I used to just use 1 deck in anki, and I didn't add much new material each day. My daily reps hovered around 50, but I always felt that I couldn't take on much more than that. I would always start to get bored, lose focus, and felt like If I had to do any more reviews I would start to hate it.

But then I created a new deck with some different material. Before I knew it, I was reviewing 50 items a day from the old deck, and another 50 in the new deck.
And then, I added a 3rd deck, and I am now doing about 150 reps a day.

Back when I was only doing 50, I felt like it was too much and I couldn't handle more, but now I'm doing 3 times as much, and it actually feels great! Although it's a little annoying juggling 3 decks, whenever I finish one, its a huge confidence booster, and then I'm ready to move on to the next one. It also helps me to manage my time a bit better. I can tell myself "I'll just finish this deck..."

Anyone else get the same feeling?
Give it a try if you feel the same way I did ^_^

I started the same way. Did small amounts, but i always felt i wasn't doing enough. So it started with 50, 50. Then went up to 75, then 100. But when my reviews were 100 i always felt like that was so much work. But now my reviews went up to 200 then 300, then 400 and nowadays oh man lol. It's ranging from 300-600 daily from my sentence deck. My vocab deck i blaze through them easily cuz i already understand a whole lot. Kanji deck is only around 40-70 reviews nowadays. So that's around 3 decks. I started to add another 2 decks. B/c i felt i can increase my load and finish everything within 1 hour. Now i'm concentrating on kana to kanji production cards and writing japanese more then anything. Cuz i want that skill to grow along with my reading+understanding.

Something I've noticed personally is that I can only handle 2 decks at a time. Trying to juggle a 3rd (let alone a 4th) just feels like weighs me down. So depending on my needs I just switch focus from time to time.

I'm doing good on having separate kanji, sentence, dictation, and grammar decks.

I wish I only had 150 reps per day! My current rate is about 700 per day between two decks.

I also find it hard to maintain more than two decks. I have grammar and geography decks that haven't been touched in months.

I used to have three decks, a year or so ago. I've since merged them all into a single big one. It has a couple of advantages. First, I can't neglect any one of them (I could neglect all of them, but that feels a bit too extreme, even when I'm lazy). Second, small 'decks' are not a problem anymore (I would probably forget or not be inclined to create a deck that would only have a dozen expired cards a week). And third, I find the reviewing sessions less tedious now. Not by much, though.

For the record, I review about 360 cards/day.
Half in the morning, half in the afternoon.

I think it may have more to do with your naturally increasing ability to handle a greater workload as you gradually start to stretch your boundaries. The more you do, the more you can start to handle.

Having said that, I hate having multiple decks. I always forget to switch between them, and like iSoron, I found that having only one deck prevents me from neglecting cards or decks I don't like. I would often let some decks gather dust and reviews because I didn't like the material/subjects in it. I use one big deck with all my stuff in it, because I procrastinate less that way.

700 per day? That's just insane. Go on vacation for a week and you have 4900 cards up for review, two weeks and it's 10 000. Just how many cards do you have in that deck to get that many reviews? 30 000?

I find 100 reviews a day to be tiresome already.

I recently started to try timeboxing. Makes me feel like I'm getting more done and focusing less on how many cards I'm doing.

Wow, for a minute, I thought you all were crazy doing 300+ reviews a day...

Then I realized, I do about 50-100 reviews a day for each deck, which leads to about 400 reviews a day...

So I guess multiple decks are good because you won't realize how insane your reviews really are!

700 is insane. I capped at about 500 myself, but I've taken about 2 weeks off from adding any new cards to get the reviews down. I found SRSing large amounts of sentences really took a lot of energy out of me, but I also see the benefit of SRS. I'm trying to find a middle ground right now. If I can manage to keep my reviews with 150 and 250, I think that'd be perfect for me...

As far as decks, I have two, but my kanji writing deck only has about 50 cards total. Someday I'll get around to using a full kanji writing deck, because my handwriting hasn't really improved much lately. I tried using multiple decks for awhile, but I found it so convenient to have it all in one. I'd have kanji writing cards mixed in too, but I review a lot on my iphone and don't have a way to write on paper at all times.

Haha I love the multi deck style! Currently I have 4, and I guess one more if you count RTK (I review that here), although I must admit I have let the RTK reviews go for the past month (1,000+ to do).

I started with one deck, everything in it. Then I decided to create a vocab only deck to fix some little issues I had with encoding words into my brain inside of a sentence. The vocab deck was imported KO from smartfm, and I had already been doing the sentences, so it was not a much of a time killer. Then I decided to pull the smartfm. sentences out of my deck - I called this one the "Import" deck, as it was just KO sentences imported from smartfm., and my original deck the "master" deck, which I now mostly use to mine dorama, but also has jpod101 stuff, some stuff from podcasts, and a few songs. I like this much better, as I can review the somewhat cold and dull smartfm. stuff on it's own, and I really like blazing through a vocab only deck. Finally, I added deck number 4 "vocab 2", which is any single words I want to reinforce from my "master" deck, 四字熟語 I stumble upon, and any odd words I come across, like random vocab I haven't learned that come up in class (just started my 1st class and though I'm ahead in most regards, there are holes in my basic japanese to mend).

Recently I also decided to do production only from cards in the two vocab decks. I was making a production card for super mature sentences, but from now on I will just do it with the vocab from the get go (faster - better). The smartfm. vocab deck has all three styles - E def -> kanji, audio; Audio-> E def, kanji; Kanji-> audio, E def. So far I like this, and the dynamic testing/re-enforcement works well, and goes pretty fast in the reviews. For me, writing them helps me remember them, and if I'm pressed for time I just visualize it. "Vocab 2" is really a brand new thing, but I think it will just have 2 versions of each card.

My goal is to clear everything each day, add 5-10 smartfm. sentences/vocab and once or twice a week mine what I have energy for from jdorama. Plus anything that comes up in class, or with my language partner (I have the computer right there, and can make the card when something interesting pops up). I'm still finding my rhythm, but probably add an average of about 15- 20 new words a day, and usually do about 300-400 reps in about 1 1/2 - 3 hours. I take my time sometimes, because I like to write kanji, and practice writing them well. I also spend extra time looking at example sentences and such, but only if I have time. I sometimes need a lot of reps on new cards to get the pronunciation. I also put the smart.fm sentences on my ipod to study on the go.

I'm not sure if the way I do it is efficient. I'm sure there are other people around here learning way more words in way less time. But I feel it is a good dynamic approach, and I'm getting to practice the four skills (read-write-hear-say) in the decks. Separate decks are a good fit for me. And I'm getting faster, able to learn a higher quantity of stuff as it goes, and adjust my pace between the decks. Hopefully in a few months I'll be doing 30-40 words a day without it being too much (already I'm seeing the value of KO order in helping me learn readings faster).