 One of the most useful yet confusing tools for students, particularly in medical school has to be Anki. Like just look at these settings. What the hell does all of this mean? And so today's video, we're going to make this super useful tool a lot more simpler by going over the best settings for you as a student. Let's get into it. Hey friends, welcome back to channel. In case you're new here, my name is Lakshman, internal medicine physician. And here on the MD journey, make videos and content to help people like you succeed on whatever journey you're on, particularly medical journeys, but doing it with less stress. And to help with that less stress aspect, today I want to do a full breakdown of the best settings that you could be using in Anki. And we'll talk about everything from basic settings to how to make sense of the settings to how to actually adjust the settings to best use it for your particular circumstance. Now if you're brand new to Anki, I definitely recommend first watching this videos that so far at this point, 250,000 people have watched here on YouTube and dropped hundreds and hundreds of comments on. And this will not only break down how Anki works, the basics profiles, but also advanced strategies that I use as a medical student to help go from 10 hours a day to five hours a day of studying and also still graduate with a 3.9 GPA. So if you're not familiar with what Anki is, if it's still really confusing, you want to know how to actually use it, then go ahead and check out that video first and then come to this video to actually understand the minutias of the settings and how to best use it for yourself. And when you're done with that video, then you can come back here where we actually talk about the settings, which I'll be completely honest, are still very confusing. And I'm not going to pretend that in this video, I understand every single minutia. So if I do make a mistake, just politely comment down below. That way I, as well as every other person who's trying to use Anki can best learn from you. And full disclaimer, no, I didn't learn all this by myself. And also to make sure I wasn't making this video that needed to be, I'll link down below some of the amazing blog posts that I found where people really, really get into the math and the numbers behind all these settings. So if you're wanting to learn more or if the video didn't help you out, make sure you check those links out, possibly answering your question as well. And so as a quick overview in today's video, we'll talk about the basic settings of Anki, as well as the basic settings of actually how to do the learning aspect of it and how to make some changes and what those do to those individual flashcards. If you feel like you're already somewhat of a pro at Anki, then go ahead and click out any of the chapters in the video and jump to the part that you're most interested in. And while you're down there, hit that like button. And there's just a few things to highlight that are good to know, one of them including the night mode. So if you really enjoy this like black kind of look, which I definitely do in most of my things, you can click this and you just have to restart Anki to have this look. Otherwise it's gonna have the typical white background, which is also totally fine. Next and arguably probably the most important is the scheduling and the basic settings. And essentially the first few things that you wanna make sure are checked is this first box that says show next review time above answer buttons. Essentially what this does, if I have unchecked this and I go into any single flashcard that I have to do, let's just do this Anki tutorial. Then if I go ahead, I see that there are no times that are set above my easy good hard again functions. But if I go back in here and I go ahead and select the preferences and I go back and close it. Now, if I started this flashcard, you can actually see the time intervals respected to each individual selection that I made. So I usually recommend that you go ahead and keep that open so that way you'll know when the next time you see a flashcard is, that way you know that if a test you're studying for is going to show up in X amount of days and you wanna make sure you see that card again, this will probably not be the best settings because I'm actually see this card in a year, 1.3 years. Next, I usually recommend keeping this check which is to show remaining card counts. Essentially you'll know how many cards are left before you're done with your review. It's usually nice for me to kind of keep an eye of how many cards I have left so I can keep myself moving along, especially if I have little time left and lots of cards to review. And then the last function that's probably important to know is how you want Anki to essentially treat your new cards and new flashcards that you make as well as your old review ones. You can either choose to have a mixture where it essentially mixes new and old cards together or if you wanna see your new cards first or your new cards after your old ones. This is kind of a matter of preference but I've seen a lot of students use any one of these options and do just perfectly fine. And the final parts of these basic settings include essentially when you want your next day to be started. I usually recommend just putting this four hours past midnight because most of us aren't doing flashcards at 4 a.m. And then finally these last two usually don't have to change the default settings. The learn ahead limit essentially says that if you click a flashcard and you selected it that you wanna show up in 15 minutes then what is the maximum time that you can see that flashcard again. So if you set it to zero then the quickest you can see it is in 15 minutes but if you show it again in 15 or 10 minutes that means if you're done with all of your flashcards we'll show you that one again. Usually I just set this to 20 and that's what it's been since the start of my duration. And then finally your time box time limit essentially says that if you want some kind of motivating factor that says, hey, Lux, you've reviewed X amount of cards in the last 30 minutes and you wanna keep the momentum going you can set this up and it'll give you a little bit of a notification that says you've done this many flashcards. I usually don't care to have Anki motivate me more than it demotivates me by the amount of cards that I have like hundreds of here but everyone has their own personal option. In case you're having any issues with a network connection or syncing your cards I'll just go ahead and put my current settings up here you can pause the video and make sure that those are the ones that you currently have. So now that we've gotten into the basic settings let's actually get into the meat and potatoes of how all of the important settings in Anki work which is really where the confusing part comes especially doing this for four years. I really didn't understand any of this and I actually just never cared to but hopefully for the purpose of this video I can explain the multiple different buttons and how you can adjust and change these based off when your next quiz, your next exam or how well you wanna learn certain information would be. So to mess around with the settings and understand it let's just click on any of the decks we'll do farm because let's be honest no one likes farm except pharmacist but we're gonna go into the options and really try to make sense of each and every one of these things. And the first thing we have to understand are steps which is if you're looking in the new card setting then the steps will be here and are shown in minutes. Steps are essentially what it sounds like whenever I do a flash card for example if I kept these steps which says one and 10 minutes then if I go ahead and go ahead and click on the first flash card it essentially represents what good would look like. So to make sense of some of these settings the first thing we have to really understand is what steps mean. Now steps essentially how you wanna graduate or how you wanna anki to move along every time you don't or do understand a flash card. And the best way to understand this is that one it's in minutes and so essentially it says that whatever this first option is is that if I don't know a card and I click again which will show in a second then it's gonna show it to me again in a minute. And if I select good which I'll show again then it'll show me that card again in 10 minutes. Now if I have a different interval after it that essentially means that if I click good the first time it'll show it to me in 10 minutes. Now if I add more to my steps let's just say I say 60 essentially what this means that if I click again it's gonna show me the flash card just like before in one minute. If I do click good on a flash card because I know it it's gonna show it to me again in 10 minutes and if I click good again then the next interval moving up is going to be 60 minutes and then after that the card is essentially graduated that means I feel like I've learned it. So I'm essentially going to be learning this card in three steps but the first one being my option for again. So just to show the basic options if I just go ahead and click restore default and I go ahead and click on study now then the first thing it's gonna do is again if I clicked again it's gonna show it to me in one minute and then everything that will be after that will be in the good interval. So less than 10 minutes will be here. And then if I chose to go ahead and add something to that specific deck and I wanted to make it a different interval so I just say I created some options. And so if I came back from the default setting and I changed it to something else like this for example essentially what this will mean is if I have to show the card again it's gonna show it to me in 60 minutes and then if I say good it's gonna say okay first time you're gonna get to see the card again in one day then you're gonna see the card in two days and then you're gonna see the card in four days. And again this is all in minutes which is a little confusing but just to give you a little bit more granular control. So you can play with these settings as you like and if you do find something that you do really enjoy then you can just go manage and add as I did here for this YouTube example as well as some other options that will go over in one second. So as you guys can see for this example flash card if I clicked again then it's gonna show it to me in my first interval which I put 60 minutes in that last setting and then if I actually click good it's gonna show it to me in one day if tomorrow I see the same flash card again and I click good it's actually gonna say two days instead of one and then if I click it one more time then it's gonna say show it to me again in four days. So that's how the intervals work. Now finishing off some of the other parts of the settings under new cards the first thing that you can see is what orders you want the cards to be shown. So you can either say show the new cards that are added or show new cards in a random order. Usually again I recommend seeing the new cards first I can just feel like the new material is out of my way but you can play with the preferences however you want. Next is pretty self-explanatory how many new cards you wanna see. Essentially I will set this to a number that is a little higher than the amount of cards that typically make in a day. So if I'm typically making 50 cards in a day then I'll probably set it at 100 so I can make sure I see all of my new cards the day that I make them. The next setting we have to talk about is the graduating interval. Now this is essentially the learning phase of Anki which basically says a card is under the learning phase if it's somewhere within this interval. But if I get past where I'm clicking good on day four then now the card is officially graduated or if I move day four and I just wanna see the card twice then after pressing good on day two then that card is officially graduated. Or if I wanna remove this last option and saying well if I see the card again in one day and still press good and then I press it again in two days afterwards and still press good then I wanna say that's probably enough luck that you've seen the card. So the graduating interval is essentially okay like what many days do you want in between when the card is graduated to when you see it again. So if I click 10 then essentially that would mean that after seeing this card and pressing good here the next time that that card would show up after being graduated would be 10 days. And the easy interval is also very self-explanatory. Essentially these steps are really made for you using the again and good option within Anki which I really didn't understand. I was always pressing the easy option if I really knew a card but it's defaulted to set to four. If I press easy it is always set to whatever that easy interval it is. Essentially if you use a good and again option you're using the Anki algorithm to help move a card along but if you press easy you essentially skip all of that and it automatically graduates the card. And so that's something to keep in mind if you think a card is somewhat easy but not really enough to where you feel like it's done with the Anki algorithm then usually pressing good is your way to go especially if you're used and wanting to see a card more often than not. And so just an example if we set the easy interval at 10 days because you're like I really just don't wanna see cards that I'm really good at then if I go in here then this card will actually show up an easy and then I can use the good and again option to really be crucial saying like do you really understand this flash card or the slide in this setting or should you be using the good option? So it's always something worth considering and I usually will recommend keeping it at four unless you have something like boards which we'll talk about later in the episode. And then finally something I would recommend checking if it's not is the very related new cards until the next day. If you're using something like the close option where like a long sentence or a phrase is related but then you're only showing a flash card. For example, if you were to be using Anki to do geography you may be saying the capital of so and so is this and you could essentially make two flash cards using the close option but it's too easy to see both of those flash cards during the same setting so essentially if I saw a close option where it says the capital of Texas is Austin or Austin is the capital of Texas I wouldn't wanna see both of those flash cards the same day. So putting this makes sure that card if it was supposed to show up today will at least get buried until the next day. Next we're gonna get into the review tabs and the settings that you can recommend so just going back to the default to kind of show you where most things are. The first thing that you have to think about is the maximum reviews per day. I usually will set this number and most students will set this number as high as possible because you don't want a card not to show up just because the view number was a little bit too low. By no means if you set the number at 9999 will you actually see almost 10,000 flash cards a day where you shouldn't but this at least makes sure that the cards that should be scheduled for that day aren't lingering because of this one setting. And the rest of these settings that you usually don't touch one thing that you should keep in mind is the maximum interval which essentially said, what is the longest time that you wanna go until you see a flash card for the next time? And then the rest of the things on the review settings you can usually just leave by itself and be perfectly fine but one thing I do recommend considering changing is the maximum intervals. Basically this says how many days in between when you see a flash card for the next time. This is essentially set for a hundred years I believe but I would recommend changing this particularly if you're studying for something like a board exam. So if you say my test is gonna be in a year if then you can at least say I wanna see the card again in 200 days. So even if the interval is much longer than 200 you'll at least see the card more than once or at least before test day. But otherwise you can just keep it at 365 which means that you'll see those flash cards again at least within a year. A hundred years is kind of ridiculous. And on a similar note whenever you're doing your reviews I also click the very related reviews to make sure that the cards that I'm doing I'm not biased by other cards that I'm getting to kind of help me with these answers. So again, capital Texas, Austin, Austin's, capital Texas I usually wouldn't wanna see those same cards on the same day. So clicking that will make sure that that's avoided. Now if you've understood all of that so far like bless you because it takes us a while and again if any of that is confusing I will link some of the articles and blogs that really helped me understand this and also get into a lot more detail that I'm getting into this video. The bottom line is that you really don't have to change these settings. You can be perfectly fine using some of those techniques that we talked about in that first video which is why I recommend going to that if you haven't done so already. But using some of these techniques will at least give you a little bit more granular control especially if you're cramming or studying for board exams which we'll get to in a second. But to finish off the settings we have to get into laps settings. Now laps is basically okay I've graduated a card thus so I go back in here and this that means that I've seen a card in 10 minutes and I've called it done or in my YouTube example I see a card in one day and then two days and then it's officially graduated. Well what if that card is now shown to me again and I don't know it? Like what happens to a graduated card? That's essentially what the laps function or lap settings helps you do. So essentially when you lapse on a card or you have to press again then how does that card move going forward? And essentially this is the new steps for that individual card before it's essentially re-graduated. So if I see a card let's say I don't know that Austin is the capital of Texas but I did a month ago or a week ago and so this basically says that to re-graduate that card based off of the default settings at Anki I would just have to show it to myself again in 10 minutes but if you really wanted to make sure that I forgot something I really want to make sure I nail it down then you can say I'm gonna add a little bit more time. So to re-graduate this card this proverbial card of Austin being the capital of Texas I'd have to show it and make sure that I know it and press good show it to me again in 10 minutes and so if you feel like you want to know a graduated card that you lapsed on even better then usually the default settings is just set to 10 minutes but you can make this even longer and have multiple steps so a card that you've forgotten can be easily remembered you can do 10, 60 and we'll talk about more settings later on. The next thing that we have to talk about that's really important is called a new interval setting essentially this says that if you do last on a card you can have cards that you may see in 365 days which means that you haven't seen in a year or cards that you've seen in 30 days but right now the default setting is set to zero. So essentially it will penalize both cards equally so a card that you may know really well or a card that's been a long time since you've seen will basically say show it to me again in one day. Usually that's not the way you want to do your learning typically most people will set this anywhere from 20 to 40 to 50. So for example if you haven't seen a flash card in 365 days if it's at 0% the next time you'll see that card is an interval of one day but if you set it at let's say 20% then it's going to take you 365 that's when the card should have shown and multiply it by 20% or roughly about 70 days which basically means you take a penalty but not as big of a one for a flash card that's relatively new. So hopefully that made sense and again there's more examples in the blog post linked down below. And to finally finish off the settings here are the leech threshold and the leech action. This basically says that if you see a card that you keep graduating and you keep messing up on over and over again what do you want Anki to do? So usually I just recommend keeping it at eight last days and then essentially tagging it. That means if you have a flash card that you were once officially okay with when you graduated and then you essentially keep forgetting and forgetting it then you want to make sure Anki sometimes does something with it. Usually tagging is a great option because then if you're studying for like a board exam or something you can come back and say let's look at all the flash cards that kind of knew but now I'm forgetting and it'll tag with the leech option. So guys I know that that was a lot. Hopefully it wasn't too confusing. If it was again all of those blog posts I'll be linked down below as well as dropping your comments down below and questions, they happen to answer them. But just keep in mind that you don't necessarily need to change these unless you want a little bit more granular control. I never made any adjustments when I was in medical school to these settings. I was still able to do just fine. But the next few things we'll talk about is how to change the settings in case you're cramming in case you're prepping for a long board exam or if you an exam in a couple of days how to make sure you use the best use of Anki. Let's get into that part. So cramming function Anki is something I used a lot not because I was necessarily cramming but sometimes the Anki reviews tended to be so much into the future compared to when my test was. So let's just say I have a test in three or four days but I don't have flash cards that are scheduled for that individual lectures for another week. So one thing you can do is actually use the custom study option and you can go to study by card or state or tag and then click right here all cards in a random order and usually I would make this number atrociously high because essentially this will make you a custom deck so you can come back to it later but I will make this kind of like 999 or something that way especially if I'm studying a lot of cards for an individual test I'm not limited to 100 but now you can essentially see all of your cards in a random order for a specific test. So if I click choose tags there's no tags specifically for this one but I'll click okay and it shows me all 27 cards for this individual random deck that I made and you can do this for any of your tests you can do this per lecture if you're using mini decks so if I go back in here and you're doing something like this where if you have a cardiology block and you're making mini decks you can do this per individual class so if it's a Monday and you're like oh I have to review lecture one and two then you can go ahead and do the custom study for lecture one and then come back and do lecture two or if you're like oh I just need a study for all of the cardiology material in like no necessarily random order then you can just do the same thing but use custom study and then do it for all of those cards within that big large deck and if you're studying for a board exam like step one and you're using pre-made cards or here's the onking deck you can actually click on it and say oh I actually want to do a custom study and I want to go ahead and just cram for the weak cards that I'm struggling with so if I click choose tags then it will show me all the different areas that are already marked within so I just want to do biochem questions from Ambos or if I want to do boards and beyond and so, so, so many more and the final part of this video I'm gonna go ahead and just put out the various settings for different kind of utilities that you may need first thing we'll talk about is cramming and so if you want to just go pause the video you can copy these settings as you need them and just go ahead and make a new one the first thing is cramming so in addition to using the custom study option which is usually the thing that I like to do if you do want to use onking in a quick way where you just see flashcards over and over again in a short period of time and you're just ready to grind out some hours of doing flashcards then again your new cards you can make multiple different intervals so that you can see the same flashcard again so again this will say I want a weak card, again card to show up in 10 minutes but then everything that's good will be 30 180 minutes, 70, 20 and so forth the more steps that I add into this process the more times I'll see that card before it's officially graduated but you can also make these intervals relatively short so then some of the flashcards will show up again that same day or the very next day and in a similar fashion when you get into the last function you can go ahead and pause the video here essentially this will say you'll see a flashcard within a day two days and then four days so if you're setting for a test within a week then you can actually be make sure that you can see your good cards within that span of time now on the flip side if you're setting for something like a board exam or if you have a pre-made Anki deck where there are tons and tons of cards usually it makes more sense that you start to see the flashcard initially maybe again in a day or two and then there's a larger gap so that way you have more time to see newer information so this is my board prep settings so again you can pause these and you can change these however you want so don't feel like you've to tack my settings based off of it again I didn't necessarily didn't use these settings when I was using Anki but this is how I would recommend setting this up initially if I press the good option it's going to show it to me again in one day and then if I show the good option again it's going to show it to me in three days and you can change your easy interval to something like 10 days so if it's a flashcard that you know really well then you can just put it as 10 and your graduate interval after that point will be three days or if you wanted to make it a week at a time that's also okay if you feel like you're mastering certain flashcards and you want a bigger gap between those and to see more and more information this is usually the way I recommend and then if you go into the last function this will essentially say that if you do have a flashcard that was good and you graduated and then you kind of set down then it'll show it to you again in one day and I believe 10, 0, 8, 0 I have to do my math backwards is seven days, so cool so that's a week and then finally get into the last function if you do have a board prep card that you were graduating in and then you have to press again it will show it to you again in one day and then go back to showing you two again in a week and then move forward into the intervals and if you're studying for your board prep the last thing that I would do is just go into your review function and change this based off of how many days you have left into your actual exam and then at least give yourself a little bit of extra time so if my test was in 300 days like a year I may want to see that card again in 150 days that way I can possibly see it again second time before the test actually comes around so I can get the cards multiple times around and you can change this however you want but usually I keep the minimum at 365 now the biggest takeaway from this video is one, if you haven't watched that other video on how to use Anki like a pro highly recommend it but two, in videos that I made about Anki such as the add-ons which you can check out right here you don't necessarily have to do any changes if you don't want to you can essentially make the most of Anki and using some of the strategies that we talked about in that initial video to really get the most of it again if you want some more granular control or at least you want to understand what the hell you're changing hopefully this video and this episode helped you out again if you're still confused add your comments down below but if this video helped any part more sense to you all I ask is you hit a quick like button to really just support this video and the channel because this video wasn't that easy to make you can try to understand how complicated it was for me to try to understand it I'm still trying to make sense of it but again if I didn't do a good enough job I will try to give as much credit to the people who did do a much better job in blog posts and more descriptions I'll link those down below there'll also be a blog post to this video so you can always come back to the actual text and images that I used in this video for you to refer back to later and I'll link that blog post down below once that article goes live but with that being said friends if you do want to learn more of how to use eight steps using Anki to go from 10 hours to five hours and a 3.9 GPA in med school I'll link down below the free course that I have that's eight step process that I used exactly in medical school step by step and down below you'll also find other free and paid programs depending on your specific needs but with that being said if this video gave you any value at all all I ask is a quick like if you have enjoyed the community consider hitting that subscribe and notification bell more videos like this going on on a weekly basis if you have any questions or if you want to just say hi drop your comments down below I'd love to hear from you guys but as always my friends thanks for being a part of my journey again if you did enjoy this video check out this video on how to use Anki like a pro as well as this video on the best Anki add-ons that you can use to really just end up your studying but I'll let you guys enjoy those and I'll see you guys in the next one take care my friends peace