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 learning 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.
Choosing a daily learning goal
You can configure your daily learning 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 Learning Goal:
Plan to study more: Increase your daily learning 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.
Today’s Goal
In addition to the Daily Learning Goal number that you set, RemNote calculates a number called Today’s Goal each day. This figure is the number of cards you would have to complete today in order to finish practicing all due cards over the next 7 days, if you continue to practice until you reach Today's Goal on each of those days. However, Today’s Goal will never be more than the daily learning goal you’ve set (it will usually be just a little bit less, unless you have a lot of overdue cards).
It is the Today’s Goal figure that is used to congratulate you when you’ve reached your goal for the day and to calculate study streaks, not the Daily Learning Goal.
Of course, you can always keep practicing more cards after you’ve met today’s goal, if you have more cards due. 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.
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, 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 target number today less than my Daily Learning Goal?
The target number shown in the sidebar next to Flashcards in in your flashcards queue is not your Daily Learning Goal but Today's Goal. See “Today's Goal”, above, for an explanation of this number.