S3E1: How to make plans you can keep all year
Full transcript:
Good morning, Happy New Year, and welcome to the first episode of S3 of the Language Confidence Project, the only daily podcast for people who love languages, and those who really don’t but have to learn one anyway. I’m your host, Emily Richardson. If you haven’t met me before, I am based in Newcastle in the UK, and have almost a decade’s experience in teaching French, Spanish, English and beginner Mandarin, and an academic background in psycho and neurolinguistics. My mission here is to empower you to believe that no matter who you are, you can succeed at learning your language, you can do it in a way that feels right for you, and you don’t have to lose yourself along the way.
And this whole week, we are going to be looking at how we can make joyful, optimistic plans for the year, dream big, while also keeping those plans sustainable. Because it really is a balancing act. We know that some imagination is involved when we’re planning for the New Year or for a new project, but what we really don’t want is to treat it like a completely creative exercise where we’re largely dreaming up this work of fiction that we will then promptly ignore from about February onwards. We want to leave both, as Martha Beck says a “space for dreaming” while also giving ourselves a fair chance of making our goals a reality.
And so, for today’s episode, the question is, how can we make plans that are going to fit our whole year? Because we don’t know what’s coming. Even if we have some pretty good predictions of busy periods and rest weeks based on trends in our industry or deadlines or events coming up, we don’t know for sure. We don’t know what life stuff is coming. And we don’t know when we’re going to feel motivated.
And that’s kind of the problem with making the plans or jumping into the brand new projects of whatever in the New Year, New You season. We tend to make all these huge plans when we’re in the middle of the most motivated stages, only to find that when the motivation fizzles out and all the other life stuff and distraction catch up with us, we can’t even imagine living up to what we committed to do. So, this time, here is a suggestion for a way to plan differently.
If you have some blank paper and a pen, go and grab them now because this is going to involve some drawing and some writing.
Instead of planning big, how about if we plan in rungs like a dartboard.
If you have your paper in front of you, draw a circle in the middle that’s big enough to write in, but leave plenty of space around the outside, because we’re going to be adding two more rings around that circle later.
And that central circle is your core activities that you’re going to be able to do towards your goal every single day or every single weekday. It’s going to be maybe one activity, maybe a few, but they are so small and so quick and so un-intimidating that you will be able to do them without too much effort at all on your busiest days, your tiredest days, your most stressed days, any kind of day when you’re still working but you’re barely holding on.
And what sorts of activities could be our core activities? Well, before we start, I want to say right now that core activity doesn’t mean “default to Duolingo because that’s only about five minutes a day”. No. It could be that Duolingo is on there, that’s not the problem. That core activity needs to be something that directly contributes to your exact end goal with your language. So it could be something like:
1) Learn 5 new words relating to a specific topic that’s really going to help you in your language
2) Do X number of spaced repetition flashcards
3) Write one line in your language journal – but with that one remember, shorter doesn’t always mean easier. It’s often harder to sum up your day in one sentence than it is to do it more simply in two or three sentences.
4) Learn one grammatical construction from a teacher that you like on IG and use it three times throughout the course of your day
And of course your core activities are also going to massively depend on your current lifestyle and circumstances. If you’re trying to fit in your language learning around a full time job with a commute, family, other responsibilities, what you establish as your core activities needs to fit into a really short amount of time, maybe just five or ten minutes maximum. Whereas if you’re a university student studying this language for most of your working week, your “bare minimum settings” will probably be much higher and of course aligned to your university syllabus but should still be limited to what you can do on your tiredest, most stressed but still working days.
So let’s go back to our circle.
Now, draw an outer ring around that circle, again, making sure you have space to write in the ring, and space outside it.
This ring is going to be all the things you can tack onto the core activities on a standard day. Now this is the day that most people plan for. Your routine is normal, you feel okay, no major curveballs. And this ring is not a to-do list, it’s a menu of things you can pick and combine to reasonably fit into whatever your standard language session is likely to be. If you like choice, put lots of potential activities. If you find choice paralysing, only write a couple of options, or write just the ones that you plan to do every single day. But think really carefully with each activity about how they’re going to work best for you and your objectives. Think about what do you want to do, how many minutes per day you want to do them for or how many words or something like that so you can measure that they are done, and then how they are going to fit in with your core activities.
Last ring. Draw one final outer ring around your standard day one. This ring is the above and beyond ring. It is for the days when you feel amazing. You are super motivated, you’ve got lots of time and energy, life is going really well, and you are storming through your to-do list. And that is going to be perhaps an extension of what’ve done on a standard day, it might be some more involved activities, or it might be a long-term project that you want to have but it’s really important that the activities here are fun and engaging. They are not a punishment for being productive and it’s not just a case of adding more stuff that might actually disincentivise you from getting through your standard day. This is the stuff that’s going to make you happy and is going to really use your language in a way that’s going to make you feel successful.
And this kind of three-tiered system is not about saying “identify the absolute bare minimum that you can do every day and then as long as you’ve done that, you’re fine”. It’s about saying that as long as you’re relying on motivation, but don’t have it, and as long as you’re overwhelmed with the task in front of you, it is so much harder to get done. So, if we have a system of Band A, Band B and Band C activities, where Band A is never too much to handle, then there will never be a day where you go to bed and feel upset with yourself that you did nothing towards your goal. Every day, you have this one tiny thing you can do to move forward in your language, to renew your commitment to it, and to prove to yourself that you can do this.
And now I would love to ask you just before I go, what methods have you found to stop yourself getting overwhelmed with your goals or to-do lists? Let me know on Instagram at @teawithemily, it’s in the show notes, and I would love to hear from you on this. And if you are brand new here, definitely come and send me a message to introduce yourself and tell me what languages you are working on!
Have a fabulous day, and I will see you bright and early at 7am UK time tomorrow!