David Buchs

Folks, For some time I could picture an implementation of the spaced-repetition strategy for reviewing my notes, but I couldn't find a procedure or app that did just what I wanted. The main short-coming of any system of tags or setting reminders is the manual input required to increment the review time. It would be too easy to miss a note or lose one along the way. Likewise, I found ToC notes to be really cumbersome. Anything that required me to export my notes (e.g. to Anki) would be too many extra steps, and I would lose the ability to annotate while I was reviewing. My breakthrough was realizing that I could use saved searches based on creation date. Ideal would be to have all of the below searches combined with an OR operator, but that is not currently possible. Nonetheless, where I have presently landed is almost completely satisfactory. Here are the two defects as far as I can see: 1) Having to cycle through a whole sequence of searches is not as inefficient as a single search, but it is not bad. There's a hidden advantage is being able easily to tell how long it has been since I last reviewed a note. 2) If I miss a day, the reviews do not stack up, but are lost until their next review interval. On the one hand, this isn't so bad because a premise of SR is the importance of properly timed reviews, which precludes missing a day. Nevertheless, the workaround is to create a parallel set of saved searches that are offset by 1 day (or 2, or 3, and so on) to be used in order to catch up on cards that would have been reviewed on a given day in the past. Anyhow -- here are the saved searches. The name represents the review interval, while the search prescribes the total time that would have elapsed from the creation of the note: Name: 001 days; Query: created:day-1 -created:day Name: 002 days; Query: created:day-3 -created:day-2 Name: 004 days; Query: created:day-7 -created:day-6 Name: 007 days; Query: created:day-14 -created:day-13 Name: 014 days; Query: created:day-28 -created:day-27 Name: 028 days; Query: created:day-56 -created:day-55 Name: 056 days; Query: created:day-112 -created:day-111 Name: 112 days; Query: created:day-224 -created:day-223 Name: 224 days; Query: created:day-336 -created:day-335 Of course, once a card appears in that last search interval, I'll create another saved search that is the next interval of 448 days, and so on. The make-up review searches would look something like this: Name: m1 001 days; Query: created:day-2 -created:day-1 Name: m1 002 days; Query: created:day-4 -created:day-3 Name: m1 004 days; Query: created:day-8 -created:day-7 And so on. Perhaps this will save somebody the time I spent looking for a solution. All the best, David