It occurs to me that maybe I don't know exactly what the blocks mean. Does each block mean a day ending at midnight, or does it mean a 24 hour period.

For example, it's 12:25pm CST, and it's telling me I have 76 items due now, and 159 due "Friday." Does this mean I'll have 235 items due in 24 hours or at midnight?

From what I can tell, it means you'll have 159 items due by midnight on Friday if you don't do any more reviews (i.e., you don't add any new reviews to do on Friday). The 76 items due now are included in the 159 items due on Friday, since those 76 items are due right now, which is also Friday. Don't overthink it - you have 76 due items right now, and by the end of the day Friday, you'll have 159 due, just like it says.

The blocks are supposed to end at midnight, but you know how good I am at timezone handling code. GrandPoohBlah is correct.

The tooltip contradicts that, probably should fix it.

Err, sorry--it would be 235, not 159.

Is that really true? The numbers seem to me not to really behave like that.

Possibly so, possibly so. What do they seem to behave like to you?

It seems like the numbers for the current day are including ones already due.

I'm just going to sleep now with 47 due now and 166 for Sunday. I'll check what it looks like after 8 hours or so!

Wispfrog is right.

And here I am back, having done no studying, the numbers are 133 due now, still 166 for Sunday.

I see. It's not how I intended it to work, but after some exploratory hacking, it's harder to do it the other way, so I'll just change the tooltip instead to something more convoluted.

So in the original scenario, you would end up with somewhere between 159 and 235 items, but you don't know how many. You can just eyeball the graph to see if the 159 items due Friday were coming due in the morning or the evening to see how many are included in your current count.

Couldn't there be a yesterday box or figure as well, showing how many of the already due items aren't today ones? Then one would be confident that by end of any day, the total due would be the sum of the numbers to the left?

Or maybe the boxes could change from being calendar days to being 24h periods from current time? Its already effectively actually a continual graph of items due to come due vs time, its just that the division into day boxes is odd, and starts before the present.

I see the changes to the tooltip, and I'm now sorry I brought this up. It's even more confusing than before! I'm just trying to beat down my queue, and was getting antsy about the next day's task... I'll just go back to beating down my queue w/o the antsiness.

There is also another problem. The numbers only reflect the current situation and only useful if you are unable to practice in the coming days and want to know how much you will fall behind. It is certainly not a good study guide to help you plan how many hours of practice you should put in. Let me explain.

Suppose you have the current situation: 100 items due now and 500 in de coming 5 days. (I am not sure either how the 'due now' fits into the figure of the next day, but for this purpose it is not that important). So, looking at these figures you know that if you can not practice during 5 days, your queue of due items will have grown to 600. But if you start practicing, it is an entirely different game. Every character and word that you have wrong will be rescheduled and this will make the queue of due items in 1, 2,.. days grow. If on top of that you have some lists active so that new words are being added all the time, then the due items will even grow more. So if you can do like 200 items a day, the described situation could easily lead to your list of items scheduled for the following days becoming larger rather than smaller. This can be rather frustrating in the beginning. But it is all part skritter :-) Just don't pay too much attention to these numbers. I try to keep my 'items due now' as low as possible and I use the 'save me' feature; whenever it becomes too overwhelming.

Marc