Spaced repetition works because you come back to your cards regularly. The algorithm can predict when you're about to forget something, but it can't do anything useful if you practice your cards only every week or two. The hard part of learning with flashcards isn't just practicing cards, but doing it consistently.
To help you stay on track with your flashcard study, RemNote asks you to set two goals: a small streak goal that keeps your practice habit alive, and a larger daily learning goal that gets you through everything you're actively studying.
Streak goals and daily goals
Your streak goal is deliberately small. It defaults to ten cards a day, an amount inspired by research on how habits form: always achievable, and just enough to get you into the queue. Hitting your streak goal is what extends your practice streak.
Your daily learning goal is the full amount you aim to practice each day. Once you've hit your streak goal, keep going until you reach your daily goal whenever you can. Aim to set your daily goal to something that's achievable for you, yet sufficient to get through most or all of the flashcards you're actively studying each day.
Setting your goals
Open Settings > Goals & Streaks to configure both goals.
Daily goal
First, choose which cards count toward your daily goal:
Cards from all of your documents.
Or only cards from exams and Currently Studying documents and folders.
Then choose how RemNote works out the number of cards you need to practice each day:
Spread over the week: RemNote splits the coming week's reviews into even daily portions, so you practice about the same amount every day instead of facing a big pile on some days and almost nothing on others.
Review all due cards each day: your goal includes every card that's due that day.
Set a daily limit: you choose how many cards you want to aim to practice each day.
Tip: if you feel overwhelmed by the number of cards you need to study daily to hit your daily goal, consider:
making only cards from exams and Currently Studying documents count toward the daily goal.
reducing the priority of unimportant documents.
If there are some documents you're currently studying, and they aren't highly relevant to you at the current moment and you're OK setting them aside until you have more free time, set them to the Maintaining or Paused state.
Maintaining documents won't count toward your daily goal, but their cards still become due and appear in the queue on the normal schedule. If you finish all of your due exam and Currently Studying cards on a given day, RemNote will start showing Maintaining cards. This is a good choice if you still want to remember the content, but it isn't your priority at the moment.
Paused documents have all of their flashcards disabled, so they never appear in the queue, until you change them back. This is a good choice if you no longer need to remember the content, or you might return to it but don't have the bandwidth for it now.
See Setting Priorities and Disabling Flashcards for more about RemNote's prioritization tools.
Streak goal
For the streak goal, you're choosing what it takes to extend your streak:
Fixed 10 cards a day: once you've practiced ten cards, your streak is extended.
Entire Daily Goal: your streak is extended only once you've practiced every card in your daily goal.
Tip: for most people we recommend leaving this at ten cards a day. Busy days happen, and being unable to clear your whole queue on one of them is completely normal. If your streak depends on the full daily goal, one of those days can cost you the streak, and losing a streak that way may feel unfair enough to take an otherwise solid habit down with it.
Streaks and Streak Freezes
Your streak is the number of consecutive days you've hit your streak goal. Try to keep it going as long as possible!
Because unexpected things happen anyway, RemNote gives you Streak Freezes. Every six days of hitting your streak goal earns you one, and you can bank up to two. If you miss a day, a freeze is applied automatically and your streak picks up where it left off the next day.
You can see how many freezes you currently have on the Flashcards page, and in Settings > Goals & Streaks > Streak Freezes.
Tracking your progress
Hover over your daily goal in the sidebar, or over the goal indicator at the top of the queue, to see progress bars showing how far you are through today's streak goal and daily goal. If you have exams or Currently Studying documents, you'll see a subsection for each so you can tell what kind of practice is still left.
For a longer view, visit the Stats page.
Hover over any day in your streak history to see what your streak goal and daily goal were on that day, along with the exact number of cards you practiced on each device.
Each day is colored according to how far you got, with a key underneath the chart.
Exams and your daily goal
If you've scheduled an exam, a dedicated section for it appears in your daily goal, showing how much exam practice you need to do today to stay on track. If you fall behind, RemNote will suggest a temporary increase to your daily goal to catch you up; see Preparing for an Exam for details.
Stretch goals
When you reach your daily goal, RemNote will calculate a new stretch goal for the day, which will be 1.5 times the previous goal. So if your daily goal was 50 cards, the first stretch goal will be 50 * 1.5 = 75 cards, and the second will be 75 * 1.5 = 112 cards. The stretch goal is on top of the previous daily goal (that is, when you reach the first stretch goal, you'll have practiced 75 additional cards, for 125 cards total).
The stretch goal helps to give you something to push towards if you're behind on your flashcards and want to keep practicing. You aren't expected to reach it; you only have to reach your streak goal to keep your streak alive.
Frequently asked questions
Why don't forgotten cards count toward my daily goal?
Why don't forgotten cards count toward my daily goal?
Pressing Forgot on a card doesn't award progress toward your streak or daily goal, because your goal is the number of cards you need to get right today.
Forgetting is still a normal, expected part of spaced repetition (the algorithm is designed so that you forget about 10% of your cards at review time), so don't worry when it happens. The card will come back within a few minutes, and answering it correctly then counts toward your goal.
I hit my goal, but it didn't count
I hit my goal, but it didn't count
This usually means one of your devices was offline while you were practicing, so its cards never made it into the count.
Go to Flashcards > Stats and hover over the day in question. You'll see a breakdown of how many cards you practiced on each of your devices, which will normally show you which one is missing. Reconnect that device to the internet, open RemNote, and let it sync for a few minutes. Your streak should be restored. If it isn't, get in touch at [email protected] and we'll sort it out.