I’ve heard a few folks mention wanting to keep the number of items they’re still unsure about down to a reasonable level (I’ve seen 100 mentioned a couple of times). If I have more than 100 or so items, and I’ve got, say, 20-30 new lessons, should I hold off on them?
Am I maybe overthinking it? If I have time, maybe I should go ahead and do the extra lessons after I finish my reviews?
It’s not black or white. It depends whether you can handle the reviewing load or not. 100 apprentice is a number that keeps reviews more or less manageable for most people without burning out. However there’s people that have gone faster and done just fine. Just take into account that every lesson will give more reviews.
Welcome to the forum @CaptainAwesome !!
Obviously you’re free to study however best works for you. However, a lot of people do put a limit on App items to pace themselves.
It’s easy to go fast at low levels but you won’t burn anything for 6 months, so until that point your workload will get bigger and bigger! I personally have a limit of 90 which at level 14 means I get through a level every 10 days (so not too slow) and have around 150 reviews a day
The purpose of this rule is to manage the review workload. Most reviews are from apprentice items. If you keep their numbers in check you control your review workload.
Do you have problems when the review workload is high? If so then keeping the number of apprentice below 100 is a good practice. It is best to adjust this number to the workload you can handle. That if if you can take a higher workload raise this number to 125 or even 150. If 100 gives you too high of a workload reduce this number to 75.
I always recommend holding off until it gets lower unless you’re ok with the review load.
At Level 6 you may not be able to see it yet since much of the load is recurring items from levels after Guru. Depending on your leveling speed, you might not see these until the high teens or early twenties.
It’s at that point where limiting the short term Apprentice items will keep daily reviews in check.
I certainly would if I were you. The <100 suggestion is merely a rule of thumb. For a lot of my WK journey I had between 110-160 items in apprentice. It’s really up to you to decide how many review you feel like doing per day.
So, I’d just go for it if I have both time and energy to do so. 
There is indeed no need to overthink this.
If you ever feel overwhelmed later on, then you might wanna slow down perhaps and recheck those apprentice numbers. But there is little reason to do so before.
It really is up to you how many reviews you can handle. My advice is to find your rhythm and change things gradually. If the current pace seems easy, do a few more lessons, but emphasis on few. The thing about SRS is it’s a continuous feed system and any change you make will reverberate for the foreseeable future. So making small changes and giving yourself time to adjust will decrease the chance of getting overwhelmed and burning out. I typically give it a week between changes, and only change numbers by 5-10 at a time.
I used to look at number of apprentice items as a gauge, but recently I’ve just been doing X number of lessons per day. This keeps my workload nearly even each day (unless I’m doing particularly poorly during my reviews).
So for example, while there are kanji in my lessons, I do 10 kanji lessons and 10 vocabulary lessons each day, and then when I’m out of kanji, I just do 20 vocabulary lessons. I really like this pace because by the time I finish the vocabulary unlocked from the previous lesson, I’m guru’ing the new kanji, and unlock more vocabulary.
Here’s the link to the seanblue’s userscript for filtering lessons by type:
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