Deadline Planner — Daily New Cards, Study Time & Review Schedule

Know how much new material to study each day—and how much overdue work fits afterward.

Deadline Planner turns a deck, tag, or Anki search into a daily new-card target and estimated study time. A separate review budget shows what remains for current reviews and overdue cards.

1. Finish new cards by your deadline

Choose a deadline, new-card study days, and an optional review-only buffer. See today's full new-card target, progress, remaining work, and estimated time. Your daily study budget never reduces the new-card requirement: insufficient time is shown explicitly.

Estimates use your recorded study history, including repeated answers on a new card's first day. Timing details distinguish learning, review, and relearning speeds. Sparse history uses collection data or labeled fallback assumptions. A configurable allowance adds time beyond recorded answers.

Overlapping goals count shared cards once in the combined workload, assigning them to the earliest effective deadline. Each goal can include suspended new cards; this option is off by default. Included cards remain suspended until you manually unsuspend them.

2. Make progress through reviews and backlog

Set your daily study budget. The planner deducts estimated time already spent and unfinished deadline work, then reserves time for today's regular reviews and learning. Remaining time becomes an overdue-card target.

See ordered subdeck targets: finish a subdeck's available overdue cards, then complete a specified number from the next. Choose a starting subdeck, or use rotating timed blocks. Browse the proposed cards or open a subdeck directly.

Compare catch-up forecasts for different daily budgets. The forecast allows for projected returning reviews and future new-card work. If clearance falls outside the forecast window, the planner says so. A separately labeled “at today's rate” estimate excludes future returning reviews.

Getting started

1. Install the add-on and restart Anki Desktop.
2. Open Tools → Deadline Planner, or use the home-page widget.
3. Add a deck, tag, or search goal and choose its deadline.
4. Set your daily study time and timing allowance in Settings.
5. Review your deadline target and the Backlog tab's subdeck assignments.

The widget defaults to the top of the deck list; its position is configurable. Prefer stable deck/tag scopes over a state-dependent search such as is:new.

Important details

• A deadline means introducing all matching new cards, not mastering the material or finishing every future review.
• Counts are unique cards; speed statistics count answer events. Repeated answers can make these differ.
• Recorded answer time plus allowance is an estimate, not a wall-clock timer.
• Catch-up forecasts use historical data and heuristics, not a full Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler (FSRS) simulation.
• Browse shows the proposed batch. Open subdeck uses Anki's normal queue; the add-on does not create a filtered deck or change review order.
• The add-on does not reschedule, suspend, move, or reset cards. Suspended cards are excluded from active review/backlog assignments.

Compatibility and privacy

Version 0.4.0. Tested on Anki Desktop 26.09.3, Qt 6.11.2, macOS arm64. Other platforms and Anki versions have not been verified.

Requires no other add-on and makes no network requests. Goals and settings stay local to the Anki profile and do not sync to AnkiWeb, AnkiMobile, or AnkiDroid. MIT licensed.

Switching from a manually installed copy

Keep only one copy of Deadline Planner enabled. Before switching to the AnkiWeb-distributed version, back up the old add-on's user_files folder and disable that copy. Install this version, quit Anki, and copy your goal/settings JSON files into the new add-on's user_files folder. Back up any existing destination files before replacing them. Restart and verify your goals before removing the old copy. The new AnkiWeb folder uses the numeric add-on code.