To help you stay on track with your flashcard study, RemNote asks you to set a daily learning goal. RemNote will encourage you to practice this number of flashcards each day and keep track of how well you’re doing at this. You should 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 a daily learning goal
You can configure your daily goal by clicking on Today’s Goal, or choosing Customize Goals from the Flashcards menu at the top, in the Flashcard Home. You’ll see this slider, which you can drag and drop to choose a new goal:
Above the slider, RemNote will estimate how long it will take you to complete this number of flashcards. To the right, you’ll see a projection of how many cards from Active documents will become due in the upcoming week, to compare against the number of cards you want to practice every day.
If the number of daily Upcoming Cards on the right is significantly larger than your Daily Learning Goal, there’s a risk you won’t regularly be able to finish all of your flashcards around the time they become due for review. While flashcards will still help you learn if you have more flashcards due than you’re able to finish practicing on a daily basis, you’ll forget more of them, be less prepared for your exams, and have a more frustrating study experience. So if it doesn’t look like you’ll be able to keep up, it’s usually better to sit down and decide which topics you want to prioritize and learn at full effectiveness, and which you can let slide for a little while.
There are two common solutions to having more Upcoming Cards than space in your Daily Goal:
Plan to practice more: Increase your daily goal, if you’re willing and able to do that.
Reduce 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. A list of documents that can be deprioritized is shown underneath the Daily Learning Goal section to help you do this.
Maintaining documents won’t be counted in Upcoming Cards, but their cards will still become due and appear in the flashcards queue on the normal schedule. If you finish all of your due Active cards on a particular day, RemNote will start showing Maintaining cards for practice. So this is a good choice if you’re still interested in remembering the content of a document, but it’s not the most important thing for you right now.
Paused documents will have all of their flashcards disabled (so that they never appear in the queue) until you change them back to a different priority. This is a good choice if you have no need to remember the content anymore, or you might want to return to it but don’t have the bandwidth to think about it for the time being.
See Setting Priorities and Disabling Flashcards for more information about RemNote's prioritization tools.
Daily Goal Smoothing
When you aren't adding many new cards, the number of cards you need to practice each day will slowly decline over time. In this situation, it's useful to smooth out the review load. That is, rather than practice 100 cards on Sunday, then fewer cards every day until you practice only 50 cards on Friday, practice about 70 cards every day of the week.
If you would need to study fewer cards than your daily goal over the next 7 days to finish all of the Active and Exam cards in your queue, the daily goal will be automatically decreased to a roughly steady value, as described above.
Of course, you can always keep practicing more cards after you’ve met your smoothed daily goal, if you have more cards due! If you do so, RemNote will congratulate you again when you reach your full daily goal number. After that, it will start offering stretch goals (see the next section).
If you want to do extra practice on top of that because you have an exam coming up, see Preparing for an Exam. Or if you want to study other cards that aren't currently due, see Practicing Specific Flashcards.
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 your stretch goal – if you feel like doing so, go for it, but if you don't, that's fine. You only have to reach your initial, smoothed daily goal to retain any practice streak you may have.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are forgotten cards counted towards my daily goal?
Spaced-repetition schedulers are designed with the assumption that you will forget some percentage of your cards on each review (by default, about 10%). Because memory is random and forgetting is exponential, it cannot be otherwise – there's no way to ensure you will never forget a card, and making the percentage extremely small (say, 1%) would dramatically increase the number of reviews you had to do to the point that you'd be unable to keep up.
Since occasional forgetting is by design, a review of a card at which you forget it is just as legitimate and important to your learning process as one where you remember it, and you shouldn't have to do extra work to achieve your target number if you happen to forget a larger number of cards than usual on a particular day.
Why is my daily goal today showing as less than my configured Daily Goal?
Your daily goal has been smoothed because you have fewer cards that need review over the next few days than your daily goal.
Why is my daily goal today showing as more than my configured Daily Goal?
You have an exam scheduled, and in order to practice all the cards in time to be ready for the exam, it's necessary to do more per day than your daily goal.