Making Anki cards takes too long? Build less, review sooner

A preclinical student on r/medicalschool laid out the loop: mandatory lecture, rewatch with annotation, a search through AnKing for cards to unsuspend, then typing up whatever AnKing missed. Their word for it was "forever". The PA version added screenshots and placeholder cards holding nothing but a slide number. None of this is new: in 2017 a student on Student Doctor Network described four to five hours a day making cards from lectures of 150-plus slides, then about four hours reviewing them.

Almost none of that is learning. Deciding what you must retrieve is, and so is catching a wrong fact. Copying, cropping, tagging and typing cloze syntax is translation between the professor's file and your deck, and it is the part you can hand off.

A UK student on r/medicalschoolanki admitted they had been putting their time into the quality of the deck instead of reviewing it. The replies said to learn the cards right after making them, while the lecture is fresh.

So the first deck is rough on purpose: the objectives, in prompts you can grade. The first review then tells you what the editor cannot. Which card is easy for the wrong reason, which two test the same thing, which detail never appears in an objective or a question. How many cards a lecture deserves is a budget question, and the budget is smaller than most decks.

Mixing them is how an evening turns into an editing session where every card becomes a design problem.

Answering cards and questions, and going back to the mechanisms you keep missing. If the exam is closer than the deck, generate practice questions from the lecture instead; the misses tell you which cards to make. PDF to Anki shows what one upload sends back. It will not make ten thousand overdue reviews disappear, and it does not do image occlusion. You still check the output. You just start sooner.