We often get emails from users complaining that their lesson is too large, and that they can never get through it all. Indeed, if you have 800 cards in your lesson, it’s more a hindrance than a help. These cries for help usually conclude that a new feature is needed, such as ‘throttling’ the flow of cards into the lesson.

Although we could easily add such a feature, restricting the lesson’s size, it doesn’t really address the root of the problem — it just covers up the symptom, that being an enormous lesson. If you find your lesson is too big, the problem is simply that you are trying to learn too much at once. If you can’t study the lesson in a day, you have too much stuff that you are trying to cram into your head.

Studies app Templates

So what is the solution? It’s quite simple: manage your lesson by removing some cases from the lesson schedule. You do this by double clicking a case, and setting the lesson schedule to ‘None’. Later, when your lesson is down to a respectable level again, you can go back and turn the lesson scheduling in those cases back on again. Note that you will not lose any lesson history when you do this: Mental Case will keep track of how many times you have studied the notes in the cases even when you change the schedule.

There is another advantage to this approach over letting Mental Case do it for you: you know what is most important and should be given priority. Mental Case could arbitrarily choose to leave notes out of the lesson, but it does not know which notes are least important, and which should be given priority. The user is best positioned to decide this.

Rather than trying to cover up overgrown lesson syndrome, we have chosen to keep it obvious, and empower the user to do something about it. So take control of your lesson and don’t let it overpower you.