Continually make new cards
In Anki, having a fresh stream of new cards seems important for keeping up the daily habit. I went through a period where I barely reviewed my cards at all, and the review load just piled up. What helped to kick start the habit again was a combination of a few things:
- Making new cards about things I was currently learning/excited about -- somehow, having some new cards makes the older "stale" cards more tolerable
- Suspending a bunch of cards that felt too difficult (indicating my encoding of the material into prompts wasn't very good)
- Reviewing a bunch of kanji cards (these felt easy and like I could do them at a rapid pace, and seeing the review count go up felt encouraging, even though I don't normally like to just "make the number go up" as that leads to Goodharting)
- Making Anki more social -- making cards with other people, reviewing their cards, making cards for other people
- Using filtered decks to "grab" cards I was more interested in reviewing (this requires having some sensible tagging system/organization into decks, so that you can grab the more interesting cards)
(I've seen Andy Matuschak make this point or a similar one somewhere.)
