Last month I was not able to do any reviews for a whole week, due to a work trip.
I decided not to use vacation mode, because I didn’t want to mess with my SRS review times, thinking that it would be the same anyway and that I wouldn’t have any problems catching up.
And that was my mistake. I came back home to 700+ reviews and couldn’t bring it down. I sat on them, doing single 20-100 review sessions per day and then giving up. Finally, after a week I had dwindled the reviews down to 500 and then just sat down and forced myself to go through them.
Because of this delay, I ended up taking 37 days to complete level 15.
I think if I had vacation mode enabled I would have been able to get back into the swing of reviews more quickly. I certainly wouldn’t have lost a week doing hopeless review sessions staring at a huge triple digit number. Given that my average level time is 12 days, plus 7 days vacation mode and a few days of adjustment, I probably could have completed the level in 20/25 days, instead of 37.
So lesson learned. Next time I will use vacation mode.
Same situation here. I’m at level 14 now, and thought I’d have time for WK during a week-long vacation. Alas, I didn’t, and came home to 500 reviews. Fortunately I had a rather low apprentice level count, so I could bring them down in batches of 100-120 items once or twice per day, but still the level will complete at 33 days instead of the usual 15.
I had to travel for 24 hours without internet access. When I arrived at my destination, WaniKani was not the first thing on my mind. The queue had grown to 174-ish items. I put the account into vacation mode.
Since I have a lifetime membership, I was not concerned about the duration of the “vacation”. I returned to it about six weeks later. When I set to work on the 174-ish items, I achieved an accuracy rate of 34%.
My advice for how to use vacation mode:
Do it early. If you’re about to board a 11-1/2 hour flight, put the account into vacation mode now.
Don’t do lessons just before putting your account into vacation mode. When you finally switch it on and that first review appears, you are not likely to remember it.
Resume your reviews as early as you can. The longer you leave it, the higher your error rate in your first review.
If you have a time limited subscription (not lifetime), remember that the subscription period does not go on vacation mode. Your next monthly payment date will stay the same.
You don’t really have to use vacation mode if you use reorder script. It let’s you do important reviews first so you can level up as early as possible and than you can do the rest whenever you want.
Vacation mode is necessary evil. It prevents your reviews from piling up but it doesn’t prevent your brain from forgetting the items. Which is why I try to use it as little as possible. But sometimes it can’t be helped, yes.
If you’re worried about disrupting review times - I always turn off vacation mode at the same time I turned it on, meaning a break, but no issues with picking reviews back up. Might help you in the future
Ideally, you never go on vacation mode for more than 48 hours. Fortunately, these days you get wi-fi almost everywhere you go (unless of course you’re camping for 2 weeks in Yosemite or climb the Everest).
Vacation mode! Is that a new setting? I was last active a year or two ago before starting up again this month. I just finished going through my several hundred reviews…
Last time I went on vacation was a trip to Japan (exciting!) 6-7 months ago. I did use vacation mode, but when I returned, remembered basically 0 apprentice items. I’m going on another trip soon, just for a few days, backpacking in the middle of nowhere, where there’s no chance for cell reception or wifi. Even though it’s only a few days, I plan to stop lessons a few days in advance and hopefully leave with 0 apprentice items…
