Spaced repetition without the guilt

Memory · about 4 minutes

Spaced repetition works: you review a fact just before you would forget it, and each successful review pushes the next one further out. The failure mode is not the method, it is the backlog. Miss a week and you come back to three hundred due cards.

What I changed

Cap new cards at five a day. New cards are what create tomorrow's reviews.
One idea per card. If the answer has a comma in it, it is probably two cards.
Delete freely. A card I keep failing is usually a badly written card, not a bad memory.
Review before email. Ten minutes, first thing, before anything else asks for attention.

The intervals

I do not tune the algorithm. The defaults are roughly:

Review	Next interval
1st	1 day
2nd	3 days
3rd	about a week
after that	previous interval × ease (≈ 2.5)

The aim is not to remember everything. It is to stop forgetting the things I chose.