“Priority Reviews.” That’s what we’re calling any Apprentice level item in your Review queue. The idea here is that these items are weaker in your memory because they’re new. And, because they’re new, they’re more likely to be forgotten if you don’t review them soon after you learn them. As items move up the ladder, you get a little more wiggle room in terms of when you review them.
So, items in Apprentice levels are more likely to be forgotten if you don’t hit those timing windows as closely. To help with that, we’ve added a few options around these items to help you to prioritize your reviewing of them.
Priority Reviews in the Reviews Widget
You can now add a Reviews widget that also displays the number of “priority” reviews you have.
The number on the left is total number of reviews that you have. The number on the right, with the egg, is the number of priority (Apprentice level) reviews you have. Say you need to choose when you do your Reviews in the day. You’re busy, or something. If you look at that and see there are no priority reviews, you might decide to hold off and do your Reviews later that night.
If you have the time to regularly do your Reviews (i.e. a few times a day), then you probably don’t need to turn this feature on. Really, just doing all your reviews when they’re available is best, but I get it—you’ve got things goinng on.
This is all fine and dandy, but while I think this feature works alright on its own, it works best when paired with another widget update we also launched:
Priority Reviews in the Forecast Widgets
We added a “show priority reviews” option to the Review Forecast widgets. When selected, you’ll be able to see how many Apprentice stage reviews coming up on any given day or hour.
You can also click into any day of your 5-day forecast and see hour-by-hour when priority reviews are incoming.
You can look at your upcoming Reviews and make decisions such as, “I was going to do my Revievws at 7 p.m., but I have a big batch of priority reviews dropping at 9 p.m., so I’ll do my current batch now and then do another review session a couple hours later when that pile of Apprentice items drop.”
Basically, it just helps you to make some better decisions about how and when you do your Reviews. You still have to do them, of course, but I hope this helps you to make better use of your time and get those Apprentice items hooked deeper into your memory, faster.
I also know there are sickos out there who see Reviews coming up in their forecast and think: “I better stay up until 4 a.m. to do them just in case there are Apprentice items in there.” So maybe, now you can just go to sleep?
This way, you can look at your upcoming Reviews and make decisions such as, “I was going to do my Reviews at 7 p.m., but I have a big batch of priority reviews dropping at 9 p.m., so I’ll do my other thing earlier and then do my Reviews a couple of hours later when that Apprentice pile drops.” Taken together with the priority reviews count in the Reviews Widget, you can start making better decisions about how to schedule your review sessions.
