively. So, on your 3rd (most recent) year of study, this calculation indicates that you should be spending about 25+9+5=39 minutes per day in reviews. Does this match your experience?
I was motivated to calculate this because upon reading your post I felt that reviewing so many cards would impose very high time costs. But after crunching the numbers, the costs seem considerably lower than I expected.
Thanks. ~6 s per card seems faster than average, judging from other user reports I’ve seen (e.g. here). It appears that Wozniak’s formula underestimates time costs, which is also in line with Gwern’s remarks here.
In case anyone is interested, here’s a spreadsheet I just created that computes the daily costs, after arbitrarily many years, of reviewing a deck which has been growing by a constant number of cards per year.
An interesting implication is that after three years one has incurred roughly 50% of the total time costs of reviewing a card, assuming a time horizon of 50 years. So if Michal keeps adding new cards at the same pace, his daily costs will converge to 390.5=78 minutes. Still, it will take another 12 years for the costs to increase by another 50%, so even after 15 years his daily costs will be 390.75=52 minutes.
Hi Pablo. Thanks for the link to the formula, I did not know someone already looked into it. At some point I estimated that it cost me ~250 s to learn a card in the first year.
In the last year, it looks like I spent ~1 hour per day reviewing on average. When I’m on my desktop computer, I’ll share the Anki statistics PDF.
I think one reason the formula might be underestimating is because I keep expanding my deck over time, so there’s a mix of newer and older cards.
I am also a bit concerned that I might be adding cards not always for what’s most useful to learn, but for what’s easiest to Ankify. So recently even though I’ve been wanting to study more ML papers, I’ve been mostly adding programming because it’s easier… :/
Great post!
You say you’ve been using Anki for ~3 years and have 37k cards. Assuming you’ve been adding cards at a roughly constant rate over this period, that’s ~12.3k cards per year, or ~34 cards per day. Relying on Piotr Wozniak’s formula for approximating the daily time costs of studying a single card in a given year
1500×year−1.5+130000
we can see that it costs 2.03E-03 mins to study a card the 1st year, 7.40E-04 mins the 2nd year, and 4.18E-04 mins the 3rd year. Multiplying by 12.3k, we get about 25, 9 and 5 minutes for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd years, respectively. So, on your 3rd (most recent) year of study, this calculation indicates that you should be spending about 25+9+5=39 minutes per day in reviews. Does this match your experience?
I was motivated to calculate this because upon reading your post I felt that reviewing so many cards would impose very high time costs. But after crunching the numbers, the costs seem considerably lower than I expected.
Here’s the promised Anki stats PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EwqIAUbgeYU9czF1YcxITZvL3D0JNe5N/view?usp=sharing
Thanks. ~6 s per card seems faster than average, judging from other user reports I’ve seen (e.g. here). It appears that Wozniak’s formula underestimates time costs, which is also in line with Gwern’s remarks here.
In case anyone is interested, here’s a spreadsheet I just created that computes the daily costs, after arbitrarily many years, of reviewing a deck which has been growing by a constant number of cards per year.
An interesting implication is that after three years one has incurred roughly 50% of the total time costs of reviewing a card, assuming a time horizon of 50 years. So if Michal keeps adding new cards at the same pace, his daily costs will converge to 390.5=78 minutes. Still, it will take another 12 years for the costs to increase by another 50%, so even after 15 years his daily costs will be 390.75=52 minutes.
Hi Pablo. Thanks for the link to the formula, I did not know someone already looked into it. At some point I estimated that it cost me ~250 s to learn a card in the first year.
In the last year, it looks like I spent ~1 hour per day reviewing on average. When I’m on my desktop computer, I’ll share the Anki statistics PDF.
I think one reason the formula might be underestimating is because I keep expanding my deck over time, so there’s a mix of newer and older cards.
I am also a bit concerned that I might be adding cards not always for what’s most useful to learn, but for what’s easiest to Ankify. So recently even though I’ve been wanting to study more ML papers, I’ve been mostly adding programming because it’s easier… :/