Grenbug

Hours and Cards?

What is this about hours and cards and lessons? I am using Anki to help me organize and stay on track with learning art. It all started from this video from 10.000hrs:

The video maker, 10k, is using the often heard statistic that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something. This comes from the Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers. While Malcolm and others have said that there’s more nuance to the 10k hours, there is a lot of research about the benefits of deliberate practice and spaced repetition. So the user, 10k, set out to show what kind of progress is possible over time and started tracking his work using Anki, and app that uses the terms Decks, Hours, and Cards (more on that later). He makes update videos every 100 hours to show how things are going. And he makes daily short videos showing his daily practice. His theory is that it will take much less than 10k hours to get to a decent place with art. Please check out his channel if you are interested in learning more.

Daily Practice

When I was doing Draw A Box lessons, I found the most valuable lesson was the 250 box challenge. And I learned a lot about line work, form, and perspective. But more importantly, I learned about daily practice. I set out to do 5 boxes per day, and was able to get through the whole 250 box challenge doing 1 page of 5 boxes almost every day. It became my ‘daily work’ that I did just like brushing my teeth or working out. It’s just something I did every day, and it became a habit. I felt out of sorts if I didn’t get my boxes in. Just like other daily habits.

Right around the time I was wrapping up the 250 box challenge, I found these videos. I spent a few months trying to Anki a few different ways to find something that works for me. And I do things very differently from the user 10k, but I am finding a good way to use it.

This blog

The user 10k films his daily practice and posts it as a short video on social media. I didn’t want to get into videos for my own practice, but I need some external place to track things and show my progress. I started this blog just to have a good place to show things. I’m still trying to get into practicing every single day, but this blog is helping. I see my history on the blog and it helps motivate me to keep going.

How I use Anki

I use the official, open source Anki app at https://apps.ankiweb.net/ For now, I am only adding cards to Anki as I take a new lesson and have a small thing to work on. Then I add it to the mix and don’t worry about deadlines or backlogs. I just pull the next practice as I’m ready and ignore the dates. I do all my notes about the lessons in Notion. I ended up duplicating the concept of Decks, Cards and Hours in Notion just because I like the abilities of better formatting and writing in Notion. Anki is not really meant for note taking, so I like Notion’s capabilities better. But Anki is better at the concept of spaced repetition and nudging you to keep practicing at the things that you mark as being harder.

-> UPDATE August 2025. I am no longer using Anki, just Notion. I found that Anki was just more work than it was worth. I note each lesson’s difficulty level in Notion, similar to Anki (easy, good, hard, again), and draw from things to practice based on this. I found that Anki is much better for volume daily practice cards (like vocabulary), but not really geared toward doing one daily lesson. It especially doesn’t work well if you want to study one particular lesson on a particular day. For example, if I have a Friday Draw-along session, Anki isn’t good at letting you schedule that. So I’m using Notion only for now.

How much do I practice?

I am still trying to get daily practice integrated into my life. I am often amazed that I go days or even a week between practices, I want to change that and try to practice near daily. I also try to do more than just this practice. I also will do little sketches on occasion, maybe 1×2 times per week. I also do more finished pieces for my Minecraft channel about 2x per month. But I don’t draw as much as I would like to. I will say this however: if I start the day by doing some little sketches in my sketchbook, I am much more likely to keep drawing over the day as I find pockets of time. If I reach for social media instead, I tend to keep checking that! I’m hoping that this blog will help me become more consistent. And it is so far!