Hi! This is my first post on the community forums, which, to be brutally honest, I’ve avoided up to now because it’s generally been more distracting than helpful when I come to my WK dashboard page to get some serious studying done.
Let me just start by saying, I love WK to death, and am happy to have purchased a lifetime membership. It’s done so much for me in the 27 levels I’ve risen through so far, and given me so much literary access to things I can now genuinely enjoy in my leisure time.
But this past spring, life has gotten SO busy for me, with both friends and myself orchestrating moves a quarter-way across the country, with very few resources (human and otherwise) between us to accomplish all that we need to get done, and to not drop the ball in my professional life, I’ve had to get extremely cut-throat about how I spend my time, and have been stuck doing errands of all sorts and general Adulting™, with very little time for extraneous leisure or relaxation time in the past three months (much less the spare time and energy to spend on WK!).
During that time, my reviews have piled up to a mountainous 1700+ items, because I was neglectful and didn’t realize how bad I’d be slipping on reviews back when this all started, and my current state of affairs is extremely disheartening, as there is no possible way I can ever climb back on top of that without micromanaging vacation mode. That said, barring any other solution, I probably will end up doing just that, because I’m willing to; I value the learning enough to put up with turning vacation mode off, doing a review session, and then immediately re-freezing my account. I’d have to do this for a long time even after conquering my 1700-large queue, as well, because due to the nature of freezing the entire SRS system at once, very few items at similar SRS levels would be staggered out from each other, and I get light-headed just thinking of how many of those 1700 items I’m going to have to send back to Apprentice I after all this time.
This is extremely stifling to the goal of actually getting any learning done. WK doesn’t have a way to be selective about what reviews you do, so it’s difficult for me to do any sort of divide-and-conquer strategy for this beast.
I realize that the onus of keeping up and pacing one’s studies is on the student, but users are human, and I feel that WK’s user experience could be VASTLY improved for those of us with busy lives (or indeed, lives with a changing amount of business!) if we had some ways to moderate the flow of reviews beyond the raw, uncaring machinations of the SRS system. Someone else has made a feature suggestion for a “moderate vacation mode,” which is along the lines of what I’d love to see as a solution to this, but any way to throttle the review-popping or sub-divide the reviews you’re offered in one sitting would be magnificent, and I feel like it’d seriously go a long way towards helping people that overwhelm themselves and get discouraged and quit, to… well, not quit!