When a new user starts using Anki, it's very tempting to set the new card amount very high. It's exciting to learn new cards, and beginners are often impatient to reach whatever goal they've set for themselves.

When I started out using Anki, I'd often set my new card amount to something like 30. Just 30 cards doesn't seem like too much, and at the beginning, it's not. But this is actually a really big mistake, and one that can derail your Anki usage before you even know it.

The forgetting curve

Anki keeps track of the forgetting curve for you, so that you only need to review a card the minimum number of times. AKA you don't spend time reviewing cards that you still remember. But it's important to remember, you are still spending time. Every new card incurs a cost, a review load that you must complete every time you study the deck.

Essentially, learning a new card in Anki is like taking on debt. You pay off that debt by reviewing the card. Multiple times, over and over again, until eventually you know the card well enough that you never need to review it again.

So I'd start out with 30 new cards a day. The first day, I just have to study 30 cards. By the end of the week, I've accumulated maybe 100 cards of review load. The end of the month, 300, or more. Way more than I ever wanted to study per day, so I quit.

So far, all of the above is common knowledge. Any experienced Anki user will tell you that you have to be careful with choosing the number of new cards per day. (One common rule of thumb is that 1 new card per day is equal to 10 reviews per day).

But my opinion is that all of this is a UX issue.

Instead of asking new users to manually configure and manage their review load, let's just directly ask them how much time they're willing to spend studying per day. Anki should default to "minutes of study time per day" rather than "new cards per day" as the standard way to configure decks.

Even for experienced users, I believe this is a more intuitive way to manage study load. I find myself often tweaking my new cards per day to match how much time I want to spend studying. It should be automatic.