I use Anki to learn, and for the last few years I’ve successfully built a habit of doing my daily cards. It’s hard at first, sometimes you don’t feel like it, but like any habit if you stick to it eventually becomes easier (not always "easy", just "easier").

But I’m not immune to falling behind, and like everyone who does Anki when life gets in the way of the daily sessions I struggle to keep up and start accumulating cards. Then one day you open the app, sees that there are 100 cards to study and you get that strong resistance to get started.

I could simply change the settings to lower the daily review limit, but I feel like I’d be just sweeping the problem under the rug then. I need to face the fact that I have to work through the backlog, which is also a signal to myself to pause adding more stuff until I get it into a manageable state.

So lately I decided that my daily commitment to Anki would be a single pomodoro and I’m glad to say that it actually helped me to fight the dread of facing those 100 cards (and a lot more behind it). So I’m just sharing this in case there are people out there with the same "late on Anki" anxiety.

By the way, there are a million pomodoro timers out there on the internet, but I wanted one that played brown noise[1] during the focus time, so I requested an LLM to generate an HTML+CSS+JS app: Bromodoro.

1. I don’t know if there really is a lot of data supporting its benefits, and I don’t have ADHD, so just take it as an aesthetic preference.