I did some searching and found numerous threads over the years discussing the “creeping” problem, where your review schedule will gradually creeps forward into the future if you’re not diligent about completing your reviews as soon as they become available. The SRS timing logic has changed a bit over the years; as currently implemented, your next-scheduled review items simply round down to the nearest hour on the clock: 13:59 and 13:01 both round down to 13:00. This is good for keeping review items batched. Unfortunately, this still means that if you don’t complete your entire batch within an hour of becoming available, your reviews will creep forward.
My use case: I try to schedule my reviews on the same hour each day (8:00AM), but occasionally I’ll miss it and won’t get to it until over an hour later. Or, maybe it’s a massive batch and I can’t complete it within the hour. It would be really nice to “recover” the previous timing so that I can keep my schedule the same and not have the reviews slide into the later hours of the day.
In fact, since starting WK, I’ve actually had to rework my schedule to do my reviews in the morning instead of the evening because the creep was cutting into my bedtime. The creeping effect would force me to either stay up late to finish reviews while tired and losing sleep, or defer until the next day and go a full 48 hours between reviews. In both cases my retention was noticeably affected. The only solution is to reset the entire schedule by skipping a day of reviews, which just feels bad. However, even after moving my reviews to the morning, some timings have already drifted by an hour over the last week: I have 36 items which unlock at 8am tomorrow, and 33 which unlock at 9am. It’s only a matter of time before I have to drop another day to reset the schedule.
I believe the easiest solution to creeping is to just subtract 2 hours (or possibly more) from the 24hr+ SRS intervals and then round down to the nearest hour. This way, I now actually have an opportunity to recover and reel my schedule back in, or reel in items which I completed on the wrong side of an hour boundary.
So, is this an issue for anyone else? I’m really enjoying WK but I feel like this is really the only major factor that detracts from the experience.