How to clear an Anki backlog without burning out

A big Anki backlog usually starts the same way: a busy week, a trip, an exam in another subject. You miss a few days, the due count climbs, and opening the app starts to feel like opening a bill. So you open it less, and the number climbs faster.

The good news is that a backlog is a scheduling problem, not a willpower problem. Anki already knows which cards are due and roughly how well you know each one. Your job is to stop the pile from growing, then work it down at a pace you can hold for weeks, not hours. Here is a plan that does that.

First, stop adding to the pile

Every new card you learn today turns into several reviews over the following weeks. While you have a backlog, new cards are borrowing against time you do not have.

Open the deck options for your main deck (or the preset it uses) and set New cards/day to 0 in the daily limits section. Do this for every deck that feeds the backlog. You are not quitting new material, you are pausing it until reviews are back under control. Once the backlog is gone, bring new cards back at a number you can sustain, which is often lower than the number that caused the backlog.

If you have a deadline and genuinely need new material, keep the new card limit small and fixed rather than switching it on and off. Predictable inputs make the review load predictable.

Pick a daily number you can actually hit

The worst way to clear a backlog is a heroic weekend. You do a thousand reviews on Saturday, feel wrecked, skip Sunday and Monday, and the cards you answered on Saturday start coming back due on top of everything that was already waiting.

Instead, choose a daily review number you could manage on a bad day, and set Maximum reviews/day in the deck options to that number. Anki will show you that many reviews per day and hold the rest back. The count on your screen becomes today's work instead of everything you owe, and that matters more than it sounds: a number you can finish is a number you will start.

Pick the cap by time, not ambition. Notice roughly how many reviews you get through in ten minutes at a normal pace, then multiply by the minutes you can realistically give it on a weekday. That is your cap. If you clear it easily for a full week, raise it a little.

Decide which overdue cards come first

When your cap is lower than the number of due cards, Anki has to choose which ones you see. Recent versions of Anki and AnkiDroid have a review sort order setting in the display order section of the deck options. Depending on your version, the choices include sorting by due date, by interval, or by how overdue a card is relative to its interval. If you are unsure, the default is reasonable. What matters most is picking one and sticking with it, so the same cards are not pushed to the back every day.

For more control, use a filtered deck to carve the backlog into chunks. A search like is:due prop:due>-7 collects cards that became due within the last week. Reviewing those first keeps your most recent material from slipping while the older pile waits. When that chunk is clear, build another filtered deck for the next slice. Emptying or deleting a filtered deck sends the cards back to their home decks with their scheduling intact.

Let FSRS do some of the work

If you have not tried FSRS yet, a backlog is a good moment. FSRS is the newer scheduler built into Anki (desktop version 23.10 and later, and recent AnkiDroid versions), and you turn it on in the deck options.

Two things make it useful here. First, it estimates how likely you are to recall each card from your actual review history, including the real time that passed since you last saw it. A card you still remember after a long gap is treated as a card you remember, not judged against an interval you never kept. Second, it has a desired retention setting, which defaults to 0.90. Lowering it a little gives you fewer reviews per day in exchange for forgetting slightly more. During a backlog that trade can be worth making for a while, and you can raise it again once things are calm.

After you turn FSRS on, run the optimize option in its section so the parameters fit your own history instead of the defaults. The setting lives in the deck options preset, which syncs with your collection, so you can do it on desktop if that is easier and then sync your phone.

Grade honestly, and do not reset

Two habits make backlogs worse.

The first is pressing Again on anything that took effort. If you recalled the answer, even slowly, that is Hard or Good. Hard still counts as remembering in both schedulers. Pressing Again on cards you actually knew sends them back into relearning and inflates tomorrow's queue for no benefit.

The second is resetting the deck to start fresh. Anki lets you reset cards back to new, and it is tempting when the number is big. It also throws away the scheduling Anki has built for every card: the ones you know cold go back to day-one intervals alongside the ones you do not. Most of an old backlog is cards you still remember. Let the reviews prove that instead of wiping it.

Cut what you no longer need

A backlog is a good time to be honest about what is in your collection. If a deck covers something you will never use again, suspend it. Suspended cards keep their history and can be unsuspended later, but they stop costing you time today.

Leeches deserve a look too. Anki tags a card as a leech after it lapses repeatedly, and depending on your settings it may suspend it as well. Leeches usually fail because of how they are written, not because of your memory. When you have energy, rewrite them: a shorter prompt, one fact per card, an example sentence, an image. Until then, leaving them suspended is fine. You can find them all by searching for tag:leech in the browser.

Do reviews in small pieces

The backlog feels huge because you picture it as one sitting. It does not have to be one. Reviews are independent: ten now and ten later count the same as twenty at once. A queue, a bus stop, the minute before a meeting starts are all long enough for a handful of cards on your phone.

This is the idea behind Tollbooth, the Android app we make for AnkiDroid users. You pick the apps you open out of habit, like Instagram or YouTube, and each one asks for a few of your own due cards before it opens. The cards are read and graded through AnkiDroid, so your schedule stays exactly as Anki keeps it. It does not replace a proper session, but it turns minutes you were going to spend anyway into reviews, which is most of what clearing a backlog takes.

How to tell it is working

You will not see the total shrink every day, because the reviews you do today schedule reviews in the future. What you should see is the daily load stop rising, then start to fall. Once your due count sits close to your cap with no pile behind it, bring new cards back at a modest number and watch the load for a week before raising it.

The short version:

• Set new cards to 0 until the backlog is gone.
• Set a maximum reviews per day you could do on a bad day.
• Use one consistent sort order, or filtered decks, to choose which cards come first.
• Consider FSRS, optimize its parameters, and lower desired retention a little if you need breathing room.
• Grade honestly, never reset, and suspend what you no longer need.
• Spread reviews through the day instead of saving them for one heroic session.