Prioritization & Sorting

Mastering the Queue: Prioritization & Sorting

To get the most out of Incremental Everything, it's essential to understand how to manage your review queue effectively. This guide breaks down the advanced prioritization and sorting tools at your disposal, allowing you to tailor your learning sessions to your exact needs.

The Priority System Explained

With incremental reading, you can quickly accumulate thousands of articles, notes, and videos. Without a system to manage this volume, the learning process can become chaotic. This is where the priority system comes in.

By assigning a priority to each item, you tell the plugin what is most important to you. The plugin then uses this information to intelligently sort your queue, ensuring that you review the most critical material first. This concept is central to methodologies like the one used in SuperMemo. For a deeper dive into the theory, see SuperMemo's article on the Priority queue.

Setting priorities helps you manage the balance of Volume vs. retention in learning effectively. It prevents your queue from being overloaded with low-value items, which could prevent you from reviewing your high-value investments.

If you want to ensure that you keep a high retention of previously added material, you cannot overload the learning process with new material (new topics[= passive reading Incremental Rem]) because you will not have enough time left to do your daily item review.

Priority Inheritance System

To streamline workflow and make priority management more intuitive, new incremental rems automatically inherit their priority from their closest parent or ancestor that is also an incremental rem.

• How it works: When you tag a new Rem as Incremental, the plugin searches up through its parents. The first ancestor it finds with the Incremental tag will pass its priority down to the new Rem.
• Fallback: If no incremental ancestor is found, the new Rem will receive the default priority value you have set in the plugin settings.

This system is particularly useful for hierarchically organized notes. For example, if you have an important book summary with a high priority (e.g., 5), any new extracts or notes you create within that summary will automatically inherit the same priority, saving you from setting it manually each time.

The "Set Priority" and "Reschedule" popups also display the ancestor's priority, giving you immediate context when you decide to manually override the inherited value.

"Set Priority" Popup

You can manually set or adjust an item's priority at any time using the "Set Priority" popup. Access it by:

• Using the /Prioritize command.
• Pressing the shortcut alt/opt+p.
• Clicking the "Change Priority" button in the queue's answer bar.
• Creating a new highlight from a PDF (the popup will appear automatically).

This popup provides two interconnected ways to manage priority:

Priority Value (Absolute Priority)

• A numerical value from 0 to 100.
• This is the number that is stored in the "Priority" property of the Incremental Rem.
• Lower numbers mean higher priority. 0 is for your most critical material, while 100 is for the least important.
• You can type a value directly or use the top slider for quick adjustments.

💡 Pro-Tip for an Efficient Workflow:

For faster and more effective prioritization, we recommend using a smaller range of values, such as 1-10.

• Why? It helps reduce decision fatigue. Spending mental energy deciding if an item is a 53 or a 58 has a negligible practical effect on your queue.
• Benefits: Sticking to a smaller scale makes prioritizing quicker and more intuitive. You still get the full benefit of the Relative Priority percentile, which automatically ranks the item against everything else.

The full 0-100 range is included for maximum flexibility and to align with the well stablished standard of SuperMemo, but a simpler scale is often more powerful in practice.

Relative Priority

• A percentile rank from 0% to 100%.
• This slider positions the current Rem relative to all other incremental items in your entire knowledge base. Setting it to 10% means this item is more important than 90% of your other items.
• The slider features a color gradient from red (high priority) to blue (low priority) for instant visual feedback.

The two sliders are linked. Adjusting one will automatically update the other, giving you both precise numerical control and intuitive visual ranking.

"Sorting Criteria" Menu

Accessed via the three-dot menu in the top-right of the queue, the "Sorting Criteria" popup lets you control the mix and order of cards in your review session.

Randomness

• This slider adjusts how strictly the queue follows your priority settings.
• 0.00 (Default): The queue is sorted strictly by priority. Your highest-priority (lowest number) items will always appear first.
• 1.00 (Max): Priority is completely ignored, and all due incremental items are presented in a random order.
• Increasing randomness can be useful for discovering older, lower-priority items you might otherwise not see.

💡 Pro-Tip for an Efficient Learning:

The default is set to "0" (strict priority ordering) only to avoid confusion to new users. As soon as you get used to Incremental Reading, set a degree of randomness to ensure you will dedicate a small amount of your study time to dive into material that can bring you valuable insights and "golden nuggets"!

Flashcard Ratio

The core idea is to strike a balance between learning new things and retaining what you've already learned. As the SuperMemo guide states:

Only a small proportion of time-consuming topics [= passive reading Incremental Rem] is allowed in the learning queue. This proportion is chosen to maximize the fun and efficiency of learning: sufficient inflow of new material combined with the necessary review of your previous investment.

• This slider controls the balance between regular RemNote flashcards (= active recall) and Incremental Rems (= passive reading).
• Slide Left: Decreases the number of regular flashcards shown between incremental rems. All the way to the left (Only Incremental Rem) will hide flashcards completely.
• Slide Right: Increases the number of flashcards. All the way to the right (Only Flashcards) will hide Incremental Rems.
• The default is a balanced mix, showing a set number of flashcards for every one incremental rem.

💡 Pro-Tip: Finding Your Ideal Balance

Use the Flashcard Ratio slider to tailor each study session to your goals.

• To manage a large flashcard backlog: Set the slider to a higher ratio, like 8-10 cards per incremental rem. This dedicates more time to your existing reviews, ensuring you don't fall behind while still introducing new material to keep sessions engaging, while at the same time avoids boredom for not seeing new material.

• To focus on new content: If your flashcard queue is manageable, set the slider to a lower ratio, like 4-6 cards per incremental rem. This prioritizes your incremental reading and learning, allowing you to make faster progress through your articles, books, and videos, while ensures your review material will not be forgotten.

Priority Shield

Inspired by advanced metrics in SuperMemo (Priority Protection), the Priority Shield is a real-time diagnostic tool that helps you understand and manage your learning load. It gives you a clear, numerical value for your "Priority Protection" — your capacity to process high-priority material.

You can find it displayed below the answer buttons in the queue (this can be toggled in settings).

• What it Measures: The shield displays the priority of the most important due Incremental Rem that you have not yet reviewed. It provides separate metrics for your entire Knowledge Base (KB) and the current Document (if you are studying a specific document).

• How to Interpret It:

  • A HIGH shield value (e.g., Absolute: 90, Percentile: 95%) is GOOD. It means you have successfully reviewed all your high-priority items, and the most important one remaining is of very low importance. Your critical material is "shielded" and protected.
  • A LOW shield value (e.g., Absolute: 5, Percentile: 4%) is a WARNING. It indicates that you are falling behind on highly important material.
  • A shield reading 100% means you have no overdue items in that scope—the ideal state!

• Priority Shield History:

  • You can track your performance over time by accessing the "Priority Shield History" graph from the queue menu (the three-dot icon). This graph plots your daily shield values, helping you identify trends and adjust your workload or priorities accordingly.

How the Plugin Prioritizes Due Items

Here is a complete breakdown of how the plugin decides which incremental item to show you next. The process balances strict priority with controlled variability.

1. Sorts All Items by Priority First The plugin begins by gathering all of your incremental rems—both due and not yet due—and sorts them into a master list. This initial sort is based purely on the Priority value you have set. Items with a lower number are considered higher priority and are moved to the front of the line. The due date is completely ignored during this step.

2. Filters for Due Items Next, the plugin takes this priority-sorted list and filters it down, keeping only the items that are currently ready for review. It does this by checking if an item's nextRepDate is today or any day in the past. The result is a perfectly ordered list of all your due items, with the highest-priority ones at the top.

3. Applies Controlled Randomness (The "Shuffle") This is where the "Sorting Randomness" setting comes into play. After creating the perfectly sorted list of due items, the plugin applies a degree of "shuffling".

   • At 0% randomness (the default): No shuffling occurs. The list remains perfectly sorted by priority, and the plugin will deterministically show you the highest-priority due item.
   • At >0% randomness: The plugin performs a series of random swaps on the items in the sorted list. A higher randomness setting results in more shuffling. This introduces a controlled chance for a lower-priority (but still due) item to appear before a higher-priority one.

4. Selects the Top Card Finally, the plugin picks the item at the very top of this final, potentially shuffled list and presents it to you in the queue.

The system is built to surface your highest-priority due material first, regardless of how long it has been overdue. The Sorting Randomness setting is a tool that allows you to introduce variability, preventing the queue from becoming too rigid and ensuring that even lower-priority items get a chance to surface over time.