I noticed that the majority of my high interval cards have very few lapses.  The majority of my cards with several lapses have intervals under 30 days suggesting that the ones with lapses are destined to take a larger share of my time.  This is just a note (to myself mostly) that I just set my leech threshold to 5 from 7 and suspended all cards with 5 or more lapses.  I ended up suspending about 400 cards which breaks my heart, but my workload went down by 50 cards tomorrow, and 400 this month, so I’ll be able to replace the suspended cards with easier ones rather quickly.  I might even set my threshold lower if this works out as well as I think it will.

Edit:  My first day after suspending ~400 ‘leeches’ I had an extra half hour to learn new words.  Consequently, I was able to add 40 new cards the first day.  I spent a little more time time than normal yesterday, but I didn’t have to worry about getting killed with reviews today because my review total today was just average.

Some stats:

Cards with an interval over 1 month: 4740 total
0 lapses: 3242  <—-68.3% of my month+ interval cards have no lapses
1 lapse:  620
2 lapses: 328
3 lapses: 193
4 lapses: 133
5 lapses: 102
6 lapses: 93
>6 lapses: 29

all intervals: 6520 total
0 lapses: 3122
1 lapse:  881
2 lapses: 527
3 lapses: 346
4 lapses: 268
5 lapses: 197  <—these
6 lapses: 204  <— and these were suspended today
>6 lapses: 976 <—-these were already suspended leeches