As learners of new languages, it’s easy for us to see that time management goes a long way in helping us grow. When we don’t manage our time well, our language acquisition slows to a grind, or possibly even to a halt, but when we make careful use of our time, we steadily make progress.
I’ve shared before how result goals, like a test score, aren’t always the best for our learning, but I haven’t shared how a time goal, which focuses on the ongoing process and the level of commitment you make, can help. Let’s look at how we can manage our time learning a language, so we can have sustainable growth, growth that can continue for a long time.
This topic is too large for one post, so we’ll be tackling it in two posts: setting goals and prioritizing!
Setting Time Goals
What’s worked best for me is something like this: an hour a day, 4 or 5 days a week. It doesn’t matter when during the day. It doesn’t matter if I do the hour in two 30-minute sessions or all at once. It doesn’t matter which of the 4 days a week I study on. As long as I keep to this time goal, I see myself improving and I feel good about myself.
We each need to find the kind of time goal that works for us. This depends on your needs, interests, and life. To find a goal that works, write down an idea that you want to achieve. Put the goal where you can see it every day, like on the wall, on your phone’s lock screen, or on the front of your notebook. Make sure you are seeing it.
If you really want to, you can even keep track of how often you reach your goal. You can mark it on your calendar when you reach it. Or you could print out a study timetable. Buy yourself some stickers you like (I know, this is what we do for kids, but it works for us, too!) and stick them on whenever you finish your studies for that day.
If you decide on something like 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening, you could have two different types of stickers. If you don’t like stickers, you could draw a smiley face. If you want to try three sessions a day, draw the circle after the first, the eyes after the second, and the mouth after the third. Then, at the end of the week, you could easily see how much time you are studying.
After a few weeks, you will be able to see clearly how much you are studying, and then compare that to how you feel about your progress. Think about it. Do you want more? Can you achieve more? Up your goal a little bit. Are you finding it overwhelming and stressful? Lower your goal a little and try a few more weeks.
Maybe you feel that it’s too much, but you also feel your progress is too slow. Then you need to decide if you need to cut things out of your life that you don’t need, or at least put them lower on your to do list. That’s called prioritizing. Can you achieve more by making learning a higher priority? We’ll talk about that in the next post.
Switch or Dial?
Now, let’s talk about being flexible with your goals. We have to remember that life isn’t consistent, and we need to adjust to what life throws at us.
Let’s say you already found a nice goal that works for you, and you’ve been sticking to it for a number of months. Then something big comes up and you simply don’t have the time to reach your goals.
Unfortunately, we humans are weak, and it’s easy for us to completely drop our language learning. Then, when life returns to normal, we’ve forgotten our goals and continue for a long time before we realize what we are missing.
That’s where the switch or dial analogy comes in. I learned this from an exercise article I once read. We shouldn’t think of our goals and language learning habits as a light switch that is either on or off: either we are meeting our goals 100% or we drop it completely and do 0%.
When big things in life happen, we run into a wall, and stop learning English
Instead, we should think of it as a dial. We have an ideal goal that we push ourselves to reach when life is calm, then when things happen we dial it down to 50% or even 25% of what we normally do. This way, we keep making progress, or at least maintaining our previous progress, and when life calms down again we can turn the dial back up slowly to 100% again, even if we have to do it 10% at a time.
The same goes in vice versa. Maybe life is normal and we are reaching 100%, then for a season life has almost nothing for us, and we find ourselves bored and looking for things to do. Why not turn the dial up to 125%? What a great opportunity to make some extra progress! If you feel like doing extra, go for it. Learn English like a superhero!
If we can see our efforts as a dial, instead of a switch, we can improve our overall efficiency when life is both calm and when it is crazy; and we can make sure we aren’t burning ourselves out or overwhelming ourselves.
That’s all for setting times goals, next time we’ll look at prioritizing things in life, and prioritizing our learning activities, but for now, complete the learning activities below to practice what you’ve just read!