how should anki decks be organized
- I had a habit of creating individual decks for all the various courses I was taking and planning to take.
- I thought doing this would help for when I wanted to focus on one course for a particular day
- I didn't want to encounter cards that were out-of-fit for when I was in a certain mind-context, focused on a specific task or collection of tasks like studying a particular topic or preparing for an interview.
- But this want made me create too many decks that eventually became unwieldy to revise. My decks felt heavy and stale. And my revision sessions got boring.
- It became unwieldy because when I had 6 decks (where each deck had 35 max-new cards and 35 to-be-revised cards), I had to revise, at most, 6 * 70 cards in a day. That's 420 which is too much.
- A better habit I've adopted involves using just one deck for all the courses.
- This helps make it easier (not unwieldy) to revise the cards because I could set the specific number of max-new cards and to-be-revised cards that wouldn't be too much for a day.
- But even this had focus issues.
- I still wanted to make my revision topic/date/xyz-specific.
- The approach I having been using that solves this is creating month-separated subdecks within that one superdeck I mentioned earlier.
- This approach helps with focus to an extent
- I'm now able to easily go to a certain month to revise the specific things I was learning for that month.
- Anki becomes like a journal. See anki as journal
- This approach made me realize that anything that must be put in anki MUST be in a state of flux, must be remembered, must be small, precise. See SRS is not a bucket SRS is a pipe.
- Time-focused decks:
- Topic-focused decks:
- I used to want the decks to be a reminder of the things I needed to learn, the things I was learning. But (now that) (if) I remember the few things I'm interested in (without anki's reminder), I don't need anki to serve that function. I don't need a deck for "New Words" (when learning new words) because I'd know (or, it will be a habit) to be on the look out for interesting words and add it to my date-specific superdeck.
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