Why I stopped using Anki for certification prep

I was the Anki guy for years. Med school friends got me into it back in 2019. By 2023 I had a deck with over 4,200 cards across three certifications. I was reviewing 180 cards a day. Sometimes more.

Then I failed CISSP in October 2023, and I had to rethink everything.

Look. Anki is brilliant for some things. Vocabulary. Anatomy. Discrete facts that have a clean "front" and a clean "back." That's why med students live on it. The problem is that certification questions almost never look like that.

A CISSP question gives you a scenario. Four answers, all of them technically correct. You have to pick the BEST one. There's no flashcard for that. You can't memorize judgment.

I kept using Anki out of habit. It felt productive, those 30 minutes every morning. But when I sat down for the exam, I realized I had memorized definitions of things I couldn't reason about under pressure. Knowing what RBAC stands for and knowing when RBAC is the wrong answer in a healthcare scenario. Completely different skills.

What I do now:

I still use Anki, but only for the first two weeks of any new cert. Vocab and acronyms only. After that, I close it. The remaining time goes into scenario-based question banks and explaining wrong answers out loud.

Talking out loud is underrated. If you can't say why option A is wrong in 15 seconds, you don't know it.

I retook CISSP in February 2024 and passed. I went from doing 180 cards a day to doing zero. The studying felt less productive, more frustrating, slower. The result was better.

Productivity isn't always learning. Sometimes the thing that feels like grinding is just the thing your brain has gotten comfortable with.