掲示板 Forums - Discussion: Schedule Balance + Auto Freeze

These are both planned features, but I'd like to discuss how they'd work best for you all.

Schedule Balance

A button in the schedule settings that will "reset" the "ready to study" numbers. Say you have a schedule with 400 terms to study each day (usually 50), and you need to bring that down. This button would, ideally, scatter the terms that are ready to be study over a specific period of time.

So, let's say you haven't been able to keep up, and you have those 400 terms to study, but the next 14 days have roughly 40-60 terms each day (your normal amount). This button would take the 400, keep 50 of them, and scatter the rest over a period. If it was 10 days, you'd get roughly 35 terms added to each of those days, making it much easier to maintain.

Issues: If it moves those 350 terms, then the average number will go up for the defined period, so there isn't really a way to scatter them and maintain that 50 terms a day. It will be higher for the period, then drop back down to the average. This seems unavoidable.

Also, thinking on what options should be present. I don't want to make it too complicated, but I'm thinking a button + a field for number of days to scatter (default to 20). It would calculate for you roughly the number of terms that'd be added each day.

Auto Freeze

This will be per schedule. If a default number of days goes by where that schedule doesn't get studied, it'll automatically get frozen retroactively.

Example: Say your auto-freeze is set at 5 days. You're nailing the vocab schedule every day, but lose track of the kanji one. On day 5, the kanji schedule will be frozen, with the freeze date set to day 1. So, when you are ready to unfreeze it, it won't be overloaded.

Thoughts on either/both of these features are appreciated!

You, as far as I can tell, though, are in a pattern that works for you. These are going to be more targeted towards those who are earlier on in their studies, where not having this could (and has been) the reason to stop studying altogether.

Ideally, you study what you need to study, and any tinkering with the SRS system is not good. However, I would argue that tinkering is worthwhile if it's "less than ideal usage of SRS for learning" vs. "giving up on learning".

A "catch up mode" is the kind of thing I've thought of suggesting before but didn't know how the logistics would work, so I'm excited this is a planned feature! I like the idea of being able to customize how long you need to catch up, or setting a specific date to catch up by with feedback about how many extra terms will need to be studied each day.

If I'm understanding auto-freeze correctly, would it reset the number of terms ready to study to the last time the schedule was used?

I don't think auto-freeze would need as much customization as the schedule rebalance, just an option for how long to go before it kicks in would be good. Having an icon to show that it's in effect is a good idea, or maybe grey out the numbers or something.

Not necessarily specific to the auto-freeze feature, but it would complement it to have an indication on schedule pages of the last day the schedule was used or how many days you've gone without studying, so users could better track when the schedule will be frozen. Not sure where to put that information to avoid cluttering it up, though.

I cannot comment too much (leaving for Japan in 16 hours) - but there is already a way to tweak the spacings between the levels :). If you search for "mastery level" in the global settings, you can adjust these. Additionally, you can do so on a schedule by schedule basis from the schedule's settings.