How it all unfolds

1)Waking up in the morning

As a memory athlete, I know that being groggy in the morning is bad for the memory and so, as soon as I wake up, I immediately take a number of steps to get over this: I speed up through my memory castles (a series of points arbitrarily set in some location known to me) randomly for about 1 minute. Then, a few minutes later, after starting to cook my breakfast, I play one short video game of memory called "duelling n back."
It's the fish looking app on the screen below.

Now after breakfast, I do what I think is most vital to fighting grogginess: I head outside for 10 minutes of walking or cycling. I mostly cycle around in the neighborhood streets. After that, morning memory grogginess is almost never an issue as far as I can detect.

2) The Main Event

So I'm ready for my main memorization event of the day, a deck of shuffled cards. This morning I wanted a fast memorization time and did get it with 1 minute and 24 seconds. Unfortunately, things worked out terribly during my recall. In the end only 23 of the 52 cards that I recalled were correct. I only occasionally fall below 30 correct cards.

In my analysis, I found that my high speed together with hitting many more difficult cards than usual explained the poor result.

3) Improving the system

Now after this exercise, I work to improve the images where I got it wrong. Doing this is one important way to improve. Here are some examples of the image work I did this morning:
0179 (9 of clubs) stumped me. I think I may have just prayed that I would remembered it even without visualizing the image. The image was that of a Dental CuP ( d= 1 , c= 7, p=9) and that's the typical paper cup the dentist gives you to rince. So as a replacement, I thought of TuG Boat. I liked it immediately because it is just one word that sounds familiar enough to me and it's very visual. I certainly felt good about this new one. The next one I missed was the very next card, 6 of spades or 0196, or DeePShit. (d=1, p= 9, sh= 6) I decided not to do anything about that one because it's a recent addition to my images and I thought I missed it because I memorized another image instead right next to the right one. Had I seen the tugboat fall in the deep shit, I would have easily remembered that. LOL.

So I improved my system and made sure to enter all the changes in my Anki app. It is a very helpful app to store images and edit them quickly. It's the app in the top left corner in the screen picture below.

After making all the changes, I immediately revised my whole deck quickly to see how my corrections were holding and to make further adjustments if needed.

My current goal is to get under 99 seconds for a perfect deck. Within the past 35 days I achieved 50 correct cards in 95 and 93 seconds. It's getting there and then I'll make sure to celebrate hard when that happens.

The above is my progress chart at Speed Cards since 2007.