Okay, this is what I wanted to know! I can see how this makes sense for other odometer goals.
I actually don’t use the Anki plugin because I’m reporting the total review count for subdecks (and because I’ve been putting off doing trivial modifications on the Anki Beeminder plugin to log review count for subdecks).
I can see how many total reviews I’ve done if I stop what I’m doing and look at the stats screen. But that’s not really part of the review flow.
From the basic review interface, Anki shows me:
- cards left to review
- new cards left to learn
- cards left to relearn (failed cards)
Reviewing in Anki is based on cards left, not on total reviews. I may see a particular card more than once during a particular session, and I will if it’s a new card, or a failed card I’m relearning.
Beeminding the total amount of work I’ve put into Anki reviews maps much more easily to reviews done. Tracking increases total review count is the robust way of keeping track of that.
These are largish looking numbers that are hard to tell apart and relate to each other just at a glance. I have to stop and do math to see how 48572 and 48652 compare.
I often confuse a single number enough–I’ve derailed myself in the past and had to ask for help from you guys with anki-rtk
or mcdreviews
because I mixed up digits during data entry because I wasn’t copy-pasting.
What I’ve done instead is just report the number as I do reviews (throughout the day) to Beeminder, which then tells me how much farther I have to go: okay it’s +80 or +47 or +17. This functionality–eliminating a bit of math–has been huge for me.
Even if that’s talking about number of reviews, there is some loose correspondence to the number of cards left to review that Anki gives me up front.
For example, I think, while waiting for the bus: if I can reduce the number of cards left for today (in Anki) from 214 to 160, it’ll get me a good part of the way to the +80 remaining reviews for my Beeminder goal. Then I can probably mostly wrap up in 2 to 3 sessions during downtime, and as a final failsafe, make sure everything’s done before I finalize data entry for the night.