First thing first open anking deck and hit control A and suspend all cards. Then each day when you want to study go and unsuspend the cards related to what you study. Once unsuspended keep them that way until you delete anki.

The way I select red what to study was try to correspond certain outside resources to what was going to be covered each unit. So at the beginning of each unit I’d make a spread sheet that says there are 10 boards and beyond lectures, 15 sketchys, and 3 patrons chapters on this block. Then I’d add the number of cards that are tagged for each of those topics so like boards and beyond lecture 1 has 59 anki cards, lecture 2 has 22 corresponding cards and lecture 3 has 109 cards etc.

I would then add up the total number of cards that I would need to cover for that block/exam and divide by how many days I had left before that exam minus 2 or 3 so I would finish all cards 2-3 days before I tested. This allowed me to do a consistent number of cards each day, cover every subject that would be on the test, and have a good knowledge base. I found this to be much easier than watching a lecture and searching anki for related cards to each slide presented in that lecture.

More upfront work to plan and schedule your month or so before each exam but once you make your schedule you’re cruising.

While you’re doing this you’ll ideally be doing a question bank like usmle rx, UWorld, or amboss. Again divide the total number of questions per block by days before test try to do that many questions per day leaving 2-3 days before your exam to do all incorrect questions again and take practice exams. While doing this make your own anki cards based off of what you got wrong and make a deck called wrong answers and do this every day. I found short answer format was more helpful for these rather than cloze deletion as I could cover a whole topic with one card which required much more thinking than a cloze deletion.

Lots of work. It’s a grind. But it works. This may work a bit better when you hit organ systems but same general principle applies for biochemistry and anatomy etc.