Haha, that’s exactly me.
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In this we are exactly alike. Doing lessons first would be heresy!
(Seriously: You gotta do your reviews almost every day, but it won’t kill you to miss lessons occasionally — that’s why I do 'em in that order. I might run out of time or energy!)
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Well, and just logically, if you have too many reviews to do, stop adding more
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I had a similar question last year. I took a poll and found the results interesting, see below if you are curious. For me rapid recall results in many mistakes and leeches. I like to spend a minimum of 5 seconds, since it greatly reduces my mistakes. If i think i know the kanji i’ll spend up to 30 seconds or so trying to recall it. If I know that i don’t know the answer then I will fail intentionally in less than 30 seconds.
I have been trying to slow down, to eliminate rushed-fingers typos* and the thing where I’m not thinking, just literally sight-reading a reading for two individual kanji instead of the word they make together. Those kind of typos.
But that’s not the same as sitting there trying to come up with an answer when I don’t have one. If I find myself without any answer, “nn” it is. After all, real conversation moves too fast for “uh, what was the word again?” all the time to be practical. It’s just a matter of what your personal standard is.
* I refuse to use the double-check script to retroactively “ok” typos. I consider teaching my fingers to type it correctly part of the deal. I know I’m the crazy one on that, but 
If I can’t get the right answer within ten seconds or so I deliberately get it wrong. The more times you see something, the better it will get ingrained in your memory. Getting answers wrong is really good for learning.
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Great topic! I have been wondering about this myself.
Like a lot of other posters have said, the best method seems to come down to a combination
of approaches.
I burned through the first levels and felt great about how things were going. If
I got a kanji or vocab word wrong, I just let the SRS bring it up for me again.
I never spent more than a few seconds on any one word or kanji - I either knew
it instantly or I didn’t.
However, I eventually built up a huge backlog of chronic leeches that have now
slowed me down.
So, I am now at a point where it seems to make more sense to stop and think
for words that give me trouble, and to make notes of any I get wrong. After a
certain point, it seems to require some conscious work/study to get past leeches
that I’ve been getting wrong over and over again.
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The best thing to do for your memory is to give your brain some time to think so that it has a chance to pull the information it’s looking for from your memory, otherwise you aren’t really practicing anything. If you can not get the answer after a few seconds try to find something in there to help you jog your memory, like try to find the radical or try to remember when you did the original lesson (what other words were in the same lesson that you do remember?). These things can all help you. If after that you still can’t get it you should see what the answer is and give yourself time to try and find a better connection to the kanji or word or whatever it is. If you just look at the answer and move on you are likely to find yourself in the same spot over and over again, which means whatever you are using to remember the word/kanji isn’t strong enough and you need something stronger.
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this is exactly what i do - it may be silly but some superstitious part of me doesn’t want anything resembling a real/wrong answer burned into my eyes/memory, so i picked the shortest thing to use that will never be correct.
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