Scheduling suggestion

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#1

hello,

i’d like to see a reschedule function that lets us review ahead of time.
there’s lots of occasions where i have time, and lots where i’m busy for hours and reviews pop up.

if you think about it, SRS is made for efficiency. spreading the reviews out as much as possible reduces workload and makes it a less tiring experience.
what SRS is not made for is effectiveness. items come up right before i’m supposed to forget them, but if my hands are tied for 12 more hours, then these items will lose substance in my memory, ranging from minimally (enlightened) to threatening a wipeout (apprentice 1).

letting us review ahead of time would eliminate that problem.

could also make it dynamic by defining how much of a time window is allowed per rank.
apprentice 1: no leeway
apprentice 2: 15 minutes
and so on.

this thought appeared to me, because i have the remainders of my “welcome back stack” up next week, 500 reviews on a wednesday (they will be enlightened then). with sunday/monday being my weekend, it’d be a walk in the park for me on monday, whereas on wednesday, it’s gonna make my day extremely stressful.

please consider a mechanic like this. the effect on efficiency would be minimal, while quality of life would gain a huge boost.

thanks.

4 Likes
#2

I jokingly suggested a user script for this once: https://community.wanikani.com/t/user-script-concept-wk-time-travel/32850?u=ctmf

But seriously, I think it’s only a problem really for the “racers” who are worried about level-up speed. It would be nice if the intervals had a little random variation thrown in to spread out the peaks of the big waves over a few days. Then instead of all 500 of your items being at an inconvenient time, only most of them would be at an inconvenient time. :slight_smile:

#3

Nope, we are also talking about it on the kitsun forum, and racing isn’t a thing there.
And I think racers would only care about time critical reviews, which isn’t the case here.
A day or two isn’t going to do much one way or another to master item but later (if you wait for a more convenient time) other items will get mixed in, and they may not have that amount of leeway. If you are tired from doing those items that could have been dealt with at a better time, your overall accuracy may suffer, you’ll get more tired and frustrated, etc.
So yeah, getting a bit of leeway would be a quality of life improvement.

7 Likes
#4

it’s actually the opposite of racing: the intervals are not set up for optimal retention effectiveness, but for efficiency. if you do them right on time, you save time and work less hard, because you’ll see them less.

it’s the same misunderstanding people have when they think “do your best to avoid freshly learned kanji, else the SRS won’t work”. that’s not correct. if you reschedule, you sacrifice efficiency for effectiveness, which, in my book, is a GoodThing™.

1 Like
#5

Couldn’t you just install the self-study script, study all of them early, then also do the actual reviews late?

I mean I’m not saying it’s a bad idea.

#6

that kind of defeats the purpose of doing an SRS, doesn’t it? we do this here to minimize our workload. if i review ahead of time, say a day earlier, future reviews won’t suffer. if we do it twice every time, we do double work. that won’t work as well as simple rescheduling.

2 Likes
#7

This is not the exact same idea but it does somewhat relate to the idea of reviewing earlier than in the current system. Sorry if I’m inadvertently hijacking a thread - if I should post this as a separate topic let me know.

I would prefer it if the intervals, once they reach a day or longer (or some threshold), are not strictly tied to the exact time of day when the card was last reviewed, but are rather just assigned to the new day itself. By this, I mean that if I review a card at 7:00 pm on Saturday (11/1) and the next interval is in one week, I can review that card anytime on Saturday (11/8) rather than have to wait until 7:00 pm on Saturday (11/8). So in a sense, the next review will be set for Saturday 12:01 am.

The downside is that this would require more dynamic interval setting, but the upside (for me at least) is that I could do the my reviews for a given day based on my availability and schedule that day and it wouldn’t be a function of previous day’s specific review schedule. I wouldn’t necessarily have to wait until 7:00 pm to do a batch of reviews just because that was when I last did them - I can still handle them in the early morning if I so chose.

I am not suggesting this for initial review (e.g. when intervals are 4 or 8 hours, or perhaps even 1 day), only once they reach a certain point. Personally, I don’t feel that the interval being slightly longer or shorter by +/- 12 hours matters once the interval is 2 days or longer (or a week, or whatever you prefer).

I have been using Anki longer than Wanikani, and I have a similar setup over there. New cards have very short intervals (e.g. 8 hours) but once cards are past that initial stage, Anki doesn’t differentiate based on the exact time the card was last reviewed. I find this works well for my schedule - maybe others would as well. All my reviews (again, not counting the newest cards) are available when I wake up and I know I just need to get through the list before the end of the day.

5 Likes
#8

I think the scatter percentage option that Kitsun has is a good way to solve this problem. If stuff shows up in your review queue all the time, there’s less pressure to do everything the exact moment it shows up.

Honestly, iKnow’s approach is best. It simultaneously adds randomness to the intervals and prioritizes items that are more overdue relative to their interval. So if it’s been 15 minutes since a review showed up for an item whose interval was 4 hours, it will give you that review before one that’s overdue by a day but whose interval was 6 months.

3 Likes
#9

Yeah, that sounds pretty much ideal.
Whenever I have the time, I’ll try to add that reordering to the reorder script…

4 Likes
#10

I’d be happy just seeing a chart of when, and how many reviews are going to pop up over say the next 24 hours. Maybe there’s a way of doing that and I’m just not aware of it.

I do try to make things work with my schedule, but “next review in ~3 hours” might be 2 reviews, or it might be 20! If I could see a timeline of the next 24 hours or so, I could at least be like “Looks like I’ll have a good amount of reviews stacked up by 3pm, I’ll plan on sitting down and doing them then.”

1 Like
#11

There is :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#12

Exactly what I had in mind. Thanks!

3 Likes
#13

yeah i like iknow’s schedules. really need to do more over there. right now though, i’m too busy with life, squeezing wk in is okay, but iknow just eats a lot of time.

1 Like
#14

This is cool thing, but I wonder if the reviews become predictable? Like, if you abuse the reorder script, you’ll start associating reviews with levels and therefore figuring out which items they correspond to without necessarily knowing them. You’ll know the answer by how long ago you’ve learned.

#15

My own solution to this conundrum is to only do lessons when I know that I’ll be awake and available to do reviews at roughly the right time later in the day, because for me it’s only an issue with very new items, but this is definitely not an option for people with less flexible work arrangements, so it’s probably a decent idea. I also like the idea of prioritising items in a review queue that are newer. I can see flexibility being abused though but ultimately we are all responsible for our learning anyways.

1 Like
#16

I don’t think I ever had an issue with that part of iKnow’s system. But that’s possibly because I did lessons very inconsistently on iKnow. So I didn’t often have a lot of new and old items come up for review at the same time.

1 Like
#17

I think completely reordering by SRS interval can be dangerous imo. Tbh, I think an “emergency button” to do the most critical items could be an option, but I don’t see it being implemented on WK due to it being highly specific (and because it helps to avoid facing the pile of reviews).

Obs: But this is me digressing, as it doesn’t solve the OP’s situation.

#18

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