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Short answer: for most students, 10 to 30 new flashcards a day is a sustainable range, with 20 a common starting point. The real limit is reviews: each new card comes back several times over the following weeks. Anki's manual estimates that learning 20 new cards a day leads to about 200 reviews a day. Set your new-card number from the review time you can afford every day, not from how much you want to cover.
Why the new-card number matters so much
Flashcards work because of two things: testing yourself and spacing those tests out. Spacing means a card you learn today will come back tomorrow, then in a few days, then in a week or two, and so on. That's what makes it stick. It is also why the number of new cards you add each day controls your workload for weeks.
Anki's manual is blunt about it. Studying new cards temporarily increases your daily reviews, and if you consistently learn 20 new cards a day, you can expect roughly 200 reviews a day. Other spaced repetition apps work on the same principle, so the numbers will be in the same ballpark.
That's the trap many students fall into in the first week of exam season: they add 100 cards on a motivated Sunday, and by Wednesday they have more reviews than time.
How to pick your daily number
- Decide your daily review time. Be honest: 20 minutes on a normal day? 45 in exam season?
- Time yourself. Review speed varies a lot by subject and card style, so time a session of 50 reviews and work out your own rate.
- Work backwards. If you can do about 200 reviews in your daily time, a rough guide is that you can sustain about 20 new cards a day. If you can do 100, aim for about 10.
- Watch your accuracy. If you are getting a lot of reviews wrong, you are adding too much or your cards are too complex. Cut new cards first.
- Keep it steady. 15 cards every day beats 60 on one day and none for three.
The quality of the cards matters as much as the number. One card that asks a single clear question takes seconds; a card with a paragraph on the back takes a minute and is easy to fail. Our guide to making good flashcards covers how to write them.
How many cards before an exam?
Work it out from the date. Spacing works best when the gaps between reviews suit the time until the test. Cepeda and colleagues' (2006) review of hundreds of spacing experiments found that spaced study beat massed study, and that longer retention intervals benefit from longer gaps.
In practice:
- Six or more weeks out: a steady 15 to 25 new cards a day is comfortable, and every card gets several spaced reviews before the exam.
- Two to four weeks out: you can push higher for a short time, but stop adding new cards in the last week or so, so you are only reviewing.
- One week out: forget the daily new-card number. Review what you have, and work on practice questions and past papers. Our spaced repetition schedule shows how to lay out the final weeks.
What to do when reviews pile up
- Stop adding new cards for a few days. This is the fastest way to bring reviews down.
- Do reviews before new cards, every day.
- Delete or fix bad cards. Cards you keep failing are usually badly written, not hard. Split them or rewrite them.
- Don't quit the deck. A backlog is fixable in a week. Abandoning it throws away the spaced reviews you already did.
Big stacks beat small ones
If you use paper cards or a simple app without scheduling, the same principle still applies. Kornell (2009) had learners study word pairs with flashcards in either one big stack or several small stacks. The big stack, which naturally spaced each card's repetitions further apart, was more effective for 90% of participants. Yet after the first session, 72% believed the small stacks had worked better. Spacing feels worse and works better.
And keep cards in the rotation after you get them right once. Karpicke and Roediger (2008) found that continuing to test items after students had recalled them correctly produced a large boost in later recall, while restudying them added nothing.
Flashcards are one format of self-testing; practice questions are another. If writing cards is what is eating your time, Ace turns your lecture slides, PDFs or notes into practice questions written only from that material, in formats like multiple choice and type-the-answer, and you choose the chapters for each session. See PDF to flashcards for how that works.
Frequently asked questions
Is 50 flashcards a day too many?
For new cards, usually yes, unless you have a lot of daily review time. Fifty new cards a day can mean hundreds of reviews a day within a couple of weeks.
How many Anki cards a day for medical school?
Many medical students do more than 20 new cards a day, but they also spend hours on reviews. Start lower, measure your review time for two weeks, then adjust.
How long should I spend on flashcards each day?
Whatever you can keep up every day. Twenty to forty minutes is common. Consistency matters more than length.
Should I do reviews or new cards first?
Reviews first. They protect what you have already learned, and skipping them is what creates backlogs.
Sources
- Anki Manual. Deck options: Daily limits. AnkiWeb documentation.
- Kornell, N. (2009). Optimising learning using flashcards: Spacing is more effective than cramming. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23(9), 1297–1317.
- Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.
- Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319(5865), 966–968.
