Load lags the decision
Reviews you create today come back for months. A rate that feels comfortable in week one is a different commitment in month six, which is exactly when people quit.
Anki Review Load Simulator
Twenty new cards a day sounds small. Six months later it is not. Set the two dials that actually decide your workload and see what the daily load becomes.
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The new-card dial is the whole game
Retention is a price, not a goal
A higher target shortens every interval. If you keep adding new cards, past roughly 93% you pay a lot of extra minutes for a little extra recall. A deck you are finishing can come out differently, and the caption under the chart describes your own settings.
Pick the minutes first
Decide the daily time you will actually keep, then set the new-card rate that fits inside it.
How this is calculated
Each day, every card that is due gets answered. A share equal to your target retention passes and has its interval multiplied; the rest lapse and come back tomorrow at one day. New cards enter at your chosen rate and are answered on the day they arrive. Nothing is random: cards are carried as fractions, so the same settings always draw the same chart.
The interval multiplier is an FSRS-inspired heuristic, not a fitted parameter. It is 1 + 1.5 × ln(R) / ln(0.9), clamped between 1.15x and 4x, which puts it near 4x at 80%, 2.5x at 90%, and 1.43x at 97%. A passed card always gains at least one day, and intervals stop growing at 365.
Answers are costed at a flat 8 seconds. Learning steps beyond the first day, per-card difficulty, sibling burying, and your own good and bad weeks are all left out. Cards that are already overdue — when the simulation is seeded from a real deck — are spread evenly across the first 14 days rather than dumped on day one.
So treat the shape as the answer and the exact numbers as an estimate. It is a good way to compare 10 new cards a day against 30, and a bad way to plan next Tuesday.
Questions
How is this calculated?
Every card that comes due either passes at your target retention or lapses. Passing multiplies its interval by an FSRS-inspired factor — about 2.5x at 90%, 4x at 80%, 1.43x at 97% — and lapsing sends it back to one day. New cards are answered the day they are introduced. Intervals stop growing at 365 days. It is an estimate of the shape of your workload, not a prediction of your schedule.
What target retention should I use?
It depends on why you are studying, and this page will not pick for you. If you keep adding new cards month after month, high targets get expensive fast: past roughly 93% the daily workload climbs sharply for a few more percent remembered, and below that the curve is shallow. A deck you are finishing rather than feeding can come out differently — over a fixed stretch a higher target can even land lower than a lower one — so read the caption under the retention chart, which describes the settings you actually have.
How many new cards a day is safe?
Whatever daily time you will still be spending in six months. New cards are the throttle on everything else: 20 a day at 90% retention grows to roughly 136 reviews a day, about 18 minutes, by the end of six months. Pick the minutes you can keep, then read the new-card rate off the chart.
Can it use my real deck?
Yes. The Anki Deck Analyzer reads an .apkg or .colpkg export in your browser and runs this same simulator seeded with your real due dates, intervals, measured retention, and answer speed. How much of that it gets depends on the export: one saved without scheduling and review history, which is how most shared decks arrive, starts from the number of cards in the deck instead, at the same defaults this page uses — 90% retention and 8 seconds an answer. The analyzer labels every number it had to substitute.