Postpone, Advance and Mercy

Here are the main applications of Postpone, Advance, and Mercy:

When repetitions are made?	Option	Suboption and conditions	How is the option executed?	What is the typical application?
Earlier	Mercy/Spread	Mercy with Consider future repetitions checked, and Collecting period longer than Rescheduling period	Redistribute elements equally in a short period of time using various sorting criteria that determine the sequence of repetitions	Learn material ahead of time. For example, review the entire subset in a period remaining before a test or exam
	Advance	Advance topics	Shorten intervals to never exceed a selected value. New intervals are selected randomly in the range from 1 to the selected limit. Last repetition date is set to today.	Quickly increase the priority and frequency of review of an important portion of material
		Advance items	Shorten intervals to never exceed a selected date (today + the interval limit). New intervals are selected randomly for the next repetition to fall in the range from today to the selected date. Last repetition date is not changed.	Ensure that poorly remembered items in a given set are reviewed in a selected period of time. This option should be used with caution. Massed review of related items may produce false positives (i.e. good grades in items than are not remembered well). This option should be avoided on branches or subsets that are remembered well.
Later	Mercy/Spread	Mercy with Collecting period shorter than Rescheduling period	Redistribute elements equally in a long period of time using various sorting criteria that determine the sequence of repetitions	Unload the backlog of material in a low priority branch, or in a low priority collection, or reduce loads in a collection that requires too much time for review.
	Postpone	Postpone outstanding elements	Increase intervals of elements that meet the postpone criteria. Only outstanding elements are affected.	Quickly unload excess of low-priority outstanding material. This can best be done automatically at the beginning of the learning day with Auto-postpone.
		Dilute a subset of elements	Increase intervals of elements that meet the postpone criteria. All elements are affected	Quickly reduce learning loads in a subset of low priority elements.