Anki settings after a long break
The standard advice when returning to an Anki deck after a long break is
- Create a filtered deck that contains cards that are recently due (say, within a week)
- Review remaining backlog little by little until all reviews are cleared
The idea is that (1) ensures that you don't continue to fall further behind. Cards that reviewed close to their due date are also less likely to be forgotten. I found this deck generally worked as advertised. I continued to have pretty high accuracy on the reviews of old cards, and it made sure new cards were reviewed promptly.
The problem I had with (2) was that my accuracy had dropped to around 50%. That meant while I was reviewing the remaining cards, I quickly added more cards to the next day's review. That effectively kept me from making much progress. Even on days when I had a free block to review cards, I'd limit myself to stopping after I'd missed 10 or so cards so that reviews for the next day didn't pile up. If I missed a couple days, I often would have so many recently due cards that I wouldn't get to my backlog at all.
Not sweating the lapses
Recently I decided to change my settings for the deck so that answering "Again" just reduced the ease by 70% with no upper limit. That means if I get a card wrong, it typically gets scheduled a few months later instead of the next day. Furthermore, the due dates are spread out based on the card so I don't get a big spike of reviews on a single day. I've been more motivated to use my occasional free periods to go through reviews, and if I skip a day I don't have a big pileup of cards that are recently due. I've also found that my accuracy has gone up from around 50% to around 70%. By getting through more cards I'm reviewing more material and getting to take advantage of redundancies.
Going forward
I'm about half-way through my backlog, and plan to keep these settings until I get through the backlog. However, once I'm done with the backlog, I'm not sure I'll keep them. I'm concerned that I'm not actually re-learning the lapsed cards. That's the tradeoff I want for now, but once I get caught up I'll probably move things back to the default.