QuickMem
How spaced repetition decides what you study today
Why a good flashcard app shows you a shrinking pile instead of the whole deck — how QuickMem sets each card's next date from four buttons, and why only twenty new cards a day arrive.
Studying a deck front to back has one obvious flaw: most of the cards are ones you already know. You spend the evening being told things you could have recited in the car, and the eight cards that are actually slipping get the same eight seconds as everything else.
Spaced repetition is the fix, and it is older than any app. Review a fact just as it is starting to fade and the memory comes back stronger and lasts longer. Review it too early and you learn almost nothing. Review it too late and you are learning it again from scratch. So the interesting question is not what is in the deck — it is what is nearly forgotten today.
Every card carries its own date
In QuickMem each card has its own next-review date, and the whole schedule is driven by four buttons you press when you flip it:
- Again — you did not have it. The card comes back within the same session, and its interval collapses.
- Hard — you got there, slowly. The next gap grows, but only a little.
- Good — you knew it. The gap grows by the card's own factor.
- Easy — instant. The gap grows by more, and the card's factor rises so future gaps grow faster still.
A brand-new card you answer Good comes back tomorrow, then three days later, and from then on each gap is the last one multiplied by a number the card has earned. Cards you keep getting right disappear for weeks. Cards you fail drop back to the start of the ladder. Nothing about this is hidden from you: each button is labelled with the interval it would set, so you can see what pressing it costs before you press it.
The underlying scheme is in the SM-2 family — the same lineage most repetition software descends from — with no knobs to tune. That is a deliberate trade: fewer decisions for you, and fewer ways to quietly wreck your own schedule.
Today's queue, and why it ends
Open the study tab and you get a queue, not a deck. In it:
- every card whose date has arrived, and
- up to twenty cards you have never seen, across your whole library.
Then it stops. The end of the queue is the point — it is what turns "study Spanish" into something with a finish line, and it is why a library of 2,000 cards can be a ten-minute habit rather than an evening you keep postponing.
The cap on new cards matters more than it looks. Importing a thousand-card deck on Sunday would otherwise mean a thousand cards on Sunday, and then the same thousand coming back in waves all week. Twenty a day feeds a big import in gradually, and because the ration is counted across your whole library rather than per deck, adding a second subject does not secretly double your workload.
When you want to study anyway
Sometimes the queue is empty and you have an exam on Thursday. You can always run through a deck outside the schedule, and even then the order is not random by default: cards are sorted by how likely you are to have forgotten them, estimated from how long it has been and how well the card has held up so far. The shaky ones come first, and a little shuffling keeps it from being the same rigid list every time.
Three things that make the schedule work
- One idea per card. A card asking three things gets graded on your best third, and the schedule then believes something that is not true. If a card has grown, split it.
- Answer honestly. Easy on a card you half-knew buys you a comfortable evening and an unpleasant week.
- Show up most days. The schedule assumes it gets to choose the day. Skip a fortnight and it will have chosen a fortnight ago, and the pile that greets you is the whole point of the daily habit you skipped.
If the deck itself does not exist yet, that is the other half of the problem — the Helper will draft it from a PDF or your pasted notes, or you can bring a collection over from Anki and let the queue take it from there.