Where Anki actually spends your time

Anki feels slow because you are paying for your future memory upfront. Most of that time is spent on setup, card creation, and the "add-on hunt" rather than actually studying.

Hello there! If you are reading this, you are likely staring at a blank Anki window or a 400-card queue and wondering if this is actually efficient. A little about me first: my name is Daniel. I am a third-year engineering science student at the University of Toronto, specializing in machine intelligence. I also work on Nebulearn, so I have a conflict of interest here. I spent years using Anki before I ever thought about building a study tool.

The reason people say Anki is time consuming is that it treats every user like a power user. It does not hide the complexity. This makes it incredibly powerful for medical students using the AnKing deck, but it can feel like a part-time job if you are just trying to pass a midterm next Friday.

The front-loaded cost of the first week

When you start using Anki, you aren't just learning your course material. You are learning a new piece of software. In my experience, the first week of using Anki for a new course follows a very specific pattern of "invisible" work.

You spend an hour or two watching YouTube tutorials on how to set up card types. Then you spend another hour hunting for the right add-ons to make the interface look less like a 1990s spreadsheet. If you are on an iPhone, you might spend ~$25 on AnkiMobile to get your cards onto your phone, which then requires setting up AnkiWeb to sync everything correctly.

This is the "setup tax." Once you pay it, you don't really pay it again, but it makes the first week feel like a massive time sink compared to just reading a PDF.

Creation time vs review time

The biggest bottleneck in any flashcard system is not the clicking of the "Good" button. It is the time spent typing.

If you are making your own cards, you are likely doing a lot of manual copying and pasting from your lecture slides into the Anki "Add" window. If you want to use "Image Occlusion" to learn anatomy or diagrams, you have to manually draw boxes over every label.

Task	Time spent (The Anki Way)	Why it takes so long
Initial Setup	2 to 5 hours	Learning the UI, add-ons, and sync.
Card Creation	1 to 2 minutes per card	Manual typing, formatting, and tagging.
Daily Reviews	15 to 45 minutes	The actual "learning" part.
Maintenance	20 minutes a week	Fixing broken cards or adjusting intervals.

The pattern I noticed in my own studies was that I would spend three hours making cards for one lecture and only twenty minutes actually reviewing them. If you have five lectures a week, that math stops working very quickly. This is why many people find Anki too slow for fast-paced courses where the material changes every few days.

The 400-card queue trap

Anki is a "due list" system. It does not care if you have a social life or a heavy project week. If you don't open the app for three days, your cards don't wait for you; they pile up.

Coming back to a queue of 400 cards is the most common reason people quit. At that point, you aren't spending time learning. You are spending time "clearing the backlog." This is the fundamental difference between a session-based app and a true spaced repetition system. While apps like Quizlet might let you "cram" a set in one sitting, Anki forces you to spread that work out.

If you want to understand why this backlog happens, it helps to look at how new vs due cards interact in a real schedule. When you add 20 new cards a day, you aren't just doing 20 cards. You are signing a contract to do those 20 cards plus their reviews for the next several months.

Is the time investment worth it?

The answer depends on your "bottleneck." If you are a medical student using a pre-made deck like AnKing, Anki is the fastest way to learn. The creation time is zero because someone else already did the work. You just have to do the reviews.

However, if your bottleneck is this week's PDF or a 60-slide lecture deck that you need to know by Tuesday, the "Anki way" might be the slow way. You will spend more time formatting cards than actually looking at the content.

I wrote a guide on study apps that save the most time which breaks down exactly when to use a heavy tool like Anki and when to use something lighter.

I work on Nebulearn because I wanted to skip the setup tax. I wanted to upload a PDF and have the cards ready in seconds without hunting for add-ons or manual formatting. We use the same FSRS algorithm that modern Anki users love, but we try to handle the "creation time" part of the equation for you.

If you have a decade-long goal, stick with Anki. If you have a lecture that needs to be in your head by tomorrow morning, there are faster ways to get there.