It seems to be a pattern that there are hours where absolutely nothing happens, followed by my queue growing immensely within the span of several hours.
I tried to avoid the situation with reviews piling up by doing them regularly, maybe 2-4 times per day. However, it doesn’t help much when WaniKani drops 40 reviews in one hour and another 50 in another. It’s not uncommon for me to go through the queue before getting askeep, only to wake up with 100+ reviews to fill out.
Is there a way to make it a bit less demanding? It’s hard to stay a day with so many reviews; I get tired and impatient, which leads to errors and even more reviews later on.
If I understand things correctly then after getting to Apprentice 3 the reviews for an item will come back at the same time of day as when you did the review -1 hour — so if you did 20 reviews all at Guru 1 between 14:00 and 15:00 o’clock and got them all correct, then all of those reviews will come back at 13:00 o’clock 7 days later (if you also did reviews not at Guru 1, then those too will come back at 13:00 o’clock but on different days). So if you’re in a pattern of doing large amounts of reviews at the same time of day then you will keep getting large amounts of reviews at the same time of day. But if you have a pile of 100 reviews in the morning then you can spread them out by (for example) doing 10 reviews per hour throughout the day.
The only ways to get fewer reviews total in a day is 1. to do fewer lessons per day (most effective), and 2. to make fewer mistakes.
Each review is a fixed amount of time after the previous one on that item. Wanikani doesn’t choose when to give them to you. In theory, if you do them evenly throughout the day, they have to stay that way.
In practice, well you have to sleep sometimes, and people have other things to do besides check Wanikani every hour of every day, and they accumulate. Then when you do them, there’s a big batch - now all those in the big batch are going to stay in the big batch unless you intentionally spread them back out by not doing all of the available ones at once.