I’m getting up to 5 times as many reviews some days as others. I want to even it up so I get a number in the middle of the two extremes. What should my strategy be to achieve that? I have 67 for tomorrow, 32 the day after, 48 the day after that, then 55, then 16, then 42, then 13. If I can even it up I can then do, say, 5 lessons per day to keep it even. I don’t want to do 67 in a day, it’s too much, so what days should I do lessons on? Or should I not do all my reviews when I have a lot? Cheers in advance for any advice.
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Maybe decide on a max number per day. If you get more reviews than that, use the reorder script to remove items by some criterion (level perhaps?). If it’s lower you do lessons instead?
cheers, not used reorder for ages so didn’t think of that. Is there a way to time lessons so their reviews land on the days with few reviews or is that not possible in the long term?
You should still try to do all your reviews each day.
What is your approach to doing lessons now?
You can’t really fix this by doing a different number of lessons each day, because that will only fix the particular day you’re doing it on (as those lessons’ future reviews will come up on different days). Even timing it so that a day’s lessons come up again on future days with few reviews is only going to be a very temporary fix, as a week down the line they’ll be totally out of sync again.
I think the best way to even things up is to just do a set number of lessons every day from this point onwards. You’ll have to accept that your reviews from the earlier levels will fluctuate more than you want, but at some point those will start to die out and you’ll mostly be getting reviews from your more recent levels.
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You can predict how the reviews will go in the following 7 days by using the Ultimate Timeline script (adjust the interval).
But to be honest, that itself takes time from the reviews. At the end of the day, just do your usual number of lessons and make sure to have 0 reviews at the end of each day. There’s no way out. I think the focus should be on you figuring out how you can become able to handle 60 reviews/day.
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Wouldn’t that require the assumption that you get 100% of them right all the time?
Why not? For some of my anki decks I do this (I cap the number of reviews and then add new cards when it’s below), the result will be a fixed number of items each day.
I don’t think the problem is lack of time to do reviews, but that there’s an upper limit to how many you can stomach on a given day. Fiddling with a script probably doesn’t add to that time.
Everyone has an upper limit I’m sure… if you can stomach at most 300 reviews a day, should you then be thinking of how to be able to do 310?
Making sure you always do the maximum amount you can handle (be that 10, 50, 300 or 百万) each day is optimal in a sense.
That’s precisely why I discarded the possibility of trying to predict anything at all. I believe the OP can work through being able to handle those days with 60 reviews.
Yeah, I should have been more specific. I meant that doing that isn’t going to leave you in a situation, a month from now, where you magically get the same number of reviews every day. Obviously if you’re happy to do this every day such that you do lessons up to the number of reviews you’re comfortable with, that’s fine.
There’s still a risk with this approach that on subsequent days you’ll go over your maximum limit though, because the OP already has big swings in number day by day. My suggestion was more along the lines of “well you can’t easily change when those existing reviews are going to come up, but you can take a measured approach now and it’ll even out eventually once you start burning all those early levels”.
You could certainly do lessons that would take you up to, say, 50 reviews in the day, and hope that a buffer of 10 items means you rarely, if ever, go over 60.
I personally found those plans and tactics futile. I just do whatever I can whenever I can, and if I can’t zero-out the day I at least make a dent in the pile. At the end of the day as long as you’re consistent it doesn’t really matter in the long run as as you said, there will be days where you next to nothing, allowing you to catch up.
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The only way to achieve what you said is to do a steady number of lessons per day, understanding that even assuming 100% accuracy you’ll eventually get (# Lessons per Day) x (8 SRS Levels) of reviews a day.
I.e. if you do five lessons a day, even if you get 100% right, you’ll eventually get 40 reviews a day once you start burning items (6 months later). And because you will get things wrong, in reality it will be more than 40.
And when you do get things wrong, if you have too many apprentice items take a break from doing lessons for a day or two to rebalance again, and get back into your routine.
Oh and don’t even try to fix your current situation… Gotta break out some next level number theory… Just start a consistent routine now and you’ll eventually smooth our your workload.
But hypothetically, say you did 20 lessons one day, and kept getting them all right, 6 months later they’ll come back for burn reviews and not much you can do to avoid that.
I see. Yeah, it would take daily fiddling which may or may not be desirable 
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I guess if it doesn’t swing quite so wildly it might be manageable.
What I do with my biggest anki deck is to always do every review, but only add cards (do lessons in WK terms) if it has <100 reviews today. I add what it takes to get up to 100, but never more than 10.
This deck seldom gets over 110 or below 85, so maybe this would be more in line with your thinking?
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As many have already said, this is not something you can really control. Try to get into the routine of doing as much as possible every day without going crazy and stay in your comfort zone.
If your upper bound is 60, do 60. If one day you have 100 reviews, but you are going to hate your life afterward, just do as many as you are comfortable with (60? maybe 65? don’t go crazy). It’s important to keep the learning experience as painless as possible and to stay motivated. If you start to hate it, you’ll not go far.
One additional point I would like to touch is the use of the sorting script for reviews. Bear in mind this is my personal opinion, so it might be dead wrong, but in your case I would not use the script to sort the reviews. Usually the script is used to finish the level quicker by attacking the kanjis first (since wanikani checks only the state of the kanjis and radicals for the level progression). You usually unlock around 100~150 new reviews per level. If your output is around 50 a day, and you attack the kanjis first for both reviews and lessons, on the long run you might end with a really huge pile of lessons/reviews, which can be daunting. You can probably mitigate this by doing your reviews till they get to a manageable state when you unlock a new level before jumping on the new lessons, but still, not sure if this would be the best for you to maintain the experience peasant 
Yeah, and I think OP has such a huge variance in review number per day (with some days already more than they want) that they’d have to have a pretty low cap on the number of lessons they could do up to as well, to avoid causing problems later on (like they can’t very well do 37 lessons on a day they only have 13 reviews, because the next day might already have 63 coming in).
I think yours is a good method if you don’t already have a big imbalance, and if you are comfortable doing a larger overall number, which gives you a little more leeway.
Divide your [number of lessons] by [half the number of days you want to spend on each level], and do that number of lessons per day. Eventually, your daily workload of reviews will be a lot more even.
Or just do poorly on your reviews, which has the natural tendency to spread your reviews out 
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@Franken
I reset my account back to level 1 from lv19 and I have found the BEST way to not get overwhelmed is to to go through each level systematically by doing the following.
1.Unlock your current level radicals
2.Guru all of your prior level vocabulary BEFORE unlocking new kanji
3.Keep your APPRENTICE ITEMS under 100 at ALL TIMES
4.REPEAT 1-3
If you do this you will find that you will start to only get items in your queue that you REALLY dont know.
There will be times when queue will spike due to the BURN periods etc, but this will keep your queues very manageable on average.
If you keep doing your reviews consistently everyday you will find it much easier to get through all of them on a regular basis as well.
**This is accomplished using TAMPERMONKEY ADD ON for my browser (firefox) and using Script ‘WankiKani Lesson Ordering Script II’
Makes sense, cheers. I’ll do 5 reviews every day, regardless, see how it goes.
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A different approach to the problem may be to make it quicker for you to do your reviews.
Some of the reorder scripts allow you to test yourself in a 1x1 mode (like WaniKani Reorder Ultimate 2). If set up correctly, you can pair up readings and meanings during reviews. Since the reviews arrive in a predictable order, you can cut your review time significantly.
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