The Daily Learning Goal

Motivate yourself and be sure you're staying on track by setting a goal for how many flashcards you want to practice.

Soren Bjornstad avatar
Written by Soren Bjornstad
Updated over a week ago

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.

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 without exceeding Today’s Goal on any day. 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 study cards that aren’t currently due, for instance to do extra practice ahead of an exam, see Practicing Specific Flashcards.)

Did this answer your question?