I want to turn this year into success both in term of results and in term of my quality of life. That means handling a lot of stuff. I have found some very practical and good advice on logs of various people I admire. I think I should apply these two pieces at this time:
Henkkles wrote:On Inertia
I've seen lots of people complaining that they can't study effectively because they procrastinate. I can easily empathize with the sentiment, and here's what I came up to address this issue.
I understood this when I was doing my first gig as a language tutor. A high school aged lad, only motivation to learn was to improve grades at school, so quite a difficult job you can imagine. I noticed that the fewer tasks I gave him, the more he would actually do. If I gave him lots of things to do, he'd only have done 25% of them by the time we had our next meeting the following week. However when I sliced the amount of his tasks in half, he actually managed to do 75% of them, increasing the actual studytime I could get him to put in. He was also more keen on doing the things that needed little to no preparation to get started.
In light of the experiences as a tutor and a learner myself, I created a few 'tenets' if you will.
1. Always know exactly what you're going to do before you start studying. Determination leaves no time for procrastination.
2. Have a clear cut plan whose end is not in the far future. This means to make yourself missions that you can accomplish say, within a month. Instead of saying "study the full Glossika course", set yourself a target to complete Fluency 1 within 28 days or so.
3. Do not study only on one occasion. I'd say that the optimal daily studytime is divided into three chunks, the 25/50/25 way. Half an hour in the morning/before noon, half an hour in the afternoon/early evening and half an hour later in the evening, for example.
4. Make your routine light at first and then add stuff later, not the other way around. If you make a four hour gargantuan routine that you try to do every day, most likely you'll just end up dreading to start which leads you to procrasting and eventually dropping the entire thing.
The take-home lesson is:
The inertia to start studying is going to be insurmountable if you have to figure out what you're going to be doing every single time you sit down with the books.
This is extremely good. I don't know whether I can do number 3 (I am NOT a morning person, and I am juggling a bit higher amounts of time, as languages + my normal studies are a bit heavier load (but there will never be more free time for languages, so complete giving up is not an option and I like learning them).
But number 1: yes, I need to do that. Better definitions of what does it mean to go through a chapter in medical textbook the first time, the second time, and so on. What does it mean to finish a unit of a language textbook, and what is a good dose of a coursebook for one session.
Number 2: excellent. I need to learn doing this. My life has been damaged enough by the loooong term thinking. The problem is, that other people are actively adding to that. All those "just keep going, you will get your prize after graduation" or "you can work the way you want one day", all that is making me extremely depressive. The Language version is "finally getting that DELE C1 exam" and similar stuff. Nope, nope, nope. Everything needs to be chopped in smaller pieces.
Number 4: this goes against a lot of other "good advice" I have been given over the years. During one session, all the "just do the worst thing first, so that you can look forward to the easier stuff" advice is horrible. For long term planning, the "do as much as you can as soon as you can, you know how horrible it is to postpone and then having too much left" piece of advice is not great either. I am trying to do it the other way now, planning reasonable chunks of work, so that I can enjoy some feeling of accomplishment, and "yesssss! I am doing more than I am supposed to! I am awesome"
Yuurei wrote:LunaMoonsilver wrote:Oh, wow, I know you said you didn't feel like you used a lot of time between Christmas and New Year, but looks like you got loads done!
I think I'm going to have to borrow your weekly goals idea to make sure I keep on track like you're doing haha.
Happy 2018!
Happy 2018 to you as well! And welcome to the language logs section - I already bookmarked your log earlier and look forward to reading about your progress! (Your use of colors totally won me over
)
As for how much I got done, I suppose I sounded more disppointed than I meant to, but there was, I think, no noticeable difference between last week and my usual weeks (where I work full-time), so I was wondering where my extra 40 hours went, is all.
I can totally recommend the weekly goals, especially if you're going for consistency, as you stated over in your log - I've never been as consistent in my learning as when I was using weekly goals. One tip for those goals though: Shoot low. Really low. Make it the lowest amount you would still feel somewhat satisfied with. The amount you could still (most likely) do, if you were to come down with a cold and be unexpectedly busy. This has several advantages:
1. Completing your goals will be
almost effortless and thus you're much (much!) more likely to actually do them. And even though you think that you would do those few things anyway even if you didn't set them as goals, the fact that you do write them down will
ensure that you do them. And so you complete your goals week after week and voilà - consitency has been attained.
2. Derived from 1.): Actually completing your goals will lead to a
sense of accomplishment (and let's not kid ourselves - who doesn't like that?), which in turn will make you even more likely to accomplish the next week's goals as well. Rinse and repeat. 3. The goals represent
a lower limit, not and upper limit and nothing stops you from doing more than your set goals - in fact easily
finishing your goals before the end of the week will make it very likely that you feel motivated to do some more. 4. Get an extra dose of that sense of accomplishment for having done a lot more than your original goals.
5. If you do get slightly ill or unexpectedly busy, you've still got a pretty good chance of completing your goals.
Heh, I didn't actually mean to get carried away like this, but I could totally talk about this topic for hours (but I already created one wall of text today, so I'll stop here).
Yes, yes, and yes.
Time to apply this. The next post will be an experimental planning one.