I hear this sort of thing a lot, and I’ve experienced it too (but with Supermemo), so let me tell you how I resolved it. It dawned on me that srs is just a tool, and it’s ridiculous to let it burn me out. I never intended to spend so much time reviewing, so first order of business was to put a 1 hour limit on daily reviews. More than that tends to burn me out if I let it go on for very long, and I have heard the 1 hour limit suggested from more than one source. If you are spending more than 1 hour a day, ask yourself how you’d feel if it was cut to 1 hour. Wouldn’t it be a big relief?Lisa wrote:one day is trivial; and a few hundred reviews a day for months are as nothing After your deck reaches thousands of cards, though, the numbers creep up and you go away for the weekend and can't catch up and eventually you'll be thousands of cards behind and trying to do 500 reviews a day and getting farther behind, and feel like you're on a never ending treadmill.
Now that I’d decided to limit it to 1 hour, how did I want to spend that hour? Again, srs is just a tool, so why not use it in the most effective way? I’ll tell you one thing that’s not very effective – reviewing old cards. If you don’t know a card that’s been in your deck for over a month, will adding another month change anything? And if you do know it, will adding another month change anything? It probably helps, and having old cards is fine when everything is going smoothly and you aren’t close to being overwhelmed. But clearly, reviewing old cards is not as helpful as reviewing new cards. Imo, srs is really helpful and efficient for about a month or so, but after that its usefulness greatly diminishes. So deleting cards older than a month is a reasonable thing to do if you are trying to get the most out of your hour.
The last part of the equation was input – I wanted to add as many cards as possible without going over the 1 hour review time limit for cards less than 1 month old. The number of new cards varies from language to language, and what types of things I’m adding (words vs sentences, L1 to L2 or L2 to L1, etc.), so it takes some experimenting to establish.
I am convinced that this is the way srs should be used to get the absolute most out of it in an aggressive learning spurt. But most people hate these suggestion. They are more interested in manicuring their decks and keeping their cards forever, even if it burns them out. It’s funny; they are so convinced that what I’m doing is “wrong” and that somehow it makes srs malfunction. I say things like “Why keep the old cards? Just delete them, and if they stump you in the future, just put them in as new cards”. But no – that’s not how Gabriel Wyner learned German in 2.5 months...I have pictures and Wikipedia articles in every card...I can’t delete them...I’m doing 1000 reviews a day, and this is the hill I’ll die on. Wait...am I ranting now? Sorry ‘bout that.
(edit)
I forgot to add that there is also the option of limiting your daily reviews via a setting in the srs. This really messes up the algorithm, so I only use it if I’m in maintenance mode and just want to see a few random cards a day to keep in contact with the language.
Finally, as others have said, you can delete all your cards and start over, but know that if you do that you will not be getting the majority of the benefit of the srs for cards that are younger than 1 month old. I would first delete all cards older than 1 month, then delete the rest after a month. Then you can start with a clean slate.