Holiday mode, worth using as a breather and "catch up" every once in a while?

Just wondering whether this is a valid/useful tactic maybe after say every ten levels. That is, going into vacation mode for say a week and then just using that week for 2-3 hours a day to refresh what you’ve done, concentrate on some sticking points etc.

Instead of using vacation mode, I’d recommend just taking a break from lessons and focusing only on reviews.

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I second @seanblue’s suggestion, especially for longer breaks.
I’ve tried both approaches when I’ve needed to spend less time on reviews due to other things happening in my life (hello university placements!) Going on vacation mode in the past meant I lost the benefit of the SRS gaps, and failed a lot more items when I first got back to doing reviews. This time I simply stopped doing lessons but kept doing reviews, and now I have a manageable number of reviews which don’t take up too much of my time, and which I can ignore for a day without stress if I need to. I wish I’d figured this approach out earlier. :sweat_smile:

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I used it once for about two weeks when I was literally on vacation and found it was impossible to do reviews consistently. And then otherwise, if I have the flu or something like that and my brain shuts down. But each time I’ve used it, it has been incredibly difficult to get back in the flow of doing reviews daily, and the reviews themselves have seemed much more difficult. So use it with caution.

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Interesting. Thanks for the advice. Being a relative novice how does it then work with the lessons? I guess they don’t stack up too much over that time?

You can’t do lessons or reviews when you are in vacation mode. seanblue and Kyasurin are simply suggesting you stop doing lessons to decrease your workload and continue with reviews.

I would say that if you feel the need to take regular breaks, you are currently doing too much - reduce the number of daily lessons so that your overall workload decreases and you don’t feel overburdened (unless you are actually on vacation or too sick to learn, as previously mentioned).

I personally don’t worry about the number in my lessons slot (currently 91) - I do the same number of lessons (11) every day and frankly don’t want to run out of lessons 'cause that would stuff up my rhythm!

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If you stop doing lessons just after leveling up, you won’t get any further lesson, except if you still had some apprentice radical or kanji (but even in that case, the number of unlocks won’t be crazy). So, in that sense, what you see is what you get, i.e., you won’t have lessons building up.

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