Anki Time Tracking: How Long Do Your Reviews Really Take?

Anki is quietly one of the best time trackers in language learning: it times every single card you review. But its numbers don't always match the clock on the wall, and they only cover flashcards. Here's how Anki records time, how to read it, and how to fit your Anki minutes into the bigger picture of your study.

On this page

How Anki times a review

For each card, Anki's timer runs from the moment the question is shown until you press an answer button. That time is stored with the review and feeds the statistics screen.

There's one important limit. The deck option Maximum answer seconds defaults to 60. If you take longer than that on a card, Anki assumes you were distracted and records 60 seconds rather than the real time, so a coffee break mid-session doesn't wreck your statistics (Anki manual: deck options). The manual's advice if you're regularly hitting the limit is to raise it or, better, make the cards simpler.

Where to find your time

• Today. The top of the statistics screen summarises today's reviews, including how many cards you studied and how long it took.
• Review time graph. Works like the review count graph but shows time spent rather than cards answered, so you can see minutes per day over a month or a year (Anki manual: statistics).
• Hourly breakdown. Shows when in the day you review, which is handy if you're trying to move reviews to a better slot.

Why Anki's time is lower than the clock

If you time a session with your phone and compare it with Anki, Anki's figure is usually lower. That's expected. Anki only counts time while a card is on screen waiting for an answer. It doesn't count:

• Editing or fixing cards, adding new ones, or looking words up.
• Anything over the 60-second cap.
• Syncing, picking a deck, or getting distracted between cards.

For deciding how many cards to do, Anki's number is the right one, because it's pure review time. For knowing how much of your day flashcards take, the wall-clock time is more honest.

Measure your seconds per card

Seconds per review is the number that turns card counts into minutes. Take a normal week, divide the minutes Anki reports by the number of reviews, and you have it. As a rough guide, simple word cards are often quicker than 10 seconds and sentence cards with audio can take 15 or more, but your own figure is the one that matters. With it, 200 reviews at 8 seconds is about 27 minutes; at 12 seconds, 40 minutes. Our post on new cards per day and review load turns this into a planning formula.

How much Anki is too much?

There's no fixed answer, but it's worth knowing the share. If you study 90 minutes a day and 60 of them are flashcards, you're spending most of your time on isolated words rather than hearing and reading them in context. Many input-focused learners aim for flashcards to be a modest slice of their total, with most time going to listening and reading. Seeing the actual split is the first step; you can't judge a ratio you don't know.

Logging Anki alongside the rest

Anki's stats stay inside Anki. To see flashcards next to your YouTube, anime, podcasts and conversation, log the session in a tracker that covers everything:

1. At the end of a session, read the time from Anki's Today summary, or use a timer if you want wall-clock time.
2. Log it as vocabulary, with Anki as the source and the right language (if you have decks in two languages, log them separately).
3. Pick one convention, Anki time or wall-clock time, and stick with it.

In the LangTrack tracker, your Anki session becomes a one-tap shortcut once you've logged it a few times, so the daily deck takes a second to record. Stats show your time by language and source, so you can see whether flashcards are 20% of your study or 70%. LangTrack doesn't sync with Anki; you log the session yourself. Log today's reviews and see where they fit.

FAQ

How does Anki track study time?

Anki times each card from when the question appears until you press an answer button, and stores that with the review. The statistics screen shows today's cards and time, and a review time graph shows minutes per day.

What is maximum answer seconds in Anki?

A deck option, 60 seconds by default, that caps how much time Anki records for a single card. If you take longer, Anki records the cap, on the assumption you were distracted.

Why is my Anki time lower than my real session?

Anki only counts time while a question is waiting for an answer. Editing cards, adding new ones, looking things up and breaks between cards aren't included, and any card over the cap is recorded at the cap.

Related reading: Anki New Cards per Day: Review Load in Minutes · Immersion Tracker: How to Log Immersion Hours · Tracking Vocab vs Time