Managing Your Routine

Don't envy others. Don't be harsh on yourself. Doubt is normal, immerse regardless that's when strength grows.
Set your own numbers and goals (track a week → divide by 7 for your daily average, keep aiming higher); ignore everyone else’s numbers.
Anchor your goals with a daily habit ("After I wake up, I do my Anki.")
Break goals down so they are more achievable (e.g. splitting reading sessions into 25 minutes each)
See failure as a learning opportunity to adjust and learn from. Failure is part of the process.
Squeeze time in between mundane tasks when busy.

Routine management in immersion¶

From the earlier sections, we now understand that freedom plays a big role in immersion. Being able to carve out your own path by being the one who chooses what to immerse with and from what to learn puts you in the role of being in charge. You are responsible for yourself. Especially when it comes to undertaking something as big as teaching yourself a new language. This calls for a structured approach, consistency and achievable goals you set yourself that also reflect your approach. Inevitably when talking about these things failure looms behind it, so it's important to also understand and see what failing really entails to bounce back from and use it to your advantage!

Preliminary thoughts¶

Don't envy others. If you do so then what you are envying is the "finished product", not the years of their own confusion, self doubt or maybe even burnout. Everybody has them with anything really. The only difference is that these people kept going despite them. Thats the only "secret". The doubt never goes away you just get better at trusting the process despite the doubt. The "secret" is just showing up every day that is on days you feel good and on days you felt like a failure. The days you feel doubt are the most important days to immerse. Thats when you build real strength!

Don't be harsh on yourself. Be more self compassionate towards you. Every time you sit down to immerse you're winning! This may sound dumb to some but it's important to realize. You are teaching yourself a language, meaning you do something for you; that's an act of self-respect. You value yourself so much you do something for yourself. You have to celebrate that! Doubt that may appear is just background noise. Acknowledge it, thank it for its opinion and then focus on the task in front of you that is immersion. You got this. Nobody can be perfect and that's not the goal. Just be stubborn such that you'll keep immersing when the doubt appears. The doubt is like a passenger in your car, not the driver. You re in control. Now go drive!

Motivation is important¶

Almost anything can be solved by just being motivated enough. You don't need to engineer your environment to make you more likely to build habits and achieve your goals. If you are motivated enough then you don't need that since well you are motivated and don't have an excuse or reason; you just do it.

These are just suggestions for you to be more consistent. You can totally do immersion and acquire your target language without any concretely defined routine. Routines for work some, for some they break and thats all normal, most importantly with language learning (immersion) your job is to show up i.e be consistent. Personally I didn't set fixed time, I essentially just filled any free time where I didn't have other plans with immersion. As long as you can sustain you're good. The easiest way to do that is being motivated and enjoying the process.

Goals differ¶

Everybody has to set achievable goals based on themselves, the biggest factor being time. I can't tell you what arbitrary number of letters or words read, minutes listened or words learned each day you should aim for, because it depends on how much time you have. For example a person being able and wanting to put in 6 hours everyday should have different goals for the day than somebody who has only 1 hour a day.

Let's say you read at 5000 letters/characters an hour but you got 2 hours day to immerse. Then your "optimal" amount would be reading 10k a day. But you also have to spend time on Anki or maybe do listening so you probably won't ever achieve that optimal amount. That's why you can't just name some number and expect everyone to manage that.

Settings goals is experimenting¶

You can set aside an amount of time you want to read everyday or listen and record how much you managed that day.
After a week, so 7 days, you sum up your amount of reading you did as in time or letters/characters and how many minutes you listened.
Divide everything by 7.

Then you got your daily average which is manageable for you. Now try to figure how how much you are actually capable of as in maybe you could do more than your daily average. You could have a week or just a day where you push yourself beyond that daily average and ask yourself following questions:

Can I maintain this amount?
Did my comprehension/enjoyment drop?
Do I feel burned out?

Depending on your answers you either:

Decrease your amount
Keep it
Push yourself more

You repeat this step a few times and you'll have your "good" amount you should aim for good progress given your circumstances. Now you got your amount, expect it to fluctuate. Some weeks you will have a lot more tme to immerse and therefore overshot your amount. Some weeks you won't have the time and need to dial back on immersion.

What you have effectively done is transformed your wish to learn a language to something concrete for example like a reading a specific amount of time or characters/letters a day.

Transform a goal into a habit¶

Anchor your goal in your day to day life. Meaning link your goal to an existing, stable cue in your daily routine. You can use the following example for help:

"After/Before [existing habit], I will [goal]."

Existing habits can be a variety of things. Think of "after waking up, "after opening my laptop", "after turning my phone on", "first thing in the morning", "while commuting to work/school".

For me, first thing I did in the morning was get my Anki reviews and new cards done so I don't have to deal with them later that day. Some like to do them at the end of their day. What ends up working for you depends on you!

When you are stressed or tired you autopilot and default back to your day to day habits. This is why building and associating your new habits and goals with your routine is essential before a crisis. When stressed you end up autopiloting into your target language habit instead of collapsing on the couch.

How to make goals easier for you¶

Engineer your environment¶

To make you more likely to achieve your habit reduce friction in your environment. This means making the barrier of entry for your goal as easy as possible. This can be immersing being a few clicks away from doing. Having your immersion material be always open in the background or installing Anki on your phone so you can always do it. You might want to use programs to block out distractions on your devices. You can also create new accounts for social media specifically for your target language so you always surrounded by native content ready to be immersed with.

You can really notice your progress and improvement the most when revisiting the media you immersed with a while ago!

Break goals down¶

"PLEASE READ AT LEAST 20 LINES PER DAY"

Jsph, April 2022

This quote here highlights an important aspect of setting yourself daily goals. Make them ridiculously small so you just go immerse and you can hit your goals even on the busiest days you might have.

Start small: Ask yourself what is the smallest amount you would easily manage to do. Let's say if you want to read for 3 hours, then it's not about one whole session where you have to fit in these 3 hours. You can break these 3 hours up into short 25 minute sessions with 5 minute pauses in between. This is called pomodoro and it works wonders! During these 5 minute pauses you should do something that doesn't relate with the 25 minute task. This can be walking around, getting something to drink or listening to music.

Pomodoro Timer

You can use this website for a pomodoro timer.

The hardest part is actually sitting down and doing what you want to. Continuing is most often easier. For Anki you can first do 1 review or new card then build upon it.

Same place: Try to do your habit at the same time and same place. Your brain will start to associate the context with the action.

What happens if you miss a day¶

You forget everything. Jokes aside missing a day is normal, you won't forget everything just because you missed one day. The key is to get back to your context cue the very next day.

Celebrate yourself¶

Really anytime you sit down and actually do immerse is a win. Treat it as such. Progress is hard to measure with immersion so it's important to drive home the point of celebrating yourself when you immerse or achieve your self set goals! You can do this by using tracking sheets or habit trackers where you can check log or check off days. Seeing your progress being visualized is rewarding as well.

How to approach your routine¶

Disruptions as learning opportunity¶

Expect daily goals to fail. Life happens and you get busy. A disruption isn't a failure; it's an opportunity for you to evaluate, adjust and overcome. Don't think bad of yourself for missing a day or missing a daily goal. Use it as a learning experience to learn from and adjust accordingly. That's why it's important to clearly define goals to have a clear conditions for failure and success. You need failure to learn and grow from and success to see what works. Being able to do something for a long periods of time consistently is realizing and practising this.

Squeezing in immersion time¶

If you happen to not have the time to for example read today like you wanted then you can try and squeeze in some other immersion time elsewhere. For example you can do some listening while cleaning, cooking or commuting and the list goes on. In these cases try to focus on your listening as much as you can while doing your mundane tasks. These pockets you can fill with immersion really add up over time! How much you get out of it depends on how well you focus during these periods of listening.

References

Passive vs. Active Listening

How hard should you pay attention when immersing

You're (not) alone¶

You are not failing or struggling alone. Ask anyone doing immersion and they will probably have felt once before the same or are feeling it at the moment. Look at your environment and ask yourself if it's a setup for success? Nudge yourself in the right direction and change your surrounding accordingly.

Reflection¶

Reflect on your progress and how you feel. What worked? What friction did you encounter? How can you tweak your approach, your environment or routine to make it easier for you going forward?