Let's say I have a time goal that I want to meet, such as 30 minutes per day or 1 hour. What should I do on days where I finish all scheduled reviews in half of my goal time? Should I stop or keep going? What about days when I reach the goal time with a big chunk of repetitions still scheduled?

I want to avoid situations that I've encountered in the past (both with skritter as well as other srs systems) where I get hit with overwhelming repetitions.

I'd check how many items are going to be due in the next few days. Do you have a feel for how long it's going to take you to finish them all?
If it's too much for your daily time goal, I'd practice down to 90% due items. If something that's less than 90% due shows up, I'd call it a day.
And of course, if there won't be enough items due in the next few days, I'd add a few new words. You'll always find some!

i am now in a kind of good rhythm. when i open skritter i have about 550 waiting for me.

when my number of reviews comes down to under 50 skritter starts to automatically add words from my lists of new words.
this point was reached after 1 hour 20 minutes skritter time today. so within the last 40 minutes i tried to reac "0" word reviews but never came down to it cause skritter kept adding new words ...
(which is good).

and after 2 hours i stop.

mispost....

JB, I generally try to break my studying into at least 2 or 3 parts, even though I study only 20-30 minutes daily... this way the items I review in the morning are "ripened" by the evening.
Of course, this "plan" is also enforced by my schedule, since I only have time for 10-12 minutes of skrittering on the bus/subway to work. (For some reason going home I get 3-5 minutes more time).

Usually the morning session is just catching up on reviews, getting from 100 or 200 reviews down to about 10 to 50... then afternoon I start from about 50 to 70 and get down to 0 along with some extra words.

When you do get to 0 with a lot of time to go, I'd take a break, and after the break manually add a few words...

My minimum for myself is 2 hours a day, although I've had days when I finished a list or two and would just review them, then I'd stop at zero reviews. When, however, there is a list I'm trying to finish, I always do work at 2 hours per day minimum.

I think it's a great method, because I'm trying to keep up with the vocabs of six books quite quickly (about 3000 characters)... Let's see if I can pull it off in three months or less.

be careful with adding too many words manually!
this can easily develop into an avalanche...

(i think adding too many words too quickly is the main reason for huge numbers of reviews.. - so be careful!)

Thanks for all the input guys, some good suggestions and opinions!

I do max 5 minutes a day, adding 5 characters a day. Sometimes I clear all my reviews (plus new characters) in 2-3 minutes - and that's that.

I study words in other flashcard programs.

How do people advance the other aspects of Chinese. I feel like skritter works well for me for learning vocabulary, and I avoid other methods of learning because the gains from skritter are more noticeable than anything else. Now I feel like I'm just a Chinese dictionary though, I can recall words but seriously struggle to create sentences or conversation. I need a skritter like method of doing this.

Has anyone tried studying complete sentences on skritter, I have noticed a few lists with short sentences, but doesn't seem popular.

I think busuu.com is a good way to learn to write sentences, they have example sentences there, you can type text in pinyin and you get corrections from native speakers. In conjunction with a good grammar book, a translation add-on like perapera and skritter you have all the components that are necessary.