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Ten cards. Ten minutes. Sets the day.
The morning recall pass is the single-most-valuable habit Brainback supports. It's ten minutes, ten cards, first thing in the morning — usually paired with the first coffee of the day. It's the entire compounding mechanism of spaced repetition in a form that fits into a real student's morning.
The specific value: doing recall in the morning means the material you're reviewing gets multiple exposures across the day (once at review, again in class if the topic comes up, again in evening study). Doing recall in the evening means it competes with sleep for the last processing window — less effective.
This is the habit the rest of the product is built around. The spacing literature going back to Ebbinghaus is a claim about schedule, not effort: material met again just before it would have been forgotten survives, and material reviewed whenever you happen to think of it mostly does not. A fixed morning slot is the cheapest way to hand the schedule to the algorithm instead of to your mood.
This isn’t aspirational advice. It’s a specific protocol you can execute tomorrow morning.
Consistency > time-of-day-specifically. Morning works best because the material has all day to compound; but the same-time-daily anchor matters more than the exact hour.
Cap the session. If the queue is empty in 5 minutes, stop. If you'd have to go past 10 minutes, stop — the algorithm will catch you up.
Don't re-order. The interleaving is a feature. Cards from different subjects arrive mixed on purpose.
Grade based on effort: 'I got it but had to think' is Hard, not Good. Honest grading is what makes the algorithm calibrate correctly.
If the queue is empty for the day, close the app. Grinding old cards defeats the spacing effect.
Brainback tracks your streak automatically. The dashboard shows a green cell for every day you close the queue. A gap is not a moral failure; it is an overflow the algorithm will hand back to you tomorrow.
Morning reviews land in a memory system that's freshly consolidated from overnight sleep. Reviews get the benefit of that consolidation window. Evening reviews compete with the next night's consolidation, which reduces effectiveness. This effect is small but real, and it compounds over weeks.
Doing the recall pass 'when you get around to it' rather than at a fixed time. Consistency matters more than duration. A student who reviews at exactly 7:15am for 8 minutes every day beats a student who reviews for 20 minutes at variable times.
Study habits compound when they're paired. These are the specific companions to this one.
Do it at a consistent time — evening, lunch, whenever. Morning is optimal but consistency beats time-of-day specifics. Same 10-minute daily anchor.
Cap at 10 minutes. Cards you don't get to today shift to tomorrow. The algorithm handles the overflow. Don't push through — burnout is worse than a day of slippage.
Habit-formation research suggests 21-66 days for a daily practice to feel automatic (Lally et al. 2010, with wide individual variation). We have no data of our own on this and will not pretend otherwise.
Yes. The algorithm doesn't know about weekends; skipping them creates queue overflow on Monday. If you must skip, skip a single day mid-week — not the weekend.
Weekly Brain score arrives · 5 minutes to reflect · adjust the week.
One concept from today. 60 seconds. Sleep on it.
One subject. Ninety minutes. No context switch.
→the morning recall pass
One habit · one week · notice the shift. Then add another.