Hmm. Let me think about your point.

The problem seems not dependent on the specifics of my efforts for me - it seems inherent to Anki for language-learning. That the flash cards have lots of bells and whistles seems unrelated to my giving up because 90 minutes a day wasn't enough to keep things under control.

I haven't had any time that my circumstances have change so much that my accessorising ended up a negative. (And I'm having trouble thinking of situations where that would be the case).

But sure, in general I can think of cases where it's probably more advisable to go with a general purpose solution (stairs rather than a climbing wall for going upstairs) in case personal circumstances change, temporarily or permanently.

Inessential complexity increases the workload of maintaining a system (like the climbing wall vs. stairs: can't maintain an upstairs floor unless you maintain the ability to use the climbing wall).

Bells and whistles, especially when it comes to making things perfectly tidy, tend to introduce a lot of rules for using and maintaining a system. For example, a color-coding system with too many colors to reasonably recall without daily practice from using the system: any interruption, such as a vacation or even a weekend, will disrupt in some way the ability to use and maintain the color-coding system.

Informal rules also accumulate over time, adding to the complexity of any given action. It doesn't take a major change to topple your flashcard system, but slow, accumulated changes have been enough to do so.

90 minutes is a very big ask if you want to be consistent. Maybe you're simply trying to bite off more than you can chew? I think consistency is king, so whatever you have to do to stay consistent will pay dividends, even if that means shaving your working set down to just 10 minutes a day.

The thing with Anki is that you cant control how much workload you have per day. Anki algorithm decides that. Say, you start by doing it little bit every day and you are fine for first three weeks. But then, Anki starts assigning you more and more repetition and that is it.

If you do less one day, Anki gives you those cards the next day on top of the normal workload of that day. There is no way out.

Worst, the less you retain, the more mistakes you make, the more your workload goes up. Anki algorithm never do the "lower workload because this person does not retain" decision. Instead, it will just give you more and more work in such case.

There is a cap on how many cards will get reviewed from a deck each day. Lower it if the default cap is too high.

If you're finding that you reliably do not recall some card Anki will eventually mark it as a leech. Those cards get suspended automatically after some number of lapses. That will reduce your workload because suspended cards are't part of your workload.

https://docs.ankiweb.net/leeches.html

The leech feature can also be dangerous if you're unaware of it, because AIUI Anki does not ask you whether to remove a difficult card or not, it just goes ahead and does it.

That's true, though the stats screen will tell you how many suspended and buried cards you have. If I track that a few times a week I can usually tell when something has been suspended that I didn't suspend myself.

> Anki can help you identify leeches. Each time a review card 'lapses' (is failed while it is in review mode), a counter increases. When this counter reaches 8, Anki tags the note as a leech and suspends the card. The threshold, and whether to suspend or not, can be adjusted in the deck options.

> If you keep failing that card, Anki will continue to alert you about the leech periodically. These warnings occur at half the initial leech threshold. For example, if you set the warning at 8 lapses, future warnings will happen every 4 lapses (at 12, 16, and so on).

Suspend means you never see the card again. So how could you keep failing it after it's been suspended for being a leech?

You need to mark that card with lowest recall for leeches to happen. If you mark it with second lowest one, it won't become leech.

If it becomes leech, it will be ignored entirely by anki.

All of that is too much expertise about how to mark cards instead of allowing you to do it intuitively.

I really wish something like https://github.com/fasiha/ebisu becomes the norm. That is, the idea of fitting the cards to your time (by prioritising) rather than you having to do everything there software wants.

The only bit missing is some algorithm deciding how often to introduce new cards based on your historical data.