Anki too many reviews: how to catch up without quitting

If Anki has piled up too many reviews, first stop adding load: set new cards per day to zero, pick a daily review number you can actually finish, and work through your most important decks first. Then clean up the cards you keep failing. Catching up takes days, not one heroic session.

The Anki manual says this directly in its deck options section: if you are behind on reviews, it is a good idea to stop new cards until you catch up. Every new card you learn today turns into several reviews over the coming weeks, so adding more only makes the pile bigger.

Deck options include a limit for new cards per day and another for reviews per day. According to the manual, once you hit the review limit, Anki stops showing review cards for that day even if more are waiting. By default it also stops showing new cards once that limit is reached, unless you enable the option that lets new cards ignore the review limit.

Keep in mind that options are grouped into presets, which several decks can share. If you change a value in a preset, the change applies to every deck using it. Check which decks share a preset before you adjust limits, so you do not slow down a deck you were keeping up with.

Here is our own example: you have 1,200 overdue reviews and can manage about 150 a day without the session becoming miserable. With new cards paused, that would take 8 days if nothing else came due. Since more cards become due every day, plan for a bit more than a week and a half.

Pick a number you can keep up even on a bad day. Finishing 150 reviews for ten days beats attempting 600 on day one and giving up on day three. Once your due count drops to your normal daily load, bring new cards back gradually, for example at half your previous limit.

If 150 reviews in a row feel heavy, split them into two blocks: 75 in the morning and 75 in the evening, or one batch on your commute and one at home. Answer calmly and do not peek early; rushing to empty the queue leads you to mark cards as correct that you only recognized, and those will fail again within days.

Not every deck matters equally right now. If you have a pharmacology exam in three weeks and a French vocabulary deck with no deadline, the first one comes first. Give urgent decks your full limit and keep the others on a reduced limit until the main one is current.

A backlogged collection usually hides cards you no longer need: topics outside the syllabus, duplicates, or imported cards you never understood. Suspend or delete them. Every card you remove is one fewer review today and many fewer later.

Watch the cards you fail again and again. Anki calls them leeches, and its manual explains how it can tag or suspend them. Such a card rarely improves with more repetition: it usually needs a shorter question, a split into two cards, or a return to the source to understand the concept.

It is tempting to change several options at once to make the number drop fast. If you use FSRS, for example, lowering desired retention reduces reviews, but it also raises the share of cards you will have forgotten when they come up. Change one setting at a time and watch the effect for a week or two.

Deleting the deck and starting over is also rarely worth it unless the content no longer matters to you. Your review history has value: cards you know well stay spaced out and only weak ones come back soon. Getting back on track usually costs less than the first number on the screen suggests.

Lumia AI can import Anki decks in .apkg format, with a preview before you confirm. Afterward, check a sample of cards to see what content came across and organize them in books. There you review by rating Again, Hard, Good or Easy, and Lumia calculates the next date.

Note that Lumia does not offer Anki's deck options, such as configurable limits or FSRS, and you should not assume it keeps your review history. If you are switching tools to escape a backlog, start with one small, high-priority deck rather than importing your whole collection.