FSRS Study Ahead

Get tomorrow's reviews out of the way today, without wasting FSRS efficiency.

Want to clear tomorrow, or the next few days, before an exam, a trip or a long shift? Classic study-ahead add-ons pull cards blindly, so you spend reviews on cards that are nowhere near due and gain almost no stability from them. FSRS Helper's Advance does it properly and only picks cards that are safe to review early, but it works on your whole collection and can't target specific days.

FSRS Study Ahead combines both. Choose the days you want to relieve, and the add-on picks only the cards FSRS considers safe to review early. They go into a filtered deck, so anything you don't get to simply stays on its original date.

Features

• Day range: tomorrow, the next 3 or 7 days, or any custom window up to 30 days.
• FSRS-safe selection: by default only cards that have passed at least 87% of their optimal interval are picked, using the same criterion and ranking as FSRS Helper's Advance.
• Your call: go beyond the safe amount if you need to. An orange mark on the slider shows the limit, and the dialog tells you how many selected cards exceed it.
• Daily load preview: per day you see how many cards are due, how many are safe, and how many remain after advancing.
• Retention preview: mean retrievability at the original due date vs. today, as in FSRS Helper.
• Non-destructive: cards go into a filtered deck with rescheduling enabled. Nothing changes for cards you don't review.

Usage

1. Tools → FSRS Study Ahead…
2. Choose a range. The number of safe cards is preselected.
3. Optionally move the slider past the orange mark to advance more.
4. Choose how cards are picked:
   • Best FSRS fit across the range: identical to FSRS Helper's ranking.
   • Earliest day first: relieves the nearest day first, safe cards before unsafe ones.
5. Create deck and review. Empty the filtered deck when you are done.

Running the dialog again rebuilds the same filtered deck.

How "safe" is determined

For every review card FSRS knows its stability, desired retention and decay. From these the add-on computes the optimal interval t_opt, i.e. the time at which retrievability falls to your desired retention. The share of the interval given up by reviewing today is

1 − elapsed_days / t_opt

A card counts as safe if this is below 0.13, the threshold used by FSRS Helper. Under the FSRS-6 default parameters, reviewing at 87% of the interval yields about 93–95% of the stability gain of an on-time review. Retention does not suffer, the cost is a slightly earlier next review.

Elapsed days come from the last review timestamp Anki stores with each card, falling back to due − ivl if it is missing. This keeps the result correct even after due dates were moved with Set Due Date or by other add-ons.

Installation

• AnkiWeb: Tools → Add-ons → Get Add-ons, code 969391836
• Manual: download fsrs_study_ahead.ankiaddon from the releases and double-click it.

Requires Anki 23.10 or newer with FSRS enabled. Works alongside FSRS Helper, but does not need it.

Configuration

Tools → Add-ons → FSRS Study Ahead → Config

Building

python3 build.py

creates fsrs_study_ahead.ankiaddon in the repository root.

Credits

Safe criterion and ranking follow FSRS Helper by Jarrett Ye and contributors (MIT). This add-on does not depend on FSRS Helper.

License

MIT © Nils Pape