First three levels: all lessons and reviews as soon as they appear. Veeeeeery quickly realized this would lead to huge surges in reviews. I also start to get fatigued and stop taking stuff in.
Levels four to nine: did lessons in batches of type (radicals/kanji/vocab) and would string out the mid-level set of vocab, but would clear all vocab and radicals at the start of a level. This was fine, but I want to slow down now (life stuff, and I don’t want to burn out/have loads of reviews when stuff starts coming up for Burn). Each level took about 7.5 days.
Now I’m doing about 18 lessons per day (they’re in batches of 6), though I’ll do extra if needed to finish a group of radicals or kanji. I think my levels will now take about 10 days, until I reach about level 14/15, when there are so few radicals that I’ll just roll them in with the vocab and speed up to 9 days.
I do reviews primarily when I wake up, and at about 8pm. But at 12pm I do the 4-hour items from that morning’s lessons, and I check in at 4pm as well to mop up any stragglers.
I put a lot more effort into my lessons than I did at first (I cycle through them loads), and I assess all my incorrect responses after review sessions now, so I’m happy trundling along at 9 - 10 days.
Oh also, I would stop doing new lessons if my apprentice items went above ~150, or if my guru items went above… I guess 600? I don’t think they’ve ever been that high yet.
Generally everything that came up in the morning (by 9-10 AM), and then once again at night, at around 9-10 PM. The night one isn’t always sustainable, though, since I’ve got work and kids and the like. On days that I level up, I just power through all the new items - kanji, vocab, everything - in one sitting and then let SRS handle which one I remember. Same for when new items show up throughout the level.
I don’t know how you guys manage to keep your reviews below 100, I always have around 150-200 in the morning and night, and if I skip a night review session, I usually wake up to 250-350. Only right after have I started a new level do reviews seem to dip below 100.
This kind of scheduling lets me level up roughly once every 8-10 days (I’m level 45 now). But in the 20s, it used to be around every 10-14 days, in the 30s it was 10-12 and it’s only in the 40s that i’m doing 8-10 days.
On weekdays, I do reviews on my commute to work in the morning (~7am) and my commute home at night (~5pm). Occasionally, I’ll add an extra review session later in the evening if I’ll have a batch of at least 25-30. On the weekends, I usually have at least 3 review sessions (morning, midday, evening), with the exact timing depending on when the bulk of the reviews are scheduled to come. I like to wait until I have at least 30-50 items for review, but not more than ~100.
For lessons, I look at three things: how much time/mental energy I’m going to have to do reviews over the next 2 days, how many reviews are scheduled to come up within the next 24 hours, and what my apprentice count is. I keep my apprentice count <125, and I don’t do lessons if work will be super busy and I already have a lot of reviews (>210-220) within the next day. The number of lessons I do at a time varies based on how far below the apprentice count I am, but I usually don’t do more than 30 lessons a day, and I usually don’t do batches of more than 15-20.