Leitner Box Flashcard Planner
Plan a physical Leitner flashcard system: box intervals, a day-by-day review calendar, daily card load and minutes needed.
About this tool
Leitner Box Flashcard Planner
Plan a physical Leitner flashcard system: box intervals, a day-by-day review calendar, daily card load and minutes needed.
The Leitner system files paper flashcards in numbered boxes: a card you answer correctly moves up one box, a card you miss goes back to box 1, and each box is reviewed on its own fixed interval. This planner turns your box count, spacing schedule and cards-per-box into a dated review calendar, a per-box load table and the long-run daily figure, which is the sum of cards in each box divided by that box's interval. Built for anyone running physical flashcards for language vocabulary, medical terms or competitive-exam facts without an app.
How to use Leitner Box Flashcard Planner
- 1
Open Leitner Box Flashcard Planner on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
- 2
Pick a "Box schedule" — Doubling (1, 2, 4, 8, 16), Expanding (1, 3, 7, 14, 30) or Gentle (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13) — then set "Number of boxes" and "Start date".
- 3
Type how many cards sit in each box under "Cards currently in each box", set "Cards you check per minute", and tick "Stagger box start days".
- 4
Read "Cards to review per day" with its minutes estimate and the Per-box load table, expand the Review calendar with the "Show all … days" toggle, then press "Copy result".
Why use Leitner Box Flashcard Planner
Real workload, not a guess
Daily card counts come from the interval arithmetic, including the days when nothing is due.
Dated calendar
Every study day is shown with its weekday, the boxes due and the minutes it should take.
Schedule comparison
Three documented spacing presets — doubling, expanding and Fibonacci — with up to seven boxes.
Common use cases
- Size a 5-box vocabulary system before you start, so you know whether 300 cards means 20 minutes a day or an hour.
- Compare doubling spacing (1, 2, 4, 8, 16 days) against expanding spacing (1, 3, 7, 14, 30 days) for the same deck.
- Stagger the boxes so they do not all fall due on day one, flattening the first-week spike that makes people quit.
- Print a four-week calendar showing exactly which boxes to pull out on each date, and stick it on the box lid.
Frequently asked questions
How does the Leitner box system work?
You keep cards in numbered boxes. Review a box on its interval; a card answered correctly moves to the next box up, a card answered wrongly goes straight back to box 1. Because box 1 is reviewed most often and the top box least often, difficult cards come round quickly and easy ones stop wasting your time.
What intervals should each Leitner box use?
The most common schedule doubles: box 1 daily, box 2 every 2 days, box 3 every 4, box 4 every 8, box 5 every 16. An expanding schedule of 1, 3, 7, 14 and 30 days is also widely used and suits vocabulary you need to hold for months rather than days. Both are offered here, along with Fibonacci spacing of 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and 13 days.
How many cards a day will a Leitner system give me?
In the long run it is the sum, over every box, of the cards in that box divided by that box's interval. For 40, 30, 20, 10 and 5 cards on a doubling schedule that is 40 + 15 + 5 + 1.25 + 0.31, roughly 62 cards a day, or about ten minutes at six cards a minute.
Is the Leitner system as good as an app like Anki?
Algorithmic schedulers adjust the interval per card based on how hard you found it, so they need fewer total reviews for the same retention. Leitner uses one interval per box, which is coarser but needs no device, works on physical cards and is easier to keep going. Both rely on the same spacing effect first measured by Hermann Ebbinghaus.