How long have you been doing WK? I’m pretty much seconding Rrwrex’s advice on this. If you haven’t been at this long enough for your enlightened reviews to start coming back (about 6 months in), you haven’t seen your full workload yet.
The beginning was when I was doing WK very inconsistently, learning all of my available lessons at once, then sometimes forgetting to check my reviews for multiple days. Things stabilized around level 6 when I started to keep a much stricter, more consistent schedule of doing 10-13 lessons a day, with at least three review sessions.
Each color represents a different batch of lessons, with the exception of the first two apprentice levels (I do two batches of reviews for those items in one day, since the reviews are due 4 hours after lessons, and then 8 hours after that).
On any given day, I have reviews coming back twice from my lessons that morning (apprentice stage 1 and 2), as well as reviews from my lessons the day before (apprentice 3), from two days before (apprentice 4), from a week ago (guru 1), from two weeks ago (guru 2), from one month ago (master), and finally from four months ago (enlightened).
Because I do the same amount of lessons each day, the reviews coming in from each stage are really consistent, so the amount of time I spend daily on WK doesn’t really change (it has gradually increased over time as I have more items in circulation/pick up more leeches, but other than small ups and downs, it’s pretty much the same day after day). This makes it nice and easy for me to get my work done, because I know exactly how much time/energy to budget for it. Even when I’m having a terrible day or are super busy, I can still take the time to get my daily SRS time in.
If you don’t do a consistent number of lessons each day, your number of daily reviews probably fluctuates a lot. As you get further in WK, all of your past studying choices will come back to haunt you. So if you binged 40 lessons in one go six months ago because you were feeling great that day, those 40 reviews might come back on top of a couple hundred other reviews during a really bad day for you when you’re feeling sick or extremely demotivated and don’t want to do a bunch of extra work. Some people are able to tough it out, but for others, it can be really hard and lead to burning out.
I recommend pacing yourself with lessons to just about anyone (including OP, once you’ve gotten your reviews back to a more manageable level). Even if you’re trying to level up as fast as possible, you can still spread out your lessons (though I would recommend against going full speed). The ultimate guide to WK talks about scheduling and pacing yourself, and I highly recommend reading through it, because it has a lot of very sound advice about creating a sustainable study schedule with WK.
I’ve been hanging around the forum for almost a year now, and just in that time, I’ve seen quite a few people burn out and quit, and most of the folks who have stuck with it spread out their lessons. I’ve also met a few folks who did all of their lessons as soon as they could and still managed to reach level 60, but most of them ended up with incredibly irregular study schedules where they’d have occasional 400 review days. That’s more than twice as many as the highest number of reviews I’ve ever done in one day. That kind of schedule would not be doable for me.
Apologies for the long explanation, but this is why doing fewer lessons is beneficial! It lets you control your pace and makes things a little smoother overall. My main philosophy with SRS is I want to be kind to my future self, so I make sure my daily workload is easy enough that I can still complete it on a bad day. That’s how I protect myself from burning out.
And @BongBong, I think it would be a great idea to pick up WK again and reset back a bunch of levels! You’ve probably lost anything guru or below, as well as probably many master level items, so it might be a good idea to reset back to a level where you have almost all enlightened stage items. If you have vocab lessons you haven’t done, I would reset back to a level where you’ve at least completed all of the lessons. Working through a review backlog can be pretty tough, but there are people on the forum who have done so successfully who can offer advice if you feel like you can’t get through it.