I Skritter an hour a day. I generally wake up with 300-400 items to review. I get this number down to zero, then add as many new items as I can before my hour's up.

Unfortunately, my life is getting busier. Soon I'll have only 30 minutes/day for Skritter. What's the best way to cope with this? Do I reduce my frequency of adding new characters (it's set the default now)? Or do I get my items-to-review to 0 (100% ready), then stop for the day?

I ask because I don't want to wake up to 600+ items in the morning.

Reducing frequency of new characters will help -- but if you're getting 300-400 the next *morning* then I wonder if you're struggling to remember the characters you've already added? Could you reinforce these somehow (sentences in Anki perhaps?).

Normally I get 200 ish the next morning. Today was an exception (almost 400) - but this was having added 150 odd words the last few days, and ones I was struggling to remember.

I generally think, as long as you're remembering the old ones fine, the less time Skrittering, the less reviews you'll start seeing. There'll be fewer new ones added too...

Don't stress about the absolute number in the queue. It's just a number of things that are ready for review. Try to ignore the number as best you can and just keep at it, a half-hour per day or whatever you can manage.

If you find that your queue is still growing out of control then you might want to set the "add word frequency" to "never" and then you can focus only on reviews until your queue gets down to manageable numbers. Then you can add words manually or dial the auto-add frequency back up.

James

Yup, add less. Overpracticing now (studying items a bit less than 100% due) will help you get ahead on your reviews and they won't feel like such a burden the next day. So lowering your adding frequency or just adding manually is a good call.

You could also break your session up into two sessions, which would balance things more toward clearing out short-term reviews and leave less in the morning to do.

James is right about ignoring the to-review numbers. It's all psychological. If you think of reviews as just as good as new words, doing them will feel more productive.

Three good suggestions!

What about memory? Byzanti is right. I do tend to forget characters I've already learned. Is my memory best served by overpracticing? It seems to me that breaking my routine into two sessions, and only practicing the items that are due, would be the wiser choice.

It's silly. Sometimes I forget how to write the most basic of characters （都，院，时, etc) even when I can read, speak, and understand them flawlessly.

I wouldn't recommend overpracticing too much--maybe down to 80% is fine, though, and will really reduce your review accumulation. The scheduling is just a guess at the forgetting that's going on in your head anyway. We aim for reviews to be most efficient at 100%, but it's not a large difference in the 80% - 150% range. (Just estimates.) Doing reviews more or less frequently is partially balanced out by forgetting fewer or more of them.

In my opinion Skritter greatly helps me become familiar with a character or word (not necessarily learn it). Even though Skritter focuses on teaching us how to write I typically am more comfortable with reading it first. I've noticed I don't tend to forget how to write basic characters once I written sentences where they are grammatically included.

So I would recommend writing sentences that include those characters. The more common ones as you mentioned should pop up frequently in your writing so you'll quickly master them.

You guys weren't kidding.

Yesterday for the second half of my practice session, I set Add New Items to Manual. I overpracticed some and stopped for the day.

This morning I woke up to 200 items, 100 less than usual. In less than half an hour I had it down to 0 and was adding new items.

So thanks all! I was expecting an improvement, but certainly not this quickly.