Drill – repetition on steroids

Drill is a special memory exercise. It forces your memory to work harder and accelerates the loading of words and sentences into your long-term memory. Here you train in all the difficult elements so that they quickly become easy in the coming days. This mechanism of repeating elements that are difficult is based on the scientific theory of “desirable difficulty.”

All the flashcards that you rated as “Difficult” or “Almost” go to the drill queue. In drill, you will repeat these flashcards, sometimes even several times, until you rate each one as “Easy.”

You start a drill from the button labelled “Drill,” which also shows how many items are waiting in it. The button appears only once you have rated enough items below four within a single day — until then drill sits on the list as inactive, telling you how many items are still missing. Once it is available you can start and stop it whenever you want, as often as you need. The drill queue covers the current day and resets the next one. 
It’s best to get down to the drill when there are at least twenty-five elements in it (a teaching recommendation, not a technical condition — the unlock threshold is lower). Otherwise it is too easy. Of course, there can be more. Just remember that one hundred and fifty elements in a drill is quite a lot of work. The records of the most hardcore users are about three hundred elements.

The longer the queue, the harder drill works

Drill gets more effective as it gets harder — and its difficulty comes straight from the length of the queue. The more items waiting in it, the less often you come back to the same sentence, and the harder your memory has to work. The threshold at which drill unlocks is deliberately low, but the real benefit starts at around twenty to thirty items in the queue.

Clearing a queue of more than a hundred items is genuinely hard work — and that is exactly what produces very good results.

Hence a technique worth knowing when you want to load new material into memory as fast as possible: keep going through new items until the drill queue grows really long, on the order of one hundred to two hundred entries, and only then switch to drill and try to clear it to zero or close to it. That combines very intensive repetition at the very start with SRS reviews spread over the following days — and that combination is the most powerful one.

One caveat from our own observations: with a long queue, the last ten to fifteen items go in really hard. Sometimes it is better to let them go for that day than to fight to the very end.