I think I'm just stressed out. I've got a nagging class that requires lots of writing ending this Saturday, and I keep playing the procrastinating game with these 5 pages I have to write by that day. I'll probably get back on schedule once it's over and this huge weight is off my back.

Why am I posting about this? I've been thinking, why isn't there some way to just freeze your scheduling? I know that at the end of this week, assuming I do very little Skritter, I will have at least 500 reviews do. I'm a slow Skritterist and long periods of straight reviews are BORING. It will probably take days to catch up, considering my attention span.

You may say, "but, screaming red-headed girl with vertical speed lines in the background, you can't simply 'suspend' the degredation of material in your memory. Haven't you read the FAQ?" I say that's a futile argument. There's already an option to "Save Me," which completely goes against this ideal. Plus, whether or not the reviews build up right now, you will still get to them later, one way or another, and if you don't remember them, they will be marked as such and come up in such a manner.

If that's the way we want to study, I say let us. But I, of course, am extremely biased because I am the we/us in question. What does everybody else think? And what do the Skritter team think? Is this a technical wall, or does this feature not exist simply because you didn't think it was needed? And what faults, if any, are there in my logic?

But if they are due then they are due, and freezing it isnt going to change it, just trick you into thinking they arent due when they in fact are.

I say dont worry about it. I once went on holiday for a month with no Skritter and got up to 7000 reviews...worked it off in the end though :)

From the FAQ, it seems the "Save Me" option just spreads out the times when items come up for review, so that you can keep adding new items in the meantime. If you use it, you actually need to Skritter more intensely over that period to keep up.

Like Antimacassar says, if they are due then they are due. I think the best thing to do is to stop adding new items and study a sustainable, fixed amount every day until you bring the number down. My number was recently over 4000 reviews. It was slightly discouraging, true, but that's how I got through it.

Not that I am condoning, but users of Anki in this situation recommend just clicking through and marking each of your 500 piled up cards as "correct". They will come back again soon enough (:

Only 500 ?
Hit 750 on friday, now back to 457 , hopefully down to about 200 in a couple of hours.

While I understand what you're saying, Antimacassar, "Due" is just an abstraction created (or borrowed from somewhere else) by the Skritter team to represent when our minds will need to review something to prevent memory decay. You are speaking of it as if it's some definite natural phenomenon and to go against it is fooling yourself or something.

I would argue that freezing it will do exactly what you said it isn't going to do. That is push back the due date, minute for minute, until you choose to unfreeze it. If it didn't do that, then it would not be the same as what I was requesting.

@Lawnmower16 the number of items due is just a number. You can ignore it if you like.

And 500 is nothing. I'm at 2,809 at the moment.

James

I'd love to study more, but most of the time my internet connection is simply too slow. Averaging 2000-3000 ms per item makes Skritter rather inefficient.

It's easier to pick oneself up to do 10min per day rather than resolving to bring the queue down to zero items. For some reason, that hurdle can keep you from starting and as a result reviews just pile up, adding to the problem.

I'm not trying to defend this behaviour, it's completely irrational, but I can relate to "screaming red-headed girl with vertical speed lines in the background"'s dilemma only too well.

I think it would be nice to have a tool which could indicate at what point you are removing reviews from the queue faster than they are being added, so that you eventually (but slowly) bring your reviews under control rather than just having them build up and overwhelm you as seems to be happening to JWW.

@Olaf Oh no, I'm not overwhelmed. I go through cycles where I don't Skritter for a while and build up a lot of items due. I don't stress too much about the number due, although I don't add new items until it's close to zero.

James

Maybe the remaining number of reviews should be in a smaller font to stop scaring people so much (: It does feel good to keep the queue down at 0 though (:

The whole reason why this site is great is that you review the words you get wrong more often than the ones you get right. And if you have that then you're going to need some kind of due date which is going to be sooner for the incorrectly answered ones and later for the others otherwise the whole thing falls apart(OK you could argue when that is exactly, but you're still going to have to have one).

If you push it back it's still basically the same thing as if you dont, just that you wouldnt know about it. I really can't see the point, especially since if it is an abstraction then why does it matter how many are due? The numbers are kinda pointless in a way, since you can never really reach 0 anyway (just refresh the page and it's probably gone up)

This post has brought up a question that has been nagging me for some time:
What ACTUALLY HAPPENS if you hit "save me" ?

In what way is that different from the "freezing" that Lawnmower16 wants ?

As for my opinion, I'm with James on this one. It's nice to hit zero, but I don't stress if I have 1000 due. I'm fairly sure that my studying would be more efficient if I could empty the queue each day (that is the point of the scheduling after all), but even without the perfect timing, Skritter is still the best writing practice ever. My children use my scratchpad (scheduling off so they don't mess up my record), so they have no scheduling at all, but it is still really useful for them.

Rachael.

I suffer the same predicament. Sometimes I go for days without Skrittering and then the gentle email reminds me and makes me feel so guilty! I log on and my aim is to hit 10 minutes a day. If I can do that, I can do another 10 minutes. I just wish there is Skritter on iPad so I don't have to sit in front of the PC and do this. Anyway, I am the sort who wishes to get things down to zero instead of seeing X number staring back at me. Maybe I shouldn't be so hung up on the number since most people here aren't.

It's a big boost for me to keep the reviews due number small - personally if I'm in a cycle where I can keep clearing down to zero daily, it gives me more motivation to keep studying.

That said, I've been in a similar predicament lately - after the May challenge I was so burnt out that I dropped from an hour a day to maybe averaging 5-10 minutes a day - 结果 I was over 2k reviews just about five days ago. However, since I've finally started studying again, at a rate of about half an hour a day, I'm down to about 1200 reviews now. The old adage about the tortoise is really worth listening to if your goal is to clear a nasty review queue like I've been working with - slow and steady...

Rachael - if you hit save me Skritter will take all the words you have due now, and spread them evenly over the next X number of days.

So you just have a bit extra on top for those next few days.

We can't pause all scheduling, because that would require rewriting the due dates on all of your items. Save Me does essentially the same thing, but only to the items that are currently do.

It seems like there are three forms of psychological burden when you've got a big review backlog:

1) The number of reviews due is high
2) You don't get any new words
3) It will take a while to catch up

Save Me attacks 1) and 2) while aggravating 3): your due reviews number goes to 0 and you start getting lots of new words, but because you're adding and you're making the scheduling less efficient, it's going to take even longer to catch up.

If you don't mind 1), then you can solve 2) by clicking the manual add word button every once in a while to get a new morsel.

In the maintenance chat the other day, Olaf suggested that 1) was a big part of the problem, and we came up with the idea to do some sort of goal mode, where the reviews due number is hidden. There were two possibilites:

A) Do X reviews a day. The scheduling would be unchanged, but the review bar and study page would only count down from X, and then stay at 0. Perhaps Skritter could do an automatic calculation to estimate how many items you'd need to do per day to stay afloat, and you could choose X based on that when you enabled the mode.

B) Do Y minutes a day. The reviews due would be hidden, and the timer alert would be more conspicuous when you hit your goal.

So either of these modes would alleviate problem 1), and if you wanted new words, you would click the manual add word button.

Questions for y'all:

i) Which of 1), 2), and 3) get you down when you have a backlog?

iI) What do you think of A) or B)?

iii) Would you mind if automatic adding gave you a new word every Z minutes or so even when you had a big review backlog, and if not, what should Z be?

i) 3) is the real problem (with no other solution than knuckling down, I fear), but 1) is the one that makes it feel hard.

ii) Both A) and B) are fine. B) is the one I would like to use under normal circumstances and A) would be great for when I have a huge backlog of items to review.

iii) For me, Skritter isn't so great when it comes to learning entirely new words (ie. ones that I can't even read), it's much more about reinforcing ones I have encountered before and learning to write them. So, when I have a big bunch of review items I probably would not want any entirely new items to be added (something Skritter cannot know). On the other hand, it might have a motivating effect to see something new once in a while. But, on the whole, it's probably better to just grind through the backlog and to look forward to getting new words when that is done.

Nick - (1) is similar to how Anki's recently scheduling system works. It doesn't give you, as you put it, just the "words you need to do to stay afloat". Rather, it groups all the due flash cards for that day, and says "this is how many you're due today" (at 4am). Rather than trickling throughout the day.

I like the system, but it would need adjustments for Skritter. You'd have to allow for smaller intervals than Anki does, for characters which are consistently marked wrong, and maybe for new characters.

I don't think the being limited by time idea would work - sometimes people go slowly, sometimes people go fast. You could always put an estimate to how long Skritter thinks is left (coupled with the above idea), or a timer that goes down based on this estimate - but Anki does that, and it's rarely accurate. I'm personally happy with a timer going up, as we currently have here.

Edit: although, frankly the need on Skritter for this sort of system is much less than it was on Anki. Skritter already tells you how many you're due total for the day on the study page anyway.

I think mostly people just need to buckle down, and do a decent amount everyday, and reduce the number of reviews (eg by removing parts studied/changing the memorisation target %, and make them easier to recall through custom definitions) as need be.

I agree with chrka, 3) is the real problem but 1) is what makes it feel hard. When you go from 1159 to 1038, that's real progress but it doesn't feel like it. It's just a slightly smaller big number.

I think either A) or B) would be a big help when you want to feel like you are making progress without having to look at the massive backlog. I think anything you can do to emphasize the progress rather then how far you have left to go would be a big help.

@Nick: 1) is what makes me not want to open the study page because the number is depressing. B) is what I try to do when time is limited and I have a huge backlog. I personally don't care about automatic adding because I like to study using temporary parts study, but I would imagine that someone with a huge backlog who gets new words on a regular basis would just fall farther and farther behind.

James

In response to Nick's carefully structured question...

What sorta gets me down is basically 1) which means 3) and results in 2). It doesn't bother me too much because it really is just a number, a reminder that learning Chinese has a cost; just having skritter as a home page isn't enough!

As for the suggested solutions: I sometimes do my own version of A). Right now my number to review is 996 and focusing on that number is discouraging because tomorrow it could be 1100 then 1200 and so on. However, I see that I have 507 due in the next 5 days so if I whittle away at least 100 today I won't get any further behind. Anything beyond 100 today will be real progress.

This mode is just enough to "stay afloat" so I don't 2) - and with no new words my progress chart stays disappointingly flat. That's what really bothers me but the answer is simply doing the practice. I don't believe I would take advantage of any features that displayed or managed my number of reviews differently.

(i) As others have said - (1) gets me down because of (3). (2) isn't as big an issue - when I'm adding new stuff, it's a boost to my ego to see those big green numbers on the progress page, but when I'm not adding, I don't consciously miss it.

(ii) As for (A) versus (B) - (A) is probably more effective, but perhaps it would be good to allow the user to determine the goals - i.e. "Stay Afloat" might keep you from increasing your actual reviews due, while "Work it off in X days" would schedule more aggressively with the goal of reaching zero reviews due in a certain timeframe. (B) is closer to what I do most of the time when I've got a large number of reviews due, but there's a lot it doesn't account for, such as study rates and increasing daily reviews due as the user studies longer on a daily basis.

(iii) If I want to add words while I'm backed up, I'll hit the manual add button. I prefer to keep adding to a minimum (zero most of the time) while I'm working on a backlog, though that might be a goal-oriented thing that effects other people differently from me. I wouldn't like auto-adding in a backlog, but maybe there could be a little pop-up reminder about the 'add new word' button once per session if no new words have been added for a while, I'm not sure if I would like that too much, but people who aren't as Skritter-savvy might appreciate it in that situation.

Okay, we've decided to try out a simple Goal Mode where you set the number of reviews you want to clear per day, and we'll see how that goes. I think it will be fun to build.

@nick awesome, that sounds like a good idea.

speaking of emotional reactions to:

> 1) The number of reviews due is high

it's a bit freaky that the number of reviews oscillates wildly.

This morning Skritter home page tells me I have under 300 words to review, which is a bit much, but manageable:

http://screencast.com/t/tKhVMPpkGsD9

However, when Skrittering, the number of words to review on the study page strangely goes up up and up, so now, after a few minutes, it says I have more than 500 to review, which is getting depressing:

http://screencast.com/t/Jx9lVUsOomn

I think that high number will jump back down to 300 or lower soon. It's probably not real, just some kind of artifact of the software, but it's a little discouraging to be hurrying up to review everything and have the work left to do go up, not down. It's like a dream where the faster you go, the more you go backwards.