[4BA9940C]

I'm familiar with that problem, and overcame it by really working at making good cards. Today, I have 6000 cards in my collection, and daily reviews take 15-20 minutes; usually 100-120 cards. (I have been using Anki for a lost time. My collection is almost 10 years old.)

Granted, writing good cards is easy to say and really hard to do. Some specific pointers:

- cards should take less than 10 seconds to answer

- most questions should be 7 words or so

- if your question has multiple clauses, split those up into separate cards

- cloze deletions are great, consider multiple clozes per card

- around 10% of your cards should have images

- good images help a lot, mediocre images make it worse -- when in doubt, don't

- Answer this Question cards should have an opposite Question for this Answer like Jeopardy

[rsanek]

In my experience, you really only start to see these problems at the tens of thousands of flashcards level. I have ~70,000 mature flashcards and also have the growing backlog problem, even if I don't add new cards for weeks. My collection is 8 years old.

I agree that making good flashcards helps alot. Another big thing is to make sure the knowledge graph is connected, eg there are no 'orphaned' individual cards / groups of cards. Those tend to suffer seriously from decay for me.