📖 Part 7: The Daily Review — Answer Buttons & How Scheduling Works

The review screen is where Anki earns its keep. Every day you flip a handful of cards and press one of four buttons — and those four little buttons quietly decide when you'll see each card again. This part demystifies the daily rhythm, what each button really means, and how a card travels from brand new to locked into long-term memory.

📚 What You'll Learn

By the end of this part, you'll understand:

The daily loop — study a deck, try to recall, show the answer, rate yourself
What Again, Hard, Good, and Easy each mean, and how to choose honestly
The card lifecycle: New → Learning → Review → Relearning, and what "due" means
How intervals grow on success and shrink on failure — and where the old "ease factor" fit in
Keyboard shortcuts, Undo, and what to do when reviews pile up

In This Part

The Daily Rhythm

Using Anki day to day is almost boringly simple, and that's the point. You open Anki, look at your list of decks, click the one you want to study, and press Study Now. Anki shows you the front of a card — a question, a word, a cloze with a blank. Before you flip it, you do the one thing that makes the whole system work: you try to recall the answer from memory. Then you click Show Answer, the back appears, and you rate how the recall went by pressing one of four buttons.

That's the entire loop: see the front → try to remember → show the answer → rate yourself → next card. Repeat until the deck is empty. A typical session is a few minutes to maybe half an hour, depending on how many cards are waiting. When you're done, Anki shows a "Congratulations, you have finished this deck for now" screen and you close the app until tomorrow.

The magic isn't in the clicking — it's in the timing behind it. That honest little rating you give each card feeds the scheduler, the part of Anki that decides when the card comes back. Rate a card as easy and it won't bother you for weeks; fumble it and you'll see it again in minutes or tomorrow. Over days and weeks this pushes each fact to reappear right around the moment you were about to forget it, which is exactly when a review does the most good.

🧠 Mindset

If pressing the "right" button feels stressful at first, relax — there is no grade being recorded and no way to permanently break a card. The scheduler is forgiving and self-correcting: one misjudged button just nudges a single card's timing. You will get a feel for the buttons within a few sessions. This page is a reference you can return to any time.

The Four Answer Buttons

After you press Show Answer, four buttons appear across the bottom of the screen. Each one carries a little time label — 1m, 10m, 4d, 2mo — and that label is a promise: it's roughly when Anki will show you this card next if you press that button. Reading those labels is the fastest way to understand what a button will do right now for the card in front of you.

Button	What it means	What it does to the schedule
Again (1)	You couldn't recall it — you drew a blank or got it wrong.	The card is a lapse: its interval collapses and it comes back very soon (often ~1–10 minutes) to be relearned.
Hard (2)	You recalled it, but only barely — slow, effortful, uncertain.	The next interval grows only a little (or barely at all). Under the classic algorithm it also lowers the card's ease.
Good (3)	A normal, correct recall — you got there without a struggle. This is your default.	The interval grows by the healthy expected amount. Most of your presses should be Good.
Easy (4)	Instant and trivial — you knew it before you finished reading the question.	The interval jumps forward more aggressively so you don't waste time on something you clearly own.

The golden rule is simple: Good is the normal answer. Press Again only when you genuinely could not recall — not when you were close, not when you second-guessed yourself. Reserve Easy for cards that are truly effortless; overusing it pushes intervals out so far that a card can vanish for months before you're actually ready.

⚠️ Watch Out: The "Hard" Trap

The single most common beginner mistake is treating Hard as "Good, but it was a little tricky." It isn't. Hard means "I recalled it, but the answer came slowly and with real effort." If you habitually press Hard on cards you actually knew, you'll bury yourself in reviews — under the classic SM-2 algorithm, repeatedly pressing Hard also drags a card's ease factor down, which shrinks every future interval and can trap the card in "ease hell" where it reappears far too often. When in doubt between Hard and Good, and you did recall the answer, press Good.

✅ Tip

You don't have to reach for the mouse. The number keys 1–4 map directly to Again / Hard / Good / Easy, and the Space bar shows the answer and then presses Good. Most experienced users review almost entirely from the keyboard.

The Card Lifecycle

Every card moves through a small set of states, and knowing them explains why a card behaves the way it does. A card doesn't jump straight to "come back in a month" — it earns its way there.

📖 Definition

New: a card you've never studied. It waits until Anki introduces it (limited by your daily new-card cap).
Learning: a freshly seen card working through short intra-day steps — by default 1 minute, then 10 minutes — before it graduates.
Review: a graduated card scheduled at day-scale intervals (days, then weeks, then months). This is where a card spends most of its life.
Relearning: a review card you failed (a lapse). It drops back into short steps to be relearned, then returns to Review.

So the journey looks like this: a New card is introduced and enters Learning, where you clear its short steps. Once it passes the final step it graduates to Review and starts collecting real, growing intervals. If you ever fail a review card (press Again), it lapses into Relearning, does a quick step or two, and rejoins the Review pool with a reduced interval. Here's the whole flow:

The word due ties this together. A card is "due" when its scheduled next-review moment has arrived — for a Review card that means the day has come; for a Learning card it can mean the next 10 minutes. Your deck's numbers on the main screen count these buckets: New cards waiting to be introduced, cards in Learning, and Review cards that have come due. Two caps shape how many you actually see: a daily new-card limit and a daily review limit (both are covered in detail in Part 8). Those limits are why adding a thousand cards at once doesn't dump a thousand cards on you tomorrow.

Intervals, Ease & Honesty

The heart of spaced repetition is that intervals grow on success and shrink on failure. Recall a card correctly and Anki waits longer before the next review — 1 day becomes 3, then 8, then 20, then months — because each successful recall makes the memory more durable. Fail it and the interval collapses back toward minutes, because a forgotten fact needs to be relearned before it can be spaced out again. This expanding schedule is the spacing effect put to work: you're reviewing right at the edge of forgetting, which is where each repetition buys you the most memory for the least time.

Where "ease" came from

Under Anki's classic algorithm — a variant of SM-2 — each Review card carried an ease factor that started at 250%. When a card came due, its current interval was multiplied by that ease to get the next one (so a 10-day interval at 250% ease became roughly 25 days). Pressing Good kept ease steady; pressing Again or Hard lowered it, permanently shrinking every future interval for that card. This is the mechanism behind the "ease hell" warning above.

⚠️ Forward reference: Modern Anki (version 23.10 and later) can replace the ease-factor system with FSRS — the Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler — which models memory far more precisely and largely eliminates ease hell. We cover FSRS fully in Part 8. For this part, focus on the experience of reviewing; the buttons feel the same either way.

Honesty is the whole game

The scheduler can only be as good as the ratings you feed it. If you press Good on a card you actually blanked on — because you "sort of" remember it, or you feel bad marking it Again — you're lying to the algorithm, and it will space that card out as if you knew it. You'll then forget it for real and wonder why Anki "isn't working." Rate your actual recall, not the recall you wish you'd had. A good habit: decide your answer before you flip the card, then grade against what you committed to.

↩️ Misclicked? Undo it.

Pressed the wrong button? Press Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on Mac), or use Edit → Undo. Anki steps back the last answer and shows the card again so you can re-rate it. No harm done.

When reviews pile up

Miss a few days and you'll open Anki to a scary backlog. Don't panic and don't try to cram every overdue card in one sitting — that's exhausting and wrecks your accuracy. The calm fix is to temporarily lower your new cards per day (so you're not adding fuel), then chip away at the reviews over several days. The due count shrinks faster than you'd expect. Digging out of a backlog gets a full treatment in Part 13; for now, just know that a pile of reviews is a scheduling situation, not a failure.

🛠️ How To: Do Your First Review Session

What you'll do: study a deck from start to "finished," grading each card honestly with the keyboard, and understand the screen you land on at the end.

Step by step

Open Anki. On the main screen, click the name of the deck you want to study, then click the blue Study Now button.
Read the front of the first card and genuinely try to recall the answer before doing anything else. Commit to an answer in your head.
Press Space (or click Show Answer) to reveal the back.
Compare it to what you committed to, then grade honestly with 1 = Again, 2 = Hard, 3 = Good, 4 = Easy. Remember: Space also works as "Good."
Keep going until you see "Congratulations, you have finished this deck for now." That means no cards are due right now — you're done until later today or tomorrow. Close Anki and come back next session.

💡 Tip

The "finished" screen sometimes appears while a few cards are still in short learning steps — Anki may say something like "there are cards due in 8 minutes." That's normal: those cards are mid-Learning and will pop back shortly. You can wait, or just come back later; nothing is lost.

Best Practices

✅ Do's

Make Good your default — most correct recalls should get Good, not Hard or Easy.
Try to recall before flipping the card; grading only means something if you attempted the answer.
Review a little every day — the whole system assumes small, regular sessions, not weekly marathons.
Use the keyboard (Space and 1–4) to make sessions fast and frictionless.
Undo (Ctrl/Cmd+Z) immediately if you misclick, so a card gets the rating it deserved.

❌ Don'ts

Don't press Again for a slow-but-correct recall — that's what Hard is for; Again means you truly forgot.
Don't lean on Hard as "Good with a wince" — habitual Hard buries you in reviews and drags ease down under SM-2.
Don't spam Easy — it flings intervals so far out that cards disappear before they're solid.
Don't grade dishonestly to feel productive — the scheduler believes you, then you forget for real.
Don't try to clear a giant backlog in one sitting — lower new cards and chip away instead.

💡 Pro Tips

Not sure between Hard and Good, but you did recall it? Press Good. It self-corrects faster than Hard.
Glance at the time label on each button — it tells you exactly what that press will do to this card right now.

📓 Learning Journal

Keep a journal as you work through this guide — digital or paper. After each part, jot down:

Key ideas you learned
Things that clicked for you
Questions or confusion points to revisit
Ideas you want to try
Your progress and how you feel about it

✍️ This part's prompt: After your first honest review session, how did grading feel? Were you tempted to press Good on a card you actually blanked on, or Again on one you nearly had? Write down one moment where being honest with the button was harder than you expected — and why sticking with the truth will serve your memory better.

📝 Part Summary

🎓 Key Takeaways

The daily loop is: study a deck → try to recall → Show Answer → rate honestly → next card.
Again / Hard / Good / Easy set the next interval; Good is the normal answer, and overusing Hard causes real problems.
Cards move through New → Learning → Review, and lapse into Relearning when failed.
Intervals grow on success and shrink on failure; classic SM-2 used an ease factor starting at 250%.
Honest grading is what makes the scheduler work — and Undo has your back for misclicks.

🎉 What You Can Now Do

You can sit down, study a deck end to end, and grade each card with intention instead of guesswork. You understand why a card comes back in ten minutes versus two months, what state any card is in, and how your button presses steer the whole schedule. That's the core skill of using Anki well — everything else is tuning.

❓ Common Questions

If I press "Again" a lot, am I doing something wrong?

Not necessarily — pressing Again honestly is the system working. But a very high Again rate on mature cards usually means the cards are too hard or ambiguous (too much on one card, or a vague prompt). Fix the card, not the button. Writing cards that stick was covered in Part 6.

What's the difference between "Hard" and "Again"?

Again means you failed — you couldn't recall the answer. Hard means you succeeded, but it was slow and effortful. If any correct answer came out of you, it's Hard (or Good) — never Again.

Does it matter what time of day I review?

Not much — consistency matters far more than timing. Anki batches everything by day (with a configurable "next day starts at" hour), so pick a time you'll actually keep and stick to it.

🔭 Up Next

In the next part, we'll open up Deck Options and turn on FSRS — the modern scheduler that replaces the ease factor with a real memory model — so you can dial in your retention target and keep your daily workload sustainable.

📚 Additional Resources

🌟 Keep Going

The buttons feel awkward for about a week, then they become invisible — you'll just know. Trust the loop, grade honestly, and let the scheduler do the remembering for you. You can revisit this page any time you second-guess a button.