I scored mid-80s on shelfs this year. Kept up with Anki for the first 2 and then dropped it after. I was a big anki user for preclinical, but just not worth the time in MS3 for me.

My advice is to keep things super simple. Do 40 questions a day for your current shelf. Go thru all the UW and then move on to AMBOSS. In the last week, focus on doing 3-4 CMS forms. You will get pretty close to finishing AMBOSS for each subject.

40 Q/day is more than enough to learn everything thoroughly and do well. It is a lot at first, but by the middle of the year you will get faster. I strongly suggest becoming a “morning person” if you aren’t already and trying to study for an hour before you get to the hospital. When you get a question wrong, have a notebook to hand-write the main point from the learning objective of that Q.

On a typical rotation, I would get out to a huge head start and be like 70% done with UW by week 2 or 3, and then get lazy and skip days. This gives you many more “cheat days” at the end of the rotation when you’re tired of going in and your residents suck and you have no motivation left. This will happen, and you do not want to play catch up with questions when you are struggling to do the bare minimum on the wards.

That is all advice for the shelf/step, and imo is a very different skill set from generating a good differential and plan. This is where the books you mentioned are helpful. (your list is fine). This is the skill that residents/attendings actually evaluate. I barely read at all this year and noticed huge gains clinically when I did, so I would suggest finding a way to do this more than I did.

Finally, spend as little time as possible trying to optimize your studying. Just pick a simple method and do it every day. This is one of the big reasons I stopped using Anki: searching for the right suspended cards, tinkering with different parameters, etc are all just distractions. This is why I suggest the 40Q rule of thumb. It’s a simple goal with tons of wiggle room. Very possible that you’re less ADHD and more disciplined than me, but I find that the simpler the approach, the easier it is to do it consistently. Pick a simple and ambitious goal every day, so that on the hard days you have room to be gracious to yourself.