How To Use Anki Like A Pro: Full Step-by-Step Walkthrough

Anki can actually ruin your studying if you don't use it right at Stanford I was drowning in thousands of flash card watching my productivity plummet despite studying more hours than anyone in fact I almost dropped out before discovering the critical features hiding in plain sight that completely transformed my Approach today I'll show you a full step-by-step walkthrough of how to use Ani like a pro including mastering the deck settings that prevent card overwhelm configuring card types correctly using the browse function to create a searchable knowledge engine and implementing the syncing strategy that prevents catastrophic progress

loss these exact techniques helped me score in the top. 1% while studying fewer hours than my peers let's Master an's interface together and fix your workflow once and for [Music] all so the first thing is we're going to look at the deck section so in this section the purpose is really to organize your card you can create both decks and subdecks so as an example here you could create so we can say test deck and then if we wanted to uh we can add other decks to this so let's say that we have these other

decks here I would just drag it to the test deck and then I can hit plus and it'll allow me to create uh different sub decks within that probably the most useful icon here is is if you click the little uh gear button here and it'll allow you to rename the deck if you want um you can also do study options and you can export the cards uh and so for example if I wanted to say like share my deck with other people I can export my cards including the media uh like images or sounds

or things like that and share it with other people in terms of studying if I wanted to study the cards so in the test deck or in my default deck I would just click on this and then it would hit study now and so as I've made this card in the past I would then just go through and review it and say say epid hematoma use the path of physiology to explain the presentation well the pathopysiology is is that you've got middle manal artery it's a high pressure system and so and so I would hit

uh enter and then I would click uh if I got it right I would hit good if I was hard but I got it right I would hit hard and if I got it wrong I would hit again the the next thing I want to talk about is Ani setting so this is something that can be really confusing if you get this wrong it can actually cause you to be extremely overwhelmed with your setting because you'll be buried in flashcards and you may not know why and you might think oh my gosh an is not

for me this is horrible but in reality when you dig a little bit under the surface you'll often times see that there's a problem with setting before I talk about settings I'm just going to briefly uh talk about some nomenclature so you've got new you've got learn and you've got do those are the three kinds of cards so new cards are cards that I've created but I haven't yet seen learn are cards that I've gotten wrong where I've hit again and do are ones cards that I've reviewed in the past that I've gotten right in

the past and I now am supposed to see them again so I'll give an example so I'm going to make a test card we'll call it test and we'll say test and then we'll add it and so what you'll see is when we go back here now it's added to the new column that's because I've made it but I haven't reviewed it yet now if I were to uh study this new card let's say I do this let's say I get it wrong if I hit again or if I hit hard or good actually in

any of these cases let's say I hit again um it now goes to the learn there are cards that I got wrong and they're now showing up for me to review again this particular day and when I review them they will typically have their intervals uh be reset so now that we understand what they different card types mean now let's go to setting to understand the ideal settings to make sure that you don't get overwhelmed with your card so generally speaking for settings I actually recommend that you keep them at the default settings and so

if you've never used Anki before that's just what you're going to see if however you're like a lot of people and you played around with this in the past and you've kind of thought to yourself oh I want to tweak this because I want to make sure that I remember everything or I want to make sure that you know my memory isn't very good and I need to do a better job of you know retaining this information often times you'll see people change their settings and what I generally recommend is that people don't change their

settings because if they change the settings one of the biggest mistakes that that you'll see is is that they'll end up having this very overwhelming number of cards that they have to do and often times it's because of their setting I would say the only two settings that you should change well so first of all how do you know if you changed a setting the first is uh let's say that I changed this so you see how this now has these undo icons have appeared if you see these undo icons that demonstrates that shows you

that you have changed the setting in some way and so I would just hit uh the undo and then you can restore it to the default and so that is what I recommend for pretty much all of these things so I would just scroll down scroll down scroll down and make sure that you now have changed them back to the the default settings the only two that I would change would be new cards which I generally recommend not doing more than 50 new cards in a day so maximum say 50 new cards total so if

you have multiple decks let's say so let's say that I've got a med school deck and I've got my test deck if I if I was trying to study from both of those I wouldn't do more than 25 new cards in each of them that would be the first thing um and then the second thing is is that I would change the maximum R viws per day to some really really high number that I'll never had now note that even though this says 99,999 that does not mean that I'm actually going to study 9,000 well

I I think I change it to 9,999 but it mean it doesn't mean that I will study 9,9 99 cards per day it just means that the maximum that I will be studying is 99,999 as you can see right even though I I increased the number it didn't change the number of cards that were due or that I was learning because the algorithm was saying that these are the cards that are due on this particular day changing the maximum number I can see doesn't change that one of the the problems that people run into is

if they keep their setting at say like 100 often times uh it it will warn you um but what can happen is is that you it calculates out okay so if you do 20 new cards per day eventually you are going to have more cards that are due on a particular day than you're allowing the program to show you people will say I don't understand why I keep forgetting all this information I'm doing my ankey cards every day and you look at the the settings and you're like oh well it's because the the program wants

to show you these cards but you haven't let it because you've changed your settings from the default and so what I recommend is just to be safe 99,999 and then again new cards uh less than 50 total the next part is the add menu so the purpose of ADD is to add new cards or information that you want to remember later and so what I'm going to show you is how to create a new note or a card within one of the decks so I am going to open say the med school deck and then

I'm going to hit add and so what it does is now it's it's opened up the add card window and the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to choose the note type and so up here these are probably the options that you're going to see what I generally recommend is to do the Bas an optional reverse card so I'm going to choose that I'll explain in a second how that's going to work again because I've opened the medical school deck it's going to go in uh the deck is going to say

medical school briefly the different card types so you've got basic which basically means it's just the basic uh kind of flash card that you're probably used to the front is going to be the question the back is going to be the answer um if you do basic and reverse card what'll happen is is that the front becomes the question the back becomes the answer but in addition to that it'll make a second card that will make the back the question and then the front is going to be the answer so for example if I said

uh capital of France the back would be Paris um and so this would be the the question for one of them and then uh Paris would be the answer in the other but it will also make another card where the Paris is the front of the card answer is going to be what used to be the front of the card in medicine where this can be particularly helpful is is that in a test scenario you might want to know either the condition's name or the something about the condition so let's say that I wanted to

know presentation of an epid hematoma I might say abidal hematoma what's the presentation and then in the back it would be the presentation I might however also want to know based on the presentation what is the condition because that is often times more what you're going to see in real life they're not going to give you the condition's name and then ask you to describe it they're actually going to describe the condition and then ask you about the name and so knowing how to make uh effective reverse cards can be very very helpful basic is

you know type an answer close deltion is one where I'm not a huge fan of these um but the basic ideas is that you'll say like Paris is is the capital of France and then you have the ability to create something where it's going to show you the answer Paris is the capital of and then I have to hit you know so I I clicked on the close deletion and it created this blank space that now I'm going to use as a prompt to help me remember it so is the capital of France it's kind

of this cute thing that people can use the downside that I have found with Clos deletions is that I tend to remember a lot of contextual Clues so if I have like a longer string of text I might remember like oh okay I that you know Paris is the capital of and I might not think about that but the text might be some sort of clue for me where I'm like oh the answer to this card is for even though I'm not actually remembering the actual information it's just this thing that I've kind of memorized

and I'm now regurgitating on a card what I recommend to use is the basic and optional reverse card and so you may want to make reverse card or you may not and so it's nice to have the option of making a reverse card or not so for example if I wanted to say capital of France right would be the front um and then the back would be Paris right if I leave this blank then it will not add a reverse card whereas if I put y for yes in the back then it will make a

reverse card so it will give me the option of if I want to do this or not so um you can see now that there are two different cards here um because I've added this why however if I delete this there are times when you're going to want to have a only a forward card and there are going to be times when you want to have a forward and a reverse card for those I actually think that in general it's better to just default to basic and optional reverse card uh what this will allow you

to do is to always have the forward card let's say I wanted to say capital of USA I would say Washington DC if I just add this right by itself then it's only added to single card right you can see there's only one card here and it is capital of USA Washington DC now if I add if I type y here for yes I don't know if you can actually um type other letters here but Y is the one that I've always defaulted to so if you type y here for ad of verse you see

now how it's added a second card so that second card is going to be Washington DC is going to be the question and then the answer is going to be the front which is capital of USA if you delete whatever it is that you type here in order to make the the the the reverse card it doesn't actually delete the card so you'll actually have to manually delete it um by going to uh notes and delete and so um but you can suspend this card if you want if you don't want to use that because

if they're linked I think that if you delete one it might actually delete the other one too so that is the add function the only other thing that I would um that I would add about this is that you can um create tags for these cards let's say I wanted to do Capital so I would say you know capital of uh UK which I believe is London um I could add this to capitals right and I could add a reverse card here and so now it's created this tag and so anytime I wanted to find

cards related to that particular tag which will become relevant later um I can do that by just searching for that particular tag I'm also going to link here a video to how to make other cards um which you can find uh in the show notes the next feature that we're going to talk about is the browse feature and so the purpose of browse is really it's like a search window or it's a search function to find important information from the browse window you can also edit and delete and move or suspend cards as I was

showing you earlier and you can use it for cram specific information for upcoming tests which I'll talk about in a future video and it will default to opening the most recent deck that you have opened and so um here we've got all of my capitals of different countries probably the most useful thing to note is all of this information over here and so what you can do is you can look at either due date like sort of the timing of them so when we're cards when our cards due like if they're due today these are

all my cards that would be due today that I'm supposed to be doing or I can sort them based on when they were added and I can look at when they were edited or studied or things like that um Flags can be useful if you like for example I've made uh subdecks before of particular cards where I didn't necessarily want to go and like add a tag to every single one of the cards but I was sharing a deck with someone or I was sharing a certain number of cards and so I wanted to just

highlight all of those particular kinds of cards I don't know maybe like all of my cards to do with acne and so I would you know tag all of them as blue or red or something like that card State I don't really use all that often um but you can again sort them based off of card state but the ones that I probably find most useful are going to be based off of tags honestly probably the most useful thing that I find is to look at them by tags the other really really useful feature and

the one that I use the most most is actually this feature um and so that's just the search bar and so I can search for all of the cards that I've ever made um based off of particular words but I think that it's actually really valuable to spell things correctly in large part because you can search your deck based off of words and if you misspell it it's actually not going to find those things so if I misspelled say epidural hematoma or if I misspelled hematoma let's say it would only show me the cards in

which I'd spelled hematoma correctly um and as I was showing you earlier from the browse menu you can actually just edit the cards this is the easiest way to edit the cards is just to find the card and then you can just type it into the browse window it will change the card immediately um and yeah you can also go to delete cards and there's a lot of other really useful things that you can do I can you know highlight all of these cards let's say that you know I had just created a bunch of

cards and I realized I didn't make any uh tags for them you can actually just hit add tag and now all of those things can um now have my capitals tag and I can now go down in my browser window and then find all of my cards that are tagged with capitals and so there's a lot of useful features these are probably the most common ones that I'm use in my day-to-day life yeah oh I would say probably the other the other maybe useful features um just to highlight some I'll I can make a a

future video if you are interested which again please put in the comments what sort of videos you would like to see um another feature that you can certainly use I will use sometimes is to change deck and so if I wanted to say Obviously capitals don't belong in medical school maybe they would belong and say my test deck or I can add we add a deck here um I can instead of it being default we can call it uh capos right so I can add a deck here so now you can see it is in

the test deck it is a sub deck of the test deck and is called capitals I'm going to cover this in the future but there's also the ability to cram specific cards and so let say that you wanted to um study things separately you can do that from a special function called creating a filtered deck and so we won't cover that in this video be sure to subscribe to the channel so you can um be alerted when we have new videos like that all right so the next feature that we're going to talk about is

stats so the purpose of stats is really to monitor your progress and you can use it to help adjust your study habits I'm going to show you the stats what I will say is is that most of you are going to want to hit collection cuz you're going to have multiple decks and so you don't want to just look at that that particular deck which is going to be the last deck that I opened collection is going to be all of the Decks that I've ever created and studied from the most relevant for 99% of

users are going to be three tabs in the stats menu they're going to be reviews answer buttons and added I'm going to talk briefly about the other ones but those are the ones that I'm going to spend the most time talking about reviews is going to tell me how many cards did I review um and tell me about those reviews so if I hover over this so you can see here um you got different colors note that I am part color blind so you're going to have to bear with me um but this red color

is I think it's kind of orangish is learning so what that means is that there were eight times that I um was reviewing things where I clicked a button opened one card and I hit again 99 times and you know saw it 100 times then it would still it would count it as 100 reviews for learning as I could also do 100 cards that I'm learning which means that they're the new cards that I'm I'm learning from the new cards are again the ones that I have made but I haven't reviewed yet and so from

reviewing from the first time those are the learning cards and so on this day 11 days ago I reviewed because this is a test deck um I had made um I don't know however many cards and what this is saying now is that I didn't review anything over the last uh N9 days in between those and then today you can see my reviews that I did and so you saw that I made a card and I reviewed it and so that is why there it shows learning one you got different kinds of intervals and so

as you saw the cards that I had gotten right the interval was something like you know hard was 2 days and I think good was like 14 days something like that and so those are ones where I you haven't done them I forget the cut off I think it's probably something like 30 days where once the interval for how long you algorithm predicts that you're going to remember this information um once that goes beyond 30 days then I think it's called a mature card since I've only reviewed these cards once before and this is the

first time that I'm seeing them after the first time that they were in the learning pile um they're still young cards and so and so what you'll notice is that I didn't hit again on any of these but I'm going to show you what happens when I do hit again and so this is my test card um I think this is the one I just made so this isn't going to work oh here uh here this is one so I'm going to hit again on this one and so I'm hit again on this one so

now let's look at what happens to my stats and so I'm again I'm going to hit collection again so I can see all of my cards so you'll see that I hit I'm now learning it says two reviews and so that's because I hit again twice on those cards and so those are cards that are young or they cards that are mature that I've hit again on and so that's what the uh learning means filtered is again if you create like a separate deck to either review a head or to cram from that's the blue

filtered cards you can also see this is something that I didn't actually notice until like years into doing ay which you probably have noticed is that you may have noticed uh which is is that you'll see this little line here um and so this is the running tally so um whenever i i i t students on looking at graphs I actually tell them to look at the axis first and so this is what I should have done here and so x-axis you've got the the timeline so uh zero days is uh today and then it

goes backwards in time for the last 30 days or you can make it 90 days or you can make it one year and so showing you is on this y AIS it's showing you how many cards did you review on that particular day and on this Y axis you can see the total number of cards that you've done over the time period so in this case over the last 30 days and so it's showing me then um that on this day right it went up to eight cards and then on this day I've done seven

reviews and so then that's why it is all the way up to 15 CU it's adding it's it's a cumulative running total of all the cards that I've reviewed over time the next one I think is most helpful is um actually answer button and so what this is telling us is how many times did I hit the various button this is I've done a very small number of reviews this is not particularly representative so what I'm actually going to show you is my actual stats from my own deck um to show you my my actual

stats for the cards that I have been setting and so you can see obviously here reviews looks very different because I've been doing my cards you know every day pretty much um and so you can look over the past year I've basically done my cards there was maybe some exceptions but I've basically done my cards pretty much consistently for now like 15 years um but if I look at my answer buttons okay so what you can see here is how many times I have hit the various buttons so you again you got again right so

I've got again hard good and easy okay so these are the different buttons and so if we go back to Stats basically those same buttons and so we've got again so one is again hard good and easy and so you'll see how many times and what percentage of the time I hit the various buttons in my particular case I almost never hit easy pressed it once I think for young cards and it looks like here I pressed it none and then for new cards I've pressed it one so it's like a very very very tiny

fact of the time the vast majority of time I'm either hitting good or hard and then I will hit again and so what this number at the bottom tells this is what percentage of the time I was hitting something that wasn't again so either hitting hard good or easy and so this is useful because I'll see students who are kind of perfectionistic like I am and they'll be like well I don't know I don't really know this card as well as I think that I do and so they will hit again the problem with this

is that every single time you hit again the interval resets and so it's basically like a new card and so remember how I said you shouldn't do more than 50 new cards in a day because it will very quickly um increase the number of cards that you're doing well hitting again you know say double my rate so I hit again maybe like uh say on average 12% of the time or 30% of the time you would be basically adding that many new cards to your deck or new reviews that you have to then review that

much more every single day this is how people can get to these situations where they are doing thousands of cards in a day and all of their time is spent doing ankey and they're like I don't understand my scores aren't going up this is overwhelming and horrible this is why it's because they're hitting again too often and so um you can get a sense of how often you're hitting Again by looking at this other thing that you can figure out by looking at how many times you hit again so sometimes it's because you're a perfectionist

the other reason that people will hit again um so often is is because their cards are just abnormally hard and so oftentimes you'll see people put just huge amounts of information on their cards right so it might be something like you know what are the capitals of France UK Uganda USA Mexico you know Argentina whatever like just this really obscene list of things that you have to remember and of course you're going to forget like at least one of those things every single time and so you're going to hit again like all the time it's

an example to illustrate that the harder that you make your cards the more likely it is that you're going to have to hit again and so there's a balance that you obviously have to strike and in a subsequent video we are going to talk lots and lots and lots about how to make excellent cards so that they are useful and connected but not overwhelming but just to just to note that this is a good way for you to check yourself and make sure that your cards are reasonable but you'll see that I actually don't add

that many cards anymore um reason being that I have I'm really just trying to maintain the knowledge that I've accumulated over the last 15 plus years if I find something I will add it um but often times I am again just trying to maintain the knowledge that I've already accumulated because as long as you don't forget the things that you've learned it's remarkable what it is that you're you're capable of I'm going to talk briefly about the other um parts of the Ani stats future due is basically telling us like um if I it tells

me the future due date of basically how many cards are going to be do on any particular day and so um I find this like only marginally helpful uh reason being like I'm constantly again like I I hit again maybe 10% of the time and so um those are going to obviously change the intervals and and and the cards that I'm reviewing today obviously like let's say that I've got a bunch of cards today that are going to have an interval that are going to be in four days right so in do in four 4

days this number is artificially low because it doesn't yet reflect the cards that I have yet to study um same thing with this this is just like a heat map calendar is just a heat map of how many reviews I've done in a particular day it's like I don't know kind of useful but I find the reviews uh panel to be much more useful card counts I think is maybe is a contender for what I would consider to be my top three um it is useful to know how many cards I have so you can

see I've got about a little bit more than 24,000 cards that are young and mature um and I've got a lot of new cards that I I think were cards that I basically made where I was like ah it wasn't worth it to do um and then you can see how many cards were buried and suspended and and other things but um it's useful for me to get a sense of how many cards have I actually created and so um I guess I've created more than 24,000 cards now that I'm actually actively reviewing review interval

is interesting it's basically telling me like what are the the intervals um of time that each card that I have that I'm actively I think it's um but how many cards have like what particular intervals and so for example I can see so this is 95% of my cards I can see that there are 98 cards that have an interval between 5,41 day and 5,500 days so basically like 10 years which is you know God that's not 10 years I mean if you you like you can see I mean there's some where it's like 9,000

days oh my goodness I have made maybe 24 you know a little more than 24,000 cards it takes me only about 30 to 60 minutes in a day to actually review those cards think about that like how is that possible it's possible because so many of my cards are in this very very long tail of long intervals and so the 10year Mark is going to be you know to say 3,600 and some days right all of these cards are basically having an interval more than 10 years that's remarkable and you know all of these cards

starting from like you know 300 days like there's so many cards with here they have an interval of greater than a year which means that after I've hit you know hard or good or easy you know the program predicts and with relative accuracy right I mean I'm only hitting I hit again 13% of the time right so with relatively good accuracy it is predicting that I am going to remember this information for a year or longer for many many of my cards so this is how I can have 24,000 cards and only have to study

you know usually less than an hour per day to recall all that information card ease is just telling me um when you hit again or hard or good or easy it's going to change the ease and so that ease will play into what the interval is and so if I hit again like a ton of times then it's it's going to increase that interval at a very slow rate and so there are a large number of cards that I've hit again on many many times I've learned a lot from that experience but it's basically the

punchline is is that it tends to be the more memorization heavy cards that I tend to forget more easily and therefore I'm hitting again on them so much hourly breakdown tells you when I'm doing my reviews and so um you can see that most my reviews over the last year have been sort of in the morning times and then it kind of Peters out after that I have experimented with different times for studying often times if I want to get my reviews done it's better to do them early because I can do I'm I'm more

focused I have more energy when I do them later on in the day I tend to I don't know just get more distracted um and it takes me often times like twice a am of time so that was the stats window next I'm going to briefly go over sync which is going to allow you to study on any device on your computer on your phone on a tablet on a web browser say like the hospital or something and allow you to make sure that this the reviews that you're doing in one place are going to

show up in another this is really important to learn how to do and so I'm going to briefly talk about this so the first thing you're going to have to do is you're going to have to sign up for an Anki web account I'm going to link in the description um how to set up your Anki web account and I'm not going to do that here let's say I've got three different devices I've got my phone I've got my computer and I've got my iPad syncing will allow me to synchronize what it is that I've

studied and all the information on my particular computer or device that I was just studying from to the server in the cloud the important thing to recognize is that I'm not actually my devices aren't talking to each other directly my devices are talking to a server and that server is talking to the other devices okay so if you understand that everything will make a lot more sense I'm going to study I'm going to study some cards um this is the card that I was doing earlier so you can see uncontrolled maternal diabetes murmur her potentially

on baby right so it's a systolic murmur um it's a flow murmur because there's an increase in uh basically fat and glycogen that happens in the intraventricular septum and so that can narrow basically the I'm going to hit synchronize on my phone and so now what I will do is I'm going to hit synchronize on my computer and it is going to synchronize it with the computer I hit synchronize and so now right it so was 101 cards and I've got two new cards and I'm going to hit synchronize and now it is going to

show me that I just reviewed two cards okay so that is how it works you'll note though that I have to synchronize it first to the server or the cloud and then I'm going to receive that information here what's important to recognize is there's one sort of critical error that people make with this and so I I want to talk about this briefly that is when you so anytime you change the note card type it basically is going to um it's going to ask you're going to require a full upload to the database when you

next synchronize your collection if you have any reviews BL BL BL BL right so I'm doing this because I want to show you what this what what happens um when you get this this window so often times people are going to see this window and it's going to say your deck's here and on Ani web differ in such a way that they can't be merged together so it's necessary to overwrite the decks on one side with the decks from the other okay so this is actually really important I I am like the kind of person

that just like kind of clicks through like Windows you don't want to click through this window you want to think about this this is actually really really important so if you choose download Anki will fetch the collection from an web and any changes you made on this device since the last sync will be lost okay so what that's saying is is that if you um if let's say I studied on my phone and I did all my reviews on my phone but my computer was the last thing to sync with the cloud then if I

hit download from eny web it's going to delete all the information from my phone and it's going to just use that information so like let's say I just did 100 views it's going to basically ignore that information and it's going to think that my most recent information is actually the stuff that was in the CL instead if you choose upload Anki will send this device's data to eny web and any changes that waiting on Ani web will be lost right so again let's say that if I had just studied on my phone I would want

to upload it to Ani web because the most updated information is on my phone so I would want to put that in the server and have that information then be propagated to all of the other things like my computer or my iPad really the question that you want to ask where is the most up-to-date information wherever has the most up-to-date information that should be the thing that uploads to eny web everything else you want to download from eny web right and that way the most up-to-dated information is going to the server and then the server

can then spread that most up-to-dated information um everywhere else often times this is not an issue you know Anki does a good job of making sure that if I study a little bit on my computer and I study a little bit on my phone or I study on my iPad like that it will actually um for the most part does a pretty good job of of reconciling those differences however there are some things like I showed you earlier if you you know change the note type or things like that where it will force you to

make a decision of which information you want now if you make the wrong decision with this I've had students where they're like I don't understand I keep studying my cards but I look at my reviews and it shows me that I haven't done any reviews for the last like 14 days and you're like hm that is weird that shouldn't happen and what they've been doing is basically they've been hitting download from eny web every single time they'll study it on their phone and the the server has this you know out ofate information that came from

their computer from say 14 days ago and they keep hitting download from Monkey web and they're like I don't understand I keep seeing the same cards every single day I check my stats and it says that I've only studied like that particular day which again it gets deleted as soon as they um hit download from anky web and so they get really confused so I'm sharing this because these are all the mistakes that people make when they're doing Ani and I don't want you to make them because they can be really really really painful in

this video we've covered the main section we've covered decks ad browse stats and sink which are the most critical features of Anki if you found this material helpful be sure to check out our related videos here so that you can learn more about how to use Anki to maximize your studying and accomplish more in less time thanks and we'll see you in the next one