[tastysandwich]

Personally I never did audio cards (though I did a lot of listening and conversation outside of Anki) or reverse cards for Japanese. My vocab decks were J->E, and my Kanji decks were Kana->Kanji. I always practised writing my answers on the screen using the whiteboard feature.

I think you should strive to keep your decks under 15 minutes total. That means you can complete them in three 5-minute blocks a day. Any longer and I found I would A) miss a deck, meaning I had to catch up the next day; or B) try to rush through them.

I highly recommend trying to engage in conversation as much as possible. In my city (in Australia) I went to "conversation classes". Basically Japanese people wanting to improve their English would meet with Australians wanting to improve their Japanese. It went for an hour, half of which was spent talking in English, and half in Japanese. And if you can only speak a little bit of Japanese, it's totally fine, you can just speak in broken Japanese mixed with English. It was really fun! You'll find opportunities to use your new vocab, and it'll stick much better.