The Anki Snooze Button
Have you managed to fit in every 2-minute block you can find in a day to do some Anki reviews? As if that wasn’t enough, there is one other time to squeeze in which you may not have considered yet. And it may be the most powerful time of all: the moment when your alarm clock goes off and you wake up. A lot of people suffer from a “get out of bed/alarm clock snooze” battle every morning. Introducing Anki at this time may change your life.
When you hear your alarm and are too tired to start your day yet, the snooze button is a guilty pleasure. After the snooze period ends, you might reach for your phone to procrastinate a little more while still half-asleep. Anything to push off getting up.
When your alarm rings, reaching for your phone is already becoming second nature (especially since many people use their phone for their alarm). Once you have your phone in your hand, turning on Anki or the Jalup app is simple. So simple that you can make it a half-asleep habit. All you need to do then, while still laying down with your eyes barely able to open, is to start doing your reviews. You can be hazy. You can be unfocused. Hazy, unfocused reviews are still reviews.
By creating this habit, you form a chain-effect of positive things:
1. You are fitting more time in the day to do Anki. There is no better time to start Japanese then literally before you have even fully waken up.
2. You’d be surprised at how much you can get done in this morning session. Since people often spend an extra 5-20 minutes snoozing/playing on their phone/actually waking up, it adds up. This is time you didn’t think you had.
3. The actual process of doing Anki wakes you up. Sure, you may start barely able to make out what a sentence says while you use all of your available strength to lift your finger to the answer button. But after a few minutes, your brain warms up and becomes alert as it processes the Japanese.
4. It motivates you. In addition to starting the day with something super productive, you are working towards your dream.
5. It makes you feel better about your day and gets you out of bed. You’ve just finished 20-30 Anki reviews. Today is going to be great.
The reverse?
If you are going to start your day with Anki, how about ending it? It’s strange, but while doing Anki reviews in the morning wakes you up, doing Anki reviews at night can help you go to sleep.
While you are laying down in bed, working through reviews is a calm way to make yourself drowsy. You get to wind down the day and drift off to some Japanese, which has the possible benefit of also seeping into your dreams.
Anki Snooze?
Have you ever done Anki in bed first thing in the morning to help wake you up, instead of a snooze button? Thinking about trying it now?
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
Great post, Adam. I’ll start doing this tomorrow, but instead of grabbing my phone, I’ll get up, splash cold water on the face to wake up, and hop on my computer to do some Anki reviews. Same thing after dinner and before going to bed.
That works too! (though slightly ups the difficulty level a bit!)
I often do reviews in bed before sleeping but haven’t tried doing it in the morning…
I’m an avid “snoozer” (much to the dismay of my significant other who usually has to get up a bit later) and currently I find it hard to imagine doing reviews during those snoozes, but I might give it a try. I probably need to use headphones though as I really like decks with audio :D
Your significant other will love it, because they will only have to hear an alarm go off once :)
While I do both habits almost every day, I have a warning to send out about doing reviews at bed right before sleeping. If you’re gonna do that, keep in mind that it’s going to slow down your process of getting drowsy unless you toggle your phone’s blue filter feature (Read Mode in some Android devices or Night Shift on iOS). That’s because blue light (the most prominent one on electronic devices’ screens) has been proven to interfere on your body’s melatonin production, the hormone which makes you sleepy. So please, keep that in mind.
Thanks for adding in this part David.
Yes, this is very important for doing it before going to bed. Using the night mode on your phone/tablet is absolutely important to not let this interrupt you falling asleep (whether it is Anki unwinding or reading a Japanese novel).
I did a suggest to incorporate such alarm native in ankidroid here: https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/issues/5296
Please feel free to support with a comment
Interesting – maybe I’ll look into the possibility of this for the Jalup App sometime in the future.
I can do Kanji reviews- but I share a bedroom with my sibling so I can’t do vocab or grammar which I would say outloud. But I am studying much more than I was with the work book.