Recently I've gotten a little annoyed with my reviews as I'm trying to get some other studying in besides Japanese. I have about 170-280 cards a day and haven't added many new cards. But thats not really a problem.

I also have switched to reviewing in Anki 2.0 completely now since "that's the future." And among some of the things that are new in it, one of the things Damian did away with was Per-Day Scheduling selection. I use to review cards as they popped up, but now you only have the option to review everything due in the day which this can make the load seem large. One of the things I have opted to do is set my review order from Large to small. Prior to this I only ever did this when I had about 500 cards to do and needed to get them done ASAP. Now though, because I always feel like I have a pile I started using it more.

One of the things I've been noticing though is that when I do the cards large->small compared to how I use to do them ("order due"); I get through cards a hell of a lot faster. With Anki 2.0 popping up a message telling you how many cards you did in a time box, I've found I can clear ~100 cards in 10-20minutes during my prime study time (@night) and about 50-70 during other times in 10 minutes. I've been thinking this was just a fluke so I've been doing the Large->Small for about a week now, and I'm pretty sure its not. I think the reason might be that when I have easy and hard cards intermixed, I tend to think a bit longer on hard cards and then second guess my self a lot with easy cards and that extends the time. Seeing a bunch of easy cards at the start sort of gets a momentum going that even lasts through the harder cards it seems.

So my proposition to many of you is.

If you have a lot of vocab cards, try setting the review order to Large interval->Small interval a few times and post here how you feel it affects your review time.

Also note if you notice it affects your fail rate too. (Daily stats were removed in Anki 2.0 so you can't see that now, I need to write a plugin for that actually, so I can see how many I failed in a day as a number.)

In Anki 1.0 the option is in the study menu under one of the drop down combo lists.
In Anki 2.0 you need to make a Filter deck. In deck browser, click "Filter/Cram." In the "search" box you want to probably put in your vocab deck name, mine is core6000 so I put in "deck:core6000 is:due" Set your "limit to" for how many cards. Since I want to do all of my cards I make it high, 1000, "cards selected by" and here choose the options "Decreasing intervals." Make sure "Reschedule cards based on answers" is clicked because this will push the interval data back to the main deck after you are finished reviewing. Hit "rebuild" and go review. If you don't finish and want to call it a day, just go back to the Study overview screen (Press 's') and hit the empty button. That will push the remaining cards back to the collection. When you want to review again merely load this filter deck and hit "rebuild."

Yes, this is generally my experience. I always select an ordering before I start reviewing with a specific intent. For the case you described, where you have lots of cards to get through, sorting them by ease (easiest first) gets you through a lot of cards really quickly. A certain individual has written about this.

The easy cards are kind of fun. You experience a streak of uninterrupted comprehension, which is very motivating, and seeing the card counter decrease in a short time motivates you to keep going while you're still "in the zone". It also makes it much less likely for your mind to wander off as an excuse to not be challenged by difficult cards.

However, my experience has also shown me that sorting them by the most difficult cards first is the better solution when you don't have a disheartening volume of cards, and especially so where most of them are still very young (<10 days). If you're well rested and eager to get your reviews done, then you're in the prime state of mind to tackle the cards that really require your brain power. This is especially true (in my experience) for cards you learned the night before, where your memory of the card is literally hours away from fading. I see two main advantages of hardest first:
1 - If you review several times a day (say, on the commute to and then from work, like I do), then reviewing the cards that have several hours of retention left before the others could be the difference between memorizing that card or not (an additional 8-hour gap is enough to forget things from the night before)
2 - The longer you review, the more you want to get away from reviewing. At least with this ordering the cards get easier the more you don't want to do them. This increases your chance of actually doing them.

Another important point is the opposite of what happens with point #2. If the hardest cards are at the end, then the harder cards will appear when you are fatigued and fed up with reviewing. This is catastrophic if you don't actually complete your reviews, because then, over several days, you end up with a cascade of unreviewed difficult cards which you will very likely forget (because they were due <5 days ago and you've left them at the bottom of the pile for 8 days).

I encourage people to play around with these settings. Anki can't read your mind (sadly), so you have to help it help you. You should change the order depending on the state of your deck and how you're feeling about reviewing.

Another nice thing in Anki 2 is being able to nest decks and float cards between them easily. Now that I've got about 12,000 cards in my collection it's become really important to break them up into smaller groupings. It's crazy to look at the number due in the morning and see 600 due cards.

Broken down into their different categories, though, it becomes a lot easier. There's a bunch of decks that only have 10-15 cards a day. I do those first. There's some decks that have like 35-40 cards a day. Then the other decks that have the new material have something like 200.

Within the different categories I do completely random, but the way I have them sorted automatically does a kind of easier->harder progression. For example, I do my kanji kentei 5級 cards before the 4級 cards. I do the Kanji in Context Level 3 cards before the Level 4 cards.

I think there's a lot to be said for having a proper warm-up and easing yourself into to studying for the day.

I prefer Small to Large, because there's less impact if I don't clear them every day.