It's roughly the largest batch you can write out attentively in one sitting without your focus giving out — rush through more and every entry starts to blur into the next; write too few and you don't get a large enough sample to see the roughly 30–50% forgetting rate the method depends on. It isn't a strict rule, just a batch size that keeps you focused while still being large enough for a meaningful pattern to show up at review time.
Any sooner and you'd still recognize almost everything from short-term memory — the review would just be testing what's fresh, not what's actually sticking. Any later and you'd have forgotten so much that copying out D1 would feel like starting over, not distilling. Two weeks sits in the middle: long enough that only what's genuinely settling into long-term memory survives, short enough that you haven't lost the thread of what you wrote entirely. It's an estimate tuned to how memory decays, not a strict rule — if your own pace runs faster or slower, the interval can move with it.
The original method's repeated hand-copying isn't just busywork — physically re-writing a word is a different kind of encoding than reading it and judging whether you remember it. Recognizing a word during review is a lighter, more passive kind of recall than producing it again with your own hand or fingers; the act of writing it out engages motor memory in a way that just looking at it doesn't. So distillation is a deliberate, separate step: after you review a list, you decide which words still need work, then hand-copy or type them yourself into the next list. It's a bit more effort each round, but that effort is where a stubborn word actually gets a chance to stick. An entry stays editable while its own list — the headlist, or a Dx list you're still copying into — is still open, so you can fix a typo before sealing it; once that list is sealed, it locks, so what you're testing yourself against later stays exactly what you wrote.
Want the full original explanation? Read David James's original Goldlist method article.
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