 So if you're in medical school and don't have a social life then more than likely your significant other is Anki. And you may be asking, Lux, how did you even know that? Don't worry, I was in the same shoes. I love you. But today I'm going to share with you a few ways you can make your relationship with Anki even better specifically through add-on. So let's get into it. Hey guys, welcome to the channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lux from internal medicine physician trying to help you succeed on whatever journey you're on but doing it with less stress. But for those of you guys that are not strangers to the channel, you absolutely love the step-by-step advice that we had given it in the simple and advanced strategies on how to use Anki like a pro. And if you haven't seen that video, that video will be linked down below. So make sure you guys check that out. But after making that video, I did get a few requests on sharing some of my favorite add-ons. I thought why not make a video on specifically how to do that. So if you're pumped, I'm pumped. Let's get into it. So before we get into some of my favorite add-ons, full disclaimer, you do not need them because aside from just one of the add-ons that I'll talk to you about in this video, I actually didn't use add-ons at all in medical school. So here's why Anki by itself is amazing and great. And sometimes add-ons just become very unnecessary. And if anything, they only make something that's already nice, a little bit nicer. So if you think of Anki as your dependable Honda Civic, think of add-ons as typically the unnecessary decked-out spoilers that most people add to their Honda Civics. Most of them don't make the actual car look nice, some of them do. So in this video, I'm going to be sure to focus on those nice additions, but remember, you don't actually need them. And the other part to also remember about add-ons is that because Anki is always making version upgrades to their software, sometimes these add-ons actually do not work. And the other important thing to understand about add-ons is they don't always work because Anki is constantly making software upgrades. And if the person who made the add-on isn't constantly updating their software, then you have something that used to work, doesn't work now, and you kind of deserve a left and a left. But with that disclaimer out of the way, let's finally talk about the best add-ons and specifically let's talk about first how you actually install them. So first thing first, you obviously have to have Anki installed onto your software. If you're unfamiliar how to do that, check out that video on the step-by-step on Anki. That'll be linked down below. But once you have something like this, then all you have to go ahead and do is click on tools and go into your add-on section. And then if you click get add-ons, it's going to request code specifically for the add-on that you want to get. But don't worry, down below in the description, I'll actually link below the code so you guys can just quickly add them on just like I do here. And I'll also link a few of the other add-ons that I don't talk about in this video, but other people also recommend. But if you already know an add-on that you want to install after watching this video or other videos on YouTube, then you can go ahead and simply Google it. It may likely be the first kind of search result that shows up or you may find a Reddit conversation. But ultimately, once you get to the add-on page, you'll scroll down and you'll find the code. But then you'll take that code and you'll come back to Anki. You'll go ahead and just paste it in. It'll process and install it relatively quickly. You'll get a success kind of notification. And the most important thing to remember is after every add-on, you actually have to restart your Anki. And as soon as you restart, boom, you're ready to use your add-on. So let's start with probably my favorite add-on. And it is actually an add-on that I actually didn't have around when I was in medical school, or at least I didn't know about it. But I so wish because I recommend it to all the students and all the people that I work with now. And that add-on is the speed focus mode add-on. Now, one of the biggest troubles about doing flashcards specifically to Anki that you likely have experienced is you don't always get the same amount of attention throughout all of the cards within a specific deck. Typically, the flashcards very early on will take a lot of your time and energy just because you're so focused on answering them and trying to memorize them. But the flashcards towards the very latter half don't get the same amount of attention, and thus your retention for that overall lecture isn't that great. And a lot of this is just due to the fact that we don't actually have a timer to help us move on from flashcard to flashcard, so we don't give an equal kind of attention span to each and every single one of them. So that's exactly where the speed focus mode add-on comes in. So basically, it's an add-on that allows you to have a timer to the various portions of doing a flashcard. One, it'll give you an alert after a set amount of seconds, and it'll actually show you the answer regardless of you choose to show it or not. And then finally, it will actually move on to the next flashcard within a set amount of time. So let's just go back into our Anki deck so we can actually see this in action. So you actually will go into any of your Anki decks and actually have some Anki or Zonki examples. And so you'll go to options, you'll go to general, and then you choose how much time you want to pass before it gives you an alert, like, hey, move on. So I'm going to choose five seconds. And then I wanted to actually show me the answer after seven seconds, and then just move on to the next flashcard after 10. You can change the times depending on how quickly you move, but let's just see this in action. So if I click study now, it's going to show me this card. I'm not going to do anything. You should hear a little alert that'll come up in the corner. So let's actually see this add on in action. I'm going to move my face to the right so that way we can actually see the alert. So here is one question. I'm not going to actually do anything, but in five seconds, you'll actually see an alert pop up and saying it's been five seconds. But after seven, right on cue, it's actually going to show me the answer. And then after 10 seconds, it's actually going to go ahead and move on to the next flashcard after it gives me enough time. So there you go. So now it's the next flashcard. And again, you can go ahead and change the setting. So I go back to deck and click on the same thing. And I click on options and I go to general. Maybe I want to alert after two seconds. I want to see the answer after five and I want to move on after seven seconds. And so again, it's going to show me that alert. It's also going to show me the answer a little bit quicker. So once again, it shows me the alert. It shows me the answer even a little bit quicker and it should move on to the next flashcard even faster. So if you're finding that you are struggling with the time aspect of a specific flashcard, so the speed focus add-on is definitely something that I wish I knew about in medical school if it was already there or definitely something that I used a little bit more of, but especially if you're or somebody who says, Anki just takes too much of my time, you're doing flashcards takes too much of a time. Try to use this add-on to one, understand without the add-on how many seconds are you typically spending seeing a question, answering the question, reviewing the question before you move on. And then use the timer to like speed it up by 25% because then it'll still feel more or less within your comfort range, but it'll still keep moving you along that way. Again, you give enough attention to the cars that you see early on as well as the cars you see later. So that gets me into the second favorite add-on that I love using. This is actually the one I used in medical school and that's the image occlusion tool, which I actually talked about a little bit more detail in my initial kind of step by step video. So that'll be linked down below, but the instructions on how to install it are pretty much the same. So I'll link the code down below. But essentially what the image occlusion tool allows you to do is then you can go into a video. So this will be my tutorial. You'll click on add. And if you click up here, you'll see various different types of flash cars that you can make. And I went into the various different types in the last video, so you guys can check that out. But one of them is the image occlusion. So you can click choose after you've installed the add-on successfully. If you click on this picture kind of icon here, then you can just find a picture of something that you have, you know, saved to your computer. So we will have an image of the Krebs cycle. So once you guys have the images, you guys can see this is the Krebs cycle. You can just go ahead and pick any shape on the left side. So I like personally like using the rectangles, which just makes it very easy. You can just cover all the little bits and pieces of the various slide that you want. So I'll just say one on the first half for whatever reason. You essentially have two options. You can say hide all guess one or hide one guess one. Typically I like to use the hide all guess one because it doesn't give me any context clues to answering the question. I either know it or I don't. Versus where hide one guess one still shows me the rest of the slide. So if I want to go ahead and hide all guess one, that actually should give me four flashcards. And if I click close, then you can see that whenever you come back to the respective deck, you'll actually see those six cars show up and you can go ahead and see how each kind of option it will show me in red, which one it's quizzing me on and then click show answer. And it's only going to show that one and still keep the rest kind of blocked over. So then I can quiz myself on the very next object. Now the last add on that I want to talk about in this video that is actually pretty useful is the review heat map. So basically the way this will work is when you go into your Anki kind of dashboard, you actually will see something down here. Now, obviously I don't use on a daily basis in residency, but basically this will be full with various different colors. And as you go through respective days, you can see how many flashcards like today. There's actually 72 flashcards reviewed in Anki, as well as some of the ones that I did for this tutorial. And you can see how many flashcards reviewing as well as how many flashcards and cars that will be coming up later in the review cycle. So if you have flashcards that are due in six months, you can see how many are due versus flashcards that are due tomorrow. And personally I like this because it's a very clean and intuitive system, but it also will tell me roughly how many cards I do on average, you know, my longest streak, so it helps me keep the momentum going. So if you see a lot of green or you can actually change the colors, but if you see the colors packing up, having one day where you didn't do any cards is probably going to motivate you to at least do a little bit. And my personally belief is that data, if as long as it's not too excessive is actually very nice. And as long as it helps you build a momentum on something especially as important as Anki, where most of us know that we should be doing our flashcards, but also know that having excessive amounts may not actually be very motivating. Using tools like the review heat map may actually keep you going because you can actually see how many streaks you have in terms of days and then keep that momentum going forward. Those guys are some of my favorite add-ons for Anki that you can use in your daily day. Now remember my full disclaimers that you actually don't need these are actually complete channels that walk you through a bunch of other add-ons that you could use. But my personal belief is that if anything it makes the process more complicated because the biggest benefit of Anki comes from when you actually do your flashcards. So anything that takes time and energy and focus away from those isn't actually that worth it. In bottom line, simple is often better. So in this video, I tried to talk about some add-ons that actually will help you improve that momentum, create some momentum without creating that complexity that many people can do when they use Anki. That being said, I know they're add-ons that you probably use or maybe you recommend. So add those in the comment section down below and let me know what you guys think. And then once again, while add-ons can be very effective, I actually find the strategy and approach of how you create flashcards and use Anki to be even more important. So if you don't really have a very good strategy yourself, check out that step-by-step video that again I'll link down below and put right here. It's probably going to become one of the most popular videos on this channel and I can understand why because there really are the strategies that I use to give me a leg up in medical school and also recover some of those hours which I know some of you guys want. Before you click off, if any of this video was helpful then just go and help this video and this channel out by smashing that like button. Do it one more time, maybe a third time just in case the first two didn't work out. Hit that subscribe button if you want more videos just like this on a weekly basis. We're putting out tons of content to help you not only on your medical journey but to help you become a better studier, better student, more productive and just kind of learn from my own successes and failures. So if you want to succeed on your medical journey by doing it with less stress then hit that subscribe button. I promise you won't be disappointed. Hit those comments down below because I love interacting with you guys in the comment section down below. With that being said guys thank you so much for joining me on my journey. Hopefully it was a little help to you guys on yours. Love you guys and again if you haven't checked out this Anki video make sure to do so. I'll be linked down below but I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace my friends.