I believe that spaced repetition is an excellent way to internalize knowledge, that time spent explicitly trying to optimize is usually worthwhile, and that that thinking meta is an important part of the optimization process. So it’s only natural that, fairly early on, I made a spaced repetition deck about how to make spaced repetition decks.
Piotr Wozniak, who created Supermemo, and who I find quite inspirational, has been making cards for more than a decade now, so instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, I went with his best practices.
After making this deck, the main effect I noticed was that I was using cloze deletion a lot more often and deleting fewer words per card than I had been before. I try to follow the rules as much as possible when I’m creating the cards, and then I think the even more important part is having the habit of noticing which cards I’m getting wrong more than a few times and reformatting them.
Here’s the deck: