The original post was about using the SRS to remember the best parts of the best examples of personal development literature.

Anyway, enjoy!

SRS Addict said,
November 24, 2009 @ 00:40 · Edit

This is a LONG comment, here it goes:
I find this post very interesting. Here’s why:

About 3 1/2 years ago I began to use the SRS program “Supermemo” (which I will refer to as “SM”). Since I began using SM, other programs have emerged that specialize in language study, but since I’ve been using SM for so long and have so much time invested in it, it is far too late to think about jumping ship. No doubt the other SRS programs out there work great, so don’t think that I’m knocking them. In the end, use SOMETHING: it’s better than nothing.

Anyways, I began to use SM about 3 years ago to retain Japanese vocabulary. Despite living in America, uncommon words that one does not use very often (such as “round-trip”) continued to remain in my memory, and it required very little thought to recall them. This feeling of satisfaction was very addictive, and I began to integrate more and more of my intellectual life with Supermemo.

I can now speak, read and write Japanese fluently. I passed the JLPT 2Q a couple of years ago without even going to Japan. And the reason that I’ve progressed this much has little to do with my abilities (I am really quite average, I think), but I believe that it is purely because Supermemo has helped to augment my abilities and to focus my efforts so that as little time and effort as possible is wasted (at least when that time and effort is being spent on Supermemo). Here is why:

Humans need a variety of food to remain healthy. Similarly, no SINGLE specific method will gain you fluency in a language. Language study requires a balance of different methods and inputs.

SM seems to have become my intellectual equivalent of a video game “save point.” While up until that time, I might have seen/read/heard many interesting or useful things, but until I “save” my intellectual progress, such information only occupies a temporary place in the mind. While SM is not the only thing I use, it is part of my ‘balanced diet.’

I began by putting Japanese sentences into SM, with the word I wanted to memorise written in English (It was easier than trying to describe the word in Japanese). This created context and usage hints. I would usually enter at least two flashcards for each word (like firing multiple bullets to ensure I hit the desired target), thus ensuring that unless I made a big mistake in structing the material (Poor word choice), the algorithms would ensure that I would remember the word in due time (After about a week or two it would stick very well in my mind).

This worked for vocabulary words, so I thought “Would this work for idiomatic expressions, also?” So I began to experiment, and as time went on, when the appropriate time to use such an idiom presented itself, it required as little time as it took to remember a simple vocabulary word. Now it was easy to rack up idioms (As well as 4-character idioms) in my head. Using James Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji volumes one and two (Although I went my own way with book two), I learned all of the ON yomi for the kanji, which made learning most vocabulary words much, much simpler (Most being a combination of two kanji using the ON yomi). In the end learning Japanese simply came down to shooting fish in a barrel, racking up more and more vocabulary that was easily accessable and would be forever retained using SM.

Japanese has now passed on from the “I need to study” phase to the “I speak it fluently” phase. If I were playing World of Warcraft, my Japanese character would be at level 80 (Although I do not play that game, as I want to defend my time from such bandits). I still add Japanese words to SM, but it is like killing low-level monsters at this point, although I would like to eventually take JLPT 1Q, the “final boss.”

But since Japanese is, for all intents and purposes, done, I am moving onto Chinese.
Knowing the kanji has helped out a great deal, and the ON yomi bears a strong enough resemblence to the actual Chinese reading of the character that it is helpful. But each language poses a different set of problems, and I am always experimenting with variations of methods to try to make it a step further in my Chinese progress. Like you mentioned, keeping a foreward thinking, open mind about how to do things helps to ensure progress. Once you find something that works, exploit it until it stops working or you find something better. Currently I’m experimenting with the flashcard format used by the web site “Smart.fm.” I’m trying to impliment it in SM to see if I learn words better than my present flashcard format for Chinese. You might want to give that site a try, if you haven’t already.
We soldier on.

About a year after I began using SM to learn Japanese, I began to expeirment with using SM on non-Japanese desirable knowledge. To learn something FOREVER required such a SMALL investment of time (Less than a minute for the next 30 years of retention). Therefore, one hour of “entertainment-consumption time” could be converted into “self-enrichment through knowledge” time; the long-lasting benefits are so obvious that it makes many other tasks and pursuits seem trivial by comparison (But one must find balance in life, you have to eat some candy every now and then). But rather than simply being a useful study tool, SM has opened up a new way of life for me, where tangible knowledge consumption and retention is well within the grasp of everyone, regardless of anything else. All that is required is a small amount of time and motivation.

As another commenter mentioned above, the process you describe is very similar to incremental reading, a feature advertised on the SM web site. Traditional reading is very much the equivilent of listening to a long speech by someone, and your ‘input’ is limited: Start, stop, or highlight. Incremental reading is basically a process of taking raw electronic reading material, extracting the useful information, and processing for long term retention (Making something into a flashcard is the end-goal of this process). It is the same as digesting food; take food in, extract neutritious parts, get rid of what you don’t need. Since the world has yet to go “fully digital” when it comes to reading material, it seems that we must suffer for a while without having “buy/borrow as a .txt document” as an option for our local libraries or book stores. On the bright side, books are very small compared to mp3s, and music is pirated very often. Therefore, the potential to download books that you buy is very possible, although spotty. For example, I purchased “Atlas Shrugged,” but found that reading it incrementally on SM was more fun than carrying the big book around with me. I was able to find Atlas Shrugged online with little trouble, now I’m currently reading it through SM.

Where traditional reading is more of a lecture, incremental reading is more of an organic dialgue. Granted, the text no longer retains its form, it gets “chopped up” rather quickly (Like clipping out parts of a magazine article that you like), but we want knowledge in our head, not pretty looking words on paper. This philosophy has made me enjoy reading much, much more. (I recommend you read more about incremental reading, it echos the sentiments expressed here. Also, I don’t want to write what has already been written).

But another expriment that I started about a year ago (That I believe conclusively works) was to see if semi-knowledge put into Supermemo could create subtle changes in my personality and thought-process. You mention putting inspirational quotes into Supermemo, and this is pretty much what I did, but I went about it in a different way. Everyone makes decisions based on principles. Someone might see someone else in need, if they are raised as a Christian, they might think “Do unto others…” so they decide to help that person out. Others might operate on a different principle, which would lead to a different action. The question was “could I take those different principles, put them into SM, and just like the idiomatic expressions, when that principle would come into play, would such principles come to mind, and give more options when making decisions?” I believe that the answer is ‘yes.’

For example, one could take key phrases from various philosophy or religious books (That are deemed useful and beneficial by the user, of course), put them into SM, and over time would have such views of the world at their disposal; whether or not they are adopted is up to the user. Therefore you do not have to adopt the philosophy to undersatnd it and have it at your disposal. For example, I have a number of quotes from Hitler in SM because his twisted mind demonstrates a certain cunning and manipulative evil, which it does good to recognize when seen elsewhere (Even in subtle ways).

So basically SM has become a tool with which I program myself. It has grown to encompass my entire life, and has become my primary means of retaining information about the world around me. I spend about one hour using SM every day. Right now I have about 33,000 active flashcards in my big flashcard “deck.”

Series starts here. Previous post is here.

I can’t find the original comment, but back in one of the preceding timeboxing posts, a kid asked a very pertinent question. It went something along the lines of:

“How can a 60-second timebox have any meaning or motivational value if you know you’re just going to have another one?”

Great question. Excellent question. Let me answer it very simply.

1. First, you’ve got go get out of the mindset that a 60-second timebox has no intrinsic value. Or, more accurately, you’ve got to get into the mindset where you can see the intrinsic value of 60 seconds. And what mindset is that? It’s this one. It’s the probabilistic algorithm mindset: it’s the mindset that says: “I’m not going to a lot of work; I’m not going to do perfect work; I’m just going to do something that helps [for 60 seconds]“. So a short timebox is saying to your numerically: what you do doesn’t have to be big, it just has to help.
2. Once you understand that 60 seconds can have value, you are then in a position to begin to appreciate nested timeboxing. Because the whole point of nested timeboxing is to bring form to the formless. 60-second timeboxes are great, but an endless succession of them can seem, well, endless. That’s where nested timeboxing comes in. It puts these useful microtimeboxes (which I’ll arbitrarily define as any timebox of size < 300 seconds) into a larger framework of meaning. Nested timeboxing gives bigger meaning and structure to the small-but-useful microtimeboxes.
3. Finally, there’s no rule that says you have to use 60 seconds as your timebox length. That just happens to be a length that appeals to me personally. That’s just how I play the game; it’s how I roll. Remember, though, this is all a game, i.e. it is something you play at. For fun. The rules only exist to make things fun. Change, interchange and ignore at will.

So that’s the basic idea there. Keep your questions coming, they’re top stuff .

“It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little.
Do what you can.”
~ Sydney Smith

When I first came to Japan, I hated how people wouldn’t take a stand. In the West, you’re taught that you have to have an opinion and it has to be a strong one, and if you don’t have strong opinions, you’re weak, stupid or both. In my first few weeks and months here, I was shocked at how often people simply wouldn’t take sides on an issue; they wouldn’t take a stand. They were neither apathetic nor passionate. They were simply…impartial.

And it bugged the heck out of me. I’m all for being undecided, but not for being decidedly impartial. That just seems wishy-washy. I mean, people in the West love to say ridiculous things like: “if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything”; that used to mean something to me…now it feels more like a hollow, idiotic threat (“Oh, crap! I’d better hurry up stand for something!”).

As time has gone on, I’ve come to love Japanese impartiality (plus, I mean, it’s not like people are impartial on everything — I am being a bit simplistic here). And I’ve come to dislike opinionated people who think they know everything. Even when they’re right. Ironically, though, that itself as a form of…opinionatedness. So it’s not like I’ve become toadly acculturated. Because if I were toadly acculturated, if I really did 「以和為貴」 (value harmony), I’d be all: 「人それぞれですね」(“well, everybody’s different, and that’s mmm kay”)。

Anyway, back on topic. The point is: we plan and (attempt to) act with too much certainty – not in ourselves, but in the environment. We act as if the environment were full of certainty, as if we were cogs in a giant machine in which everything has already been decided. And that’s stifling. In many ways, we humans don’t like certainty. Boring jokes, boring people and boring movies are all called “predictable” – too certain.

We’ve all written to-do lists before…
…And then proceeded to do nothing that’s on the list.
Why?
Because we’re dumb?
No, because we’re smart.

Those lists of things to do (or, more accurately, the way we use them), rob us of the freedom to exercise our creativity. There’s too much certainty. Certainty of having to be stuck doing a specific thing in a specific place in a specific (read: boring) way. There’s this idea that there’s this One True Best Optimal Correct Method of Doing X, and our only job is to find it and then execute. If we find it, we succeed, if not, we just kind of suck.

But let’s take a step back here. You have to realize that your certainty is false. It feels real, but it doesn’t exist. Are you freaking Nostradamus? Can you tell the future? How do you even know – when you write the list – that those things actually need doing? I mean they probably need doing, but there’s no certainty. Heck, most of the time, you don’t even do the things on the list after about the second item, so why do you even bother write them in the first place?

We are oppressed by a false certainty – a false certainty of method, boredom and location.

So the first thing to do is free yourself of the notion that you know how, where or when anything should or will happen. Because you don’t.

Now we’re having fun. We’re unpredictable now. We’re like an early M. Night Shymylan movie, or a good-looking but mentally unstable woman, or homemade cookies. No one knows what the heck’s going to happen next.

But a part of you counter-rebels against this rebellion: “Isn’t that just irresponsible? I mean, we simply throw our hands up and let things go to the wind?! Isn’t the goal for us to work like clockwork, acting with perfect reliability and precision? OK, maybe not perfect, but isn’t it at least our goal to be somewhat reliable?”

There you go pulling words out of my mouth again.

The keyword is, indeed, “somewhat”.

So, that false certainty we discussed earlier might be described as a deterministic action model. A part of us knows that this model is flawed, but we still try to force it to work, and the result is usually analysis paralysis – we just don’t do…anything. We procrastinate; we spin our wheels; we stare into space; we go to Facebook; we check our email. Anything but deal with the lunacy of trying to make a deterministic action model work in a world where we can’t even predict next Tuesday’s weather with certainty.

Think about this for a moment – we can look into deep space, but we don’t know for sure whether or not your picnic next weekend is a go.

What I’m suggesting is that we embrace the holes in our knowledge, embrace our flaws, embrace our imperfect human nature (even as we strive to continuously improve), and adopt a more probabilistic action model.

Don’t try to get things done. That’s too hard. Too painful. Too annoying. Too prone to failure.

Don’t try to get things done.

But…

Do try to increase the probability that they will get done.

Don’t try to get things done. Do try to increase the probability that they will get done.
Don’t ask if you’re doing the right thing.
Do ask if what you’re doing increases the probability of having what you want to happen, happen.
Do ask if what you’re doing increases the probability of you getting what you want.

Don’t work with the certainties; it hurts too much; it’s too painful. Work on pushing up those probabilities.

Next time you feel so overwhelmed in your quest to become fluent in Japanese, that you just sit there and do nothing, sit there and watch English-language shows on Hulu to try to drown out the guilt you’re tripping on (just like Maddie used to), stop yourself, wake up and smell the probabilistic coffee.

Watching a Japanese anime instead of running off to Hulu may not be as “perfect” as doing your SRS reps, but it demm </SouthAfricanAccent> well increases the probability of your actually learning Japanese, more than some English escapism ever could.

Doing just one SRS rep may not make it so that all your SRS reps get done, but it demm sure raises the probability that that will happen, more than sitting there doing nothing does. (The wording on this blog is getting weirder and weirder).

Ditto for listening to Japanese music while you read English-language documents..

Or doing your Japanese SRS reps on your iPad while you sit in on an English-language meeting.

It’s not perfect; it’s not certain. But the probability that you will (1) learn some Japanese now and (2) get back into doing more Japanese later is infinitely higher than it would be if you were doing nothing.

You catch my drift? If you can’t do the so-called right/perfect/correct thing, whatever you fantasize that thing to be, at least do something that helps. Something that moves you forward. Something that gets you in the ballpark. Something that’s somewhat right. Size doesn’t matter. Details don’t matter. Only ballpark. General direction. General area. All up in there (literally waving my right hand in vaguely circular, kinda conical way). That’s the basic idea. That’s AJATT immersion. It’s also what the situational goals thing is about.

Maybe you can’t do the 100% certain, perfect, ideal, Platonic thing that gets you The Desired Outcome. But if you do so many fun, easy, simple, short, quick, little things that The Desired Outcome has a 97% probability of happening, then, well…call it a win. It’s the difference between a deterministic algorithm that you don’t have the time or energy to execute, versus, small, short, simple, easy, lazy, ad hoc (=random) methods – probabilistic algorithms – that, while imperfect, will actually get done, because it’s just so easy.

100% * 0 action is still 0%. 0.485% * 200 tiny actions is 97%. An action that has a 50% chance of not helping you with your Japanese (i.e. that has only half a chance of helping you with your Japanese), repeated enough times can give you a 99.99% probability of success in Japanese.

OK, I’m getting a bit carried away here. Fake math facts, real math truth. You get the idea. You know who you are. Make your choice.

“Nothing” is the only too little; “not now” is the only too late.

EOF

PS: Paradoxically enough, I am finding that it’s important that you (1) abandon certainty in the environment, while simultaneously (2) embracing certainty in yourself. But we’ll leave the details of that for another time…

It sometimes seems like a lot of people get upset when:

1. I remind them that Heisig said it was OK to give yourself the keywords and story as a hint, and
2. I tell them to continue doing their kanji SRS reps until the kanji cards fully mature, i.e. until the intervals extend beyond their lifetime.

I mean, what am I supposed to say?

“Learn kanji in the most painful way possible and then quit before any of it sticks in your memory” ? :)

I’m just saying, dawg: if you have an answer of your own you like better already…then there’s no need to ask, right?

</rant>

I wanted to pull a Seth Godin and do a short one for a change

Oh, go here to read the series from the very beginning, and here to read the previous installment.

Some very pertinent questions about the value of timeboxing (or lack thereof) came up on the Twitter the other day. Since my answers are too long to tweet, I’d like to share them with you here.

“Isn’t time boxing just a long-winded way of procrastinating? Isn’t a better idea just ‘get crap done’? Why use timers and crap?” — @TracyBBoy

Excellent question…s. Let me attempt an answer.

>Isn’t time boxing just a long-winded way of procrastinating?

How is it procrastination to say “I’m going to do thing T for M minutes starting now“, and then do it?

>Isn’t a better idea just “get crap done”?

Is it? What about the people who sit around paralyzed thinking “but it’s gonna take forever”? What about tasks that do need to be done, but also need to be prevented from taking too long? What about tasks that are cyclical, that do not finish? What about tasks that cannot be easily divided into even parts but would benefit from being done piecemeal (and since time can always be divided evenly…)

>Why use timers and crap?

If time is easier to divide than task quantity, then it makes sense to divide by time. Time is (now) a universal, standardized, unambiguous, and often quite convenient metric.

Timeboxing is about giving form to the formless. It’s about making the large small.

At some meta-level, we are only afraid of what we can’t understand. And what does the word “understand” mean? Well, in Japanese, you say 分かる/解かる/理解 (wakaru | rikai), which shares the same root as 分ける (wakeru) and 分解 (bunkai), all of which mean “to break apart“. In jive, when you’re explaining something to someone, you (used to) say “let me break it down for you”.

Once something is broken down into small, visible pieces, you own it; you control it; you understand it. You can’t fear it and you can’t fantasize about it. All that’s left is to do. To play with it. That’s what timeboxing is about.

But…whatever. It’s not like it’s an idea that needs defending. If it would work to go slap everybody in the face and tell them to shut the fork up and get it done, Nelson Mandela bootcamp style, I’d be for that, too. But that’s what we do right now, and it doesn’t work. All it does is make people feel like crap, teach them to work reactively out of fear and shame (rather than proactively out of joy and greed), and add an unnecessary “moral” element to work.

Most work is and should be amoral. I vote for “cleanliness is next to knowing where the heck your stuff is, being able to think straight, and having no household pests” over “cleanliness is next to godliness”.

The difference between timeboxing and “just do it” is the difference between abstinence (“tell them kids to just not do it”) and contraception (“let’s put some mechanisms in place to mitigate the consequences of the fact that those kids may just do it”). The former is simple and straightforward, but also produces higher per capita teen pregnancy and STD rates. The latter requires some overhead, but we’re at least admitting what the nature of most humans is going to be in a society that allows freedom of motion. And that is the point — we need to work with the human organism and not against it; if the human organism wants smaller pieces, then it should get them. The least we can do for ourselves is present work in appealing portions, even if the content of the work itself remains largely unchanged.

Hmmm…got a bit racy there with the examples…

It may well be that you’re already able to just do it. It certainly sounds like it. There are people like that, just as there are people who simply can’t use, won’t use and don’t need to use tools like Remembering the Kanji and SRS. That’s wonderful — it really is. You’re making the right choice; you should continue to go ahead and just do it. There are many areas of my life where I’m like that — where tools and equations just get in the way. But there are plenty where I’m not. In these latter areas, I need to introduce new ideas and tools; I need to think and strategize and tweak; I need to use my head and I need to allow for some overhead — because the alternative is that nothing happens.

Timeboxing is overhead. But it is not net overhead… it brings us net gain. Except when it doesn’t, in which case, it’s just overhead and should be avoided. So don’t timebox, TracyBBoy. You don’t need it; it would be like a dark-skinned person going to a tanning salon. Like the people who just can’t get into SRS, you already have things figured out, and that is a good thing. Run with that. Leave the children to their toys .

“@ajatt All you need to get crap done. No timers, no convoluted equations, etc.: http://nowdothis.com” — @TracyBBoy

I’m mostly a pragmatist, too. But you have to know when to be a pragmatist and when to be an intellectual. And sometimes, you need to intellectualize your problem in order to come up with a more pragmatic solution for it. When pragmatism and simplicity get in the way of effectiveness, we call that anti-intellectualism.

I actually really like that app, NowDoThis. It’s not the antithesis of timeboxing at all. In fact, it’s a great timeboxing tool. Timeboxing is all about single-tasking.

Let’s say I put “write book” in the app. Am I going to be able to single-task that? No toilet breaks, no eating, no sleeping? All in one day? All in one sitting? 500 pages? No. I’m going to need to say “write 1 page” or “spend 30 minutes writing”…What’s that? Is that the pitter-patter of little timeboxing feet I hear?

Will timeboxing solve all my problems?

Timeboxing will not solve all your problems any more than your favorite dish is good enough to eat at every meal every day for the rest of your life. Timeboxing is a tool, an ingredient. And it goes great with NowDoThis! While far from omnipotent, it is highly potent. Batteries not included. Dilute to taste. Results may vary.

Big thanks to @TracyBBoy for his probing questions and app suggestion. He really touched on core issues and made this post possible. Tracy exemplifies a healthy attitude toward tools; he is not submissive; he is better than any tool — the tool has to prove itself to him, not the other way around.

• Wiktionary Bookmarklet

Source code:

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• Japanese Wiktionary Bookmarklet

Source code:

javascript:(function(){var w=window,d=w.document,s="";;if(d.selection){s=d.selection.createRange().text}else if(d.getSelection){s=d.getSelection()}else if(w.getSelection){s=window.getSelection()}window.open("http://ja.wiktionary.org/wiki/"+encodeURIComponent(s),"_blank")})()


EOF

Oh, go here to read the series from the very beginning, and here to read the previous installment.

Today, as promised , I’d like to answer some of the questions you raised in comments on preceding articles of this series. Let’s go straight to it.

Did you use timeboxing to write these articles?

Yes. Although sometimes I eventually had enough momentum going to not need the timeboxes.

How long should one [rest] break for between timeboxes, and what are recommended activities?
Should I make my work timeboxes and rest timeboxes equal in  lengths?
What if I like 2-minute timeboxes for resting? Should I not do them because you say I shouldn’t?
Also, if I feel like stopping mid-timebox should I continue anyway or should I stop because I want to stop?

OK first of all, write this on your liver: never use the word “should” in my presence. There are no “shoulds” in AJATT. People are always shoulding all over themselves </TonyRobbinsReference>. Do whatever you want. Do whatever makes you happy and productive.

I don’t make rules: I make games. SRS is a game. Nested timeboxing is a game. Games have rules, too, but those rules are designed to make things fun and addictive. That is their only purpose. It just so happens that we use the game of timeboxing to do “productive”(-seeming) things, but that doesn’t make it any less of a game, any more than a beanbag stops being a beanbag because it’s an office and not a living room.

Second. I don’t take breaks between nested timeboxes. I mean, I do insofar as I ultimately stop working and go do other things, but taking breaks isn’t part of the game, if you will. For me, the point of (nested) timeboxing is to be working all the time you work. It’s about focus. Gosh, I’m using all these words I hate. I do have natural moments of “pause”, but no official breaks. But that’s just me.

I hate time-limited breaks. To me it’s like timing sex.  I’m gonna break until I feel rested, and I’m gonna hump until it no longer feels good…and I don’t know when that is until I get there…When hungry, eat…when tired, rest. When bored, change the channel. But that’s just me.

Now, I know a lot of you are thinking: “but if I start resting, I’ll never stop”. That’s because you’ve been raised in slavery. Don’t you see? BECAUSE your breaks have been rationed out and time-limited, they have increased in value a hundredfold. More than all the camels and women in the desert, yazalami! They’ve become like crack and gold and diamonds and baseball cards and first edition comic books — valuable BECAUSE they are rare.

Humans are forgetful, but not lazy. Humans work hard. Watch someone play WoW, those motherlovers get worn out. And we’ve all read those news stories of kids in Korea playing video games literally to death. Humans are hard-working sons of mothers. We only seem intrinsically lazy because we have inadvertently given rest activities a very high (but extrinsic) value.

With timeboxing, we are doing the complete opposite of that. We are rationing out and nickel-and-diming and salami-slicing and swiss-cheesing and bite-sizing and shrinking and wrapping and miniaturizing the work, while freeing up the rest. The idea of timeboxing is to make work addictive by making it exciting and rare and short.

When tired, rest. Rest all you need to. Make your rest abundant and you’ll get bored of it. Flood the market with rest — make it so that you can rest any time. It’s kind of like how when you were a kid and you actually wanted to go back to school as the summer holiday grew to a close. You were like: “enough of this Nintendo and candy and playing outside already…get me my uniform and pencil case — I’m going back to meet the lads!”.

Aside: IMHO, there’s a bit of a scam going on with school summer holidays. It seems to me that they’re designed to be just long enough that you get sick of them, but not so long that you start taking on productive, independent learning projects that would demonstrate to you that you don’t need school. But I digress.

Again, I do take breaks during the timeboxing, but never for more than one minitimebox (i.e. never traversing a timebox — the alarm lets me know “hey, get back in the game”). If you need to rest that much then you shouldn’t be working, period. But that’s just me.

So, either:

• Stop and go do something else until you’re bored of it — eat, sleep, rest, whatever.
• Or, make your timeboxes smaller.

The whole thing about nested timeboxing is that it’s not a new form of slavery, it’s not a new way of forcing yourself to work. Nested timeboxing is designed to make you want to work. It’s supposed to make you go: “What? 60 seconds of work??? I’ll do that for free! Heck, I’ll pay for the privilege to get on the ride …where’s the turnstile?”. If it doesn’t do that for you, then tweak it until it does.

Remember: game = FUNgible. You run the show. You make the rules. I cannot sit here and tell you what to do and if I were you I wouldn’t let me tell you what to do.  Dang, man…life is complex enough, already.

Do not mold yourself to fit any idea I put forward. Mold the idea to fit you. This is a blog, not a religion.

A personality cult with fascist leanings, yes, but not a religion.

Again, do whatever you want. This is all a game. It’s not school; I am not your teacher; you do not take take orders from me. I’m barely sharp enough to be making systems (games) that work for myself. Don’t come here all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed looking for magic pills; I have none for you. You will gain nothing from following or forcing yourself to be like me. Just try stuff out and see what you like.

For freak’s sake, man…you are not an “average” person; we all have a lot in common, but there is no “average” person. So don’t come here to take orders, come here to see a perspective and see how you’re going to use it. This is why people — Americans, at that — die at personal development seminars: they don’t know when to just act like a cat and tell the whole world to buzz off because it’s ball-licking time. Be a cat about this, not a lapdog.

So… There is a 2 minute break between each timebox, correct?

No. If you need to rest that much, you shouldn’t be working. I mean, come on, in dual timeboxing, the small timeboxes are only like 60 seconds each. What’s to rest from?

When I read a textbook using 30 minute time boxes, it felt too easy at the beginning.

Dude…I say let it be too easy . Then again, you weren’t asking a question.

When I have a short break between study sessions, I lie on the sofa and do nothing.

Good one!

Anyway…that’s it from me for now. Uncle Khatzumoto went a bit PG-13 there…I hope you weren’t all scarred. Feel free to add any questions and insights you may have; I’d love to do one more round of Q&A.

…Like you needed to know all that…

Anyway, so, yeah, timeboxing. Well, fundamentally, timeboxing uses just one type of tool: a (countdown) timer with some form of alarm/notification function. There are two basic types of timers:

• hardware – actual physical timers, and
• software — timer applications that run on a more general purpose computing device like a PC or an iPad.

I use hardware timers almost exclusively because, well, because we all know that software can be full of it sometimes. Like, YouTube is great, but IMHO, it still lags behind satellite TV in some crucial ways. The great thing about software is that it can and does improve, but those improvements often take time.

We can’t sit around waiting for our Palm Pilots and laptops and iPads to boot, so we grab pen and paper. Similarly, all the clicking and mouse-moving involved in using a software timer can get very old very fast, especially if you’re doing “microtimeboxing” with 60~90 second blocks (see dual timeboxing, decremental timeboxing for details). So, for now, hardware is the way to go. Besides, not all my timeboxing is done in computer-friendly environments…

Since I live in Japan, I got all my timeboxing devices (isn’t that a sexiest way of saying “egg timer” you’ve ever heard?) here. However, statistics show that a slight majority of the readers of this blog live in the US, so, YTMV — your timer may vary .

With that rather unnecessary introduction out of the way, let’s just talk about hardware timers today and leave the software for another post.

That concludes today’s hardware discussion. Tune in some other time for information on software timers. Oh yeah, if you have any hardware/software timer reviews or recommendations of your own, feel free to post or link to them right here in the comments section.

So, this was a comment made by a handsome AJATTeer named Jonathan, left on this post about having fun; he discusses the coolness of SRS. Here he is in his own words (emphases added):

Obviously, people (adults) were becoming fluent in second/third/nth languages LONG before the invention of SRS, or even flashcards. And the general consensus among learners who use an SRS is that you also have to do non-SRS stuff (informal reading/listening/immersion) in addition to your daily reps. So really, an SRS is neither necessary nor sufficient for L2 acquisition.

Does it make the process faster or more efficient? I’m not sure. I tend to think so, both because of the scientifically well-established effectiveness of spaced repetition for long-term memorization, and just plain old common sense (although the latter is infamously questionable in my case )

For my part, I love SRS’ing. It sounds weird, but I can’t wait to get up each morning, get my coffee, and do my reps. I get a huge sense of accomplishment from watching Mnemosyne’s “Scheduled” and “Not memorised” counters drop from two or three digits to zero every day, and that makes it fun. So it’s fun, and it’s in Japanese, and… hey! Don’t I recognize that formula from somewhere?

It’s fun in much the same way that RPGs are fun (YMMV), particularly RPGs involving lots of micro-management like Pokemon or Final Fantasy Tactics. Adding items, grading my performance, keeping track of statistics… it’s a form of instant gratification, in a process where delayed gratification is the name of the game. I like numbers and structure; that’s just how my brain is oriented. It’s not a choice, it’s a lifestyle! But it’s largely what keeps me going in my quest for fluency; if I didn’t have some kind of objective indicator of how much progress I’ve made and what I’ve learned so far, it would be all too easy to succumb to the old “when the heck am I going to get good, I haven’t learned a single thing in months, I’m sitting here pretending to read these strange symbols that I’ll never actually understand and I should just give up” trap. (Okay, maybe it needs a shorter name.)

Anyway, I’m not the sort of person who buys into ideas like “kids are magical” or “East Asians are magical”, but I’m very much the sort of person who is quick to self-doubt. The SRS keeps me motivated and encouraged (not to mention organized and accountable), and that alone makes it indispensable in my opinion.

Oh, go here to read the series from the very beginning, and here to read the previous installment.

What The?

That’s right — incremental timeboxing. As the name would suggest it is simply decremental timeboxing…in reverse. I haven’t felt the need to use incremental timeboxing as much as decremental timeboxing, but it can be useful for situations where you need to warm up and work up the energy to do some kind of work (rather than make effective use of waning energy).

Timebox Sizes (“Increment Patterns”)

Increment patterns:

• 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 (units: minutes) | Each timebox is one minute longer than its predecessor
• 1-2-4-8-16 (units: minutes) | Each timebox is double the length of its predecessor
• 30-60-90-120 (units: seconds) | Each timebox is 30 seconds longer than its predecessor

Mixed Timeboxing

Incremental-then-Decremental (“Curved” or “Parabolic” Timeboxing)

I haven’t tried it yet myself but I imagine that incremental and decremental timeboxing could actually be mixed together, with timeboxes growing in size up to a certain point, peaking, and then winding down. Depending on the work in question I get the feeling that it could be a really effective technique. Patternwise, perhaps it would go a little something like this:

• 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1 (units: minutes) | Increment by one minute, peak, decrement by one minute
• 1-2-4-8-4-2-1 (units: minutes) | Double timebox length, peak, halve timebox length
• 30-60-90-120-90-60-30 (units: seconds) | Increment by 30 seconds, peak, decrement by 30 seconds

The only potentially tricky part would remembering which side of the curve you were on (rising or falling). You could also just go by your energy level: keep incrementing gradually until you feel tired, then start decrementing rapidly — more rapidly than you incremented — like so:

• 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-5-3-2-1 (units: minutes)
• 1-2-3-4-5-3-2-1 (units: minutes)
• 30-60-90-120-240-480-120-60-30 (units: seconds)

Strictly speaking, it might be slightly inappropriate to call “incremental-then-decremental” a form of nested timeboxing. A more descriptive name would be something to the effect of “curved” or “parabolic” timeboxing. Coz…it cuurrrrves…like space-time. No? Dexter’s Lab? Anyone? No? OK, no…

Dual-Decremental

Another timeboxing mash-up would be to use dual (two-timer) timeboxing that decrements. Basically you have the big timer doing decremental timeboxing, and the small timer looping through the big timer on a fixed loop of, say, 60 seconds. Example times:

• BIG TIMER: 10-5-3-2-1 (units: minutes)
• SMALL TIMER: 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1… (units: minutes)

Fun for all the family. Anyway…that’s it from me for now . I’d love to hear about your timeboxing techniques and success stories — feel free to share them here.

Oh, go here to read the series from the very beginning, and here to read the previous installment.

What Is Decremental Timeboxing?

OK, so decremental timeboxing. AKA “downward spiral” timeboxing. What the heck is it? Well, decremental timeboxing is another nested timeboxing variant that occurred to me in the course of my daily adventures. All it is running timeboxes sequentially (back-to-back), while making each new timebox shorter than the previous one. Like dual timeboxing, decremental timeboxing is a “nested timeboxing” method. Unlike dual timeboxing, decremental timeboxing requires only one timer.

Kel, WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?

• The task is big: it needs time
• But you don’t want to “feel” like a lot of time is being spent, because this feeling of burden and enormity leads to procrastination
• You want to shorten the time for the task to take advantage of Temporal Motivation/Parkinson’s Law
• But you can’t make it that much shorter
• I don’t have the evidence but I imagine that our attention/mental energy follows a curve
• Over a single session, our ability to pay attention –- to focus mental energy on a task –- generally decreases
  • But it doesn’t disappear — we don’t suddenly run out of energy. Rather, it fades away
  • Decremental timeboxing takes advantage of the fact that we still have some mental energy to bring to bear
  • But decremtental timeboxing also takes into account the fact that (a) we’re weakening and (b) creating a feeling of “this is going to end soon” makes us work better
• As always with timeboxing, all we are doing is cleverly choking the “D” term of the temporal motivation theory equation.
• Decremental timeboxing turns work into play: “just a little bit…we’re almost done…just this little bit…just a couple more minutes”
• Unlike dual timeboxing, decremental timeboxing accomplishes a nesting effect using only one timer. After all, we can’t always be Flava Flavin’ it with multiple chronometers…

What Kinds of Decrement Patterns (i.e. Timebox Sizes) Do You Use?

• Decrement patterns:
  • 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 (units: minutes) | Each timebox is one minute shorter than its predecessor
  • 10-5-3-2-1 (units: minutes) | Each timebox is half the length of its predecessor
  • 90-60-30 (units: seconds — incidentally, this was at one point my favorite decrement pattern for washing dishes)
  • Decremental timeboxing with decremental reset:
    • 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1; 5-4-3-2-1; 3-2-1; 2-1 (units: minutes) | Each timebox is one minute shorter than its predecessor
    • 10-5-3-2-1; 5-3-2-1; 3-2-1; 2-1; 1 (units: minutes) | Each timebox is half the length of its predecessor

In Closing

Somewhere along the line, we all seem to learn the false lesson that only big matters, that our steps do not count, that the process is a waste of time, that if we’re not working our way to a heart attack then we’re not really working. Everything is too small. Everything is too late for the fictional deadlines we make up. Everything is too early because we don’t have the imaginary perfect toolset we’re supposed to have.

And all the while we wonder why nothing’s happening…

It’s never too late. It’s never too early. It’s never too small. Do something, no matter how small. Do anything, the easier the better. ((((DO SOMETHING!) SMALL) USEFUL) NOW!)

I think that’s almost it for this particular more-than-three-part timeboxing trilogy. Except this — your questions. If you have any, I’ll answer them in the next (and probably-though-maybe-not final) post.

Timeboxing Turns Work Into Play

I love how nested timeboxing makes virtually any work feel like web-surfing — mindlessly moving from one interesting thing to the next (except, of course, in this case, we’re doing something immediately productive!).

I use the word “mindless” deliberately…usually this word carries a negative connotation, but the thing is that most of us have “too many mind“; most of us spend time stuck in analysis paralysis pretending to be “prioritizing tasks” when really we’re just freaking out and hating our work and ourselves.

I’m with HONDA Naoyuki on this one — most of us don’t need to prioritize our work, we just need to get started on it. Many times. That’s what’s killing us…paucity of starts. And all the tidying and soda breaks and relaxation exercises in the world cannot will not ever change this. Let’s be brutally honest: your life simply is not that complicated — most of the time, you already know what your top priority direction is. The only question is: are you headed in it?

That’s why I’ve found timeboxing to be such a great tool. Timeboxing, used skillfully, is all about “shut the truck up and just effing do it” — minus the meanness.

Dual timeboxing can give work the spontaneity of play. Because, you see, work and play are actually the same. The primary difference between work and play is not content, but form. When you feel like you’re making a lot of fun, small choices, we call it play. That’s why mountaineering is classified as a hobby and not a life-threatingly dangerous form of hard manual labor — lots of fun, small choices.

As it turns out, certain types of content tend to get packaged in fun forms…but trust me when I tell you that video games start to get boring for game testers. Play can become work and work can become play. The key is that you have the knowledge and freedom to make everything a game for yourself.

You don’t need to get rid of Facebook and Gmail and all the other  game-like distractions — they’re not the problem: they’re the solution. More accurately, they contain the blueprint for the solution. Play and games distract us not because something is wrong with us, but because something is right with them: they are tapping directly into “the firmware of the mind“, if you will . We need to cut up our work into pieces so tiny and so easy to do that we don’t even know or feel that we’re working any more. We need to turn our work into Farmville. That’s what these 90-second spurts are to me. A game.

Why bother change our nature? Why pretend that we don’t, as human beings, prioritize short term gain over long term gain? We’re not going to win by forcing ourselves away from that. We have tried — Heaven knows we have tried — and it doesn’t work. Correction:  it does work, but only when someone else is there to coerce us, and it fails as soon as that person disappears. This is why so many former professional athletes are obese…it’s not age: it’s dependence on coercion.

We will win consistently when we use our strengths and use our nature and use our short attention spans to do fun, instantly-rewarded little things that just so happen to produce long-term gain.

If worrying is about having “too many mind”, then flow is all about “losing your mind” (how do I keep coming up with these?). To the extent that dual timeboxing can help get rid of “too many mind”, you could argue that it is helping us induce flow states. And that’s fun.

So, Why Dual Timeboxing?

Dual timeboxing is just personal timeboxing using two timers. I first started using it when I noticed that I was missing a lot of trains.

If you live in Japan, then you know that our trains run the heck on time. It literally takes a death to make our trains late. So, under normal circumstances, missing a train, in Japan, is like failing an open-book, open-notes test where the answer was given in advance and there was only one question.

I mean, the schedule is written, published and distributed in advance for all to see.  It’s publically searchable from any of dozens of train websites like Ekitan and Jorudan. You can even get a little wallet-sized copy at your local train station. All for free! IMHO, unless death, injury or natural disasters are involved, missing a train in Japan really isn’t morally defensible, at least as far as the pure logic of the situation is concerned. I mean, come on, it’s not like the train is gonna fake us out! Unless someone dies it will leave at the exact time it says, and not a second earlier or later, every time, every day. All you have to do is be there for it and let the magic unfold.

So I started using normal, “vanilla” timeboxing to help me make it to the trains I needed to make it to. But that actually didn’t work too well. Why? Because I would wait until the last two minutes of the timebox to actually start getting ready. Unfortunately, it would take me about 5~10 minutes to prepare my things. Now, those of you who have mastered kindergarten mathematics will realize that 10 > 2. The crocodile wants to eat the 10. So I kept missing trains.

And what if I just took the next train? Well, the same crap would happen, dawg. Wait until the last two minutes and then be running late. Maybe missing a train isn’t that big a deal. But for me it was and is a metaphor for life itself. In life, I want to be able to say: “I shall do thing X at time Y”, and actually have that happen.

The fact that this “have all the time in the world, but then wait until the last 2 minutes to start　getting ready and still not make it” pattern of procrastination followed by panic kept repeating itself, showed me that the problem was not the train schedule, it wasn’t “the Japanese people and their love of rules” or any other prejudicial nonsense like that. The problem lay in my behavior. My behavior needed to change.

I knew I had to “master” the art of meeting trains, because this same procrastination-panic cycle was cropping up in my other work, like translating video games or creating products like the QRG, MFSP and even AJATT+.

Herein lies the paradox: I needed more time, but I also needed less time. In other words, I needed not one but many two-minute timeboxes. Thus was dual timeboxing born.

How Does Dual Timeboxing Work?

Again, dual timeboxing is just regular timeboxing but with two timers — “the big one” and “the small one”.

• The big timer measures the total or absolute time remaining (until, say, I need to leave my place of residence to catch the train. Example lengths (minutes): 90, 60, 30, 10
• The small timer measures the subtotal or relative time remaining within the current nested timebox. Example lengths (seconds): 120, 90, 60

Clearly, dual timeboxing is good for more than just making it to the train. It’s good for anything where you have a clear, hard, absolute deadline with a longish time horizon (dozens of minutes to a couple of hours?), within which you have to do some creative or otherwise amorphous work — work where the content is not so hard and fast, work where the details are not fully predetermined.

So, personally:

• I don’t plan out what I’m going to do in the big timebox.
• I have a “theme” (e.g. “study X” or “write Y” or “get ready to leave”), but within that theme…
• I act spontaneously…I just pick something productive to do for 90~120 seconds (or whatever the length of the smaller timebox is) and give that all my energy.
• It’s like eating chips or popping bubblewrap. Sure, there’s a bag, but I’m just eating this one chip.
• Occasionally, I even use some of the small timeboxes to take little breaks. I keep both timeboxes running as normal during the breaks…no clock-stopping since that (for me) creates the illusion we can stop time, which is the one thing we cannot do. We cannot (yet? hehe) stop time — all we can do is position ourselves and our tools in such a way as to use the ever-flowing river of time productively </OverlyPoeticStatements>.
• If my breaks get too long (use up too many small timeboxes), then I take it as a sign that the big timebox is too big and/or that I shouldn’t be working anyway, so I’ll just stop working altogether. Remember, the point of timeboxing is to limit work time, and but also to be actually working during work time. Yes…”and but”.

Complex (i.e. made up of many pieces), amorphous, ambiguous tasks are the kind that seem “hardest” to us, whether it’s cleaning house, writing an article or doing our SRS reps. Breaking it up like this helps me focus on just doing, not on freaking out about the enormity of the task (which, as we all know, leads to avoidance behaviors like our good friend Procrastination).

Timeboxing Turns Work Into Play

[This section got spun off into its own post. Click here to read it].

OK, Kenfucius, I’ve Drunk the Kool-Aid, But How Do I Use This For Learning Japanese?

• SRSing
• Reading (you could switch books every 90 seconds…this actually works really well when it’s your L2 — a language in which you are a mental child — and you can’t concentrate for too long)
• Watching/listening to media — think of it like channel-surfing.

Anyway…that’s the basic idea. Tune in next time for the second type of nested timeboxing – decremental timeboxing.

Nested timeboxing is a fake umbrella term I just made up for what is actually two different variations on the timeboxing concept that I recently “discovered”. I don’t want to go all Columbus on you here – it may well be that someone else was already living in this part of timeboxing space. But I’ve never seen anyone discuss these before, so, I’m going to go ahead and unjustly take credit for now.

So, timeboxing, for the reasons discussed in the previous post, makes it easier for us to actually get to work and save time. Timeboxing “lowers the barriers”, if you will. In fact, the smaller the timebox, the more time is saved and the easier it is to get to work. But that’s exactly the problem and paradox of traditional timeboxing. Because, you see…

• while smaller timeboxes are easier to work on → concretely
• LARGER timeboxes are easier to work with → conceptually

It’s a simple concrete vs. abstract dichotomy. Larger blocks of time are easier to work with conceptually, such as when scheduling. It’s easier to say “I’ma work on this for an hour” and write that in your schedule, and keep track of that in your time-tracking system, than to say “I’ma work on this for fifty-six 90-second units”…because keeping track of 56 little things is annoying; it’s just more overhead that we do not need; there’s so much to keep track of in life already: the systems we use to help ourselves work better should be reducing our workload, not increasing it. I, for one, refuse to sit around tallying up 90-second timeboxes.

So an hour of time is easy to work with, but it’s very hard to work on. As anyone who has ever said to themselves “let’s sit down and work on X for an hour” knows, that hour is incredibly hard to get started on – you suddenly find yourself stricken by the urge to do “righteous time-wasting” – endless tidying up, cleaning and preparation activities. Whether it’s work or play, big blocks of time invite procrastination. Conversely, if someone says to you: “do X for 90 seconds”, you won’t even think twice about it; there’s nothing to think about – you just get started on it. You’ll drop whatever you’re doing and do it, because the D parameter (see the equation in the previous article) is just so freaking small. Small blocks of time invite action.

Nested timeboxing allows us to enjoy the best of both worlds; it helps us actually walk the big talk. With nested timeboxing, a large timebox surrounds a bunch of smaller timeboxes. We’ll discuss the details in the next post.

This first article is just a placeholder to help us get our bearings. The real tofu and potatoes will come in the next two parts, where I’ll discuss two timeboxing variants that I’ve recently been using — dual timeboxing and decremental timeboxing, both of which are “AJATT originals” AFAIK…

What Is Timeboxing?

If you’re not familiar with timeboxing, WikiPedia, Steve Pavlina, Litemind, and J.D. Meier and Dave Cheong all give great, easy-to-read introductions to the concept. My first exposure to the idea was Mr. Pavlina’s article.

While we’re being definitional, when I talk about timeboxing here at AJATT, I’m generally referring to what WikiPedia calls “personal timeboxing”.

Anyway, the short answer is this: timeboxing is a technique where we place deliberate, prior, artificial  limits on the time to perform a given task. Within reason, the tighter (shorter) the time limits, the better.

Why Timeboxing?

Why is timeboxing so powerful and useful? Well, recall the Temporal Motivation Theory (TMT) equation by Piers Steel. This equation tells as that for any given task:

U = EV / ΓD

• U = Utility, i.e. fun. The idea is that humans always make the choice they believe maximizes U. IIRC, humans always want and choose to do the thing that has the highest U.
• E = Expectancy. Your confidence in your ability to complete the task.
• V = Value, i.e. importance of the task.
• Γ =  Distractions.
• D = Deadline, delay. How much time you have to do the task.

For a fuller discussion of the whole Temporal Motivation Theory thing, you might want to check out the rather verbose article I wrote about winnable games, as well as the original TMT paper by Steel himself. In my humble, non-expert opinion, Steel has probably managed to compress virtually the entire body of work of the personal development industry into a workable equation using only simple arithmetic and just one Greek letter. Hot stuff.

So timeboxing works by artificially limiting D. By giving you a smaller delay – less time – to work with, the utility (U) shoots up and the power of distractions (Γ) is weakened. In fact, the more we shrink D, the weaker Γ becomes. So if you could only do one thing to help your situation with regard to some task you’ve been avoiding, reducing the amount of time you have to do it, would be it.

While we’re here, this seems like as good a time as any to bust out Parkinson’s Law – of course, it’s not a “real” law, but…it might as well be:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

So reducing D makes Parkinson’s Law our friend rather than our enemy, because not only do we actually get the work done, but we also find that there is less work to do. More accurately, limiting the time causes us to make choices that reduce the quantity of work; we trim the task down to size.

That’s all for now. Come back for the next installment in the series! Feel free to share any ideas, info and/or insight you may have down below in the comments section.

No matter where you live, it’s fun and useful to make friends fast, and one thing that helps friendships form is accurately remembering people’s names (and then saying them a lot).

Here in Japan, because I stand out so much and look so radically different from everyone else, it’s usually quite easy for other people to remember my name…but I don’t frequently get the same benefit of a “lone statistical outlier” in physical appearance to help names stick in memory. Until recently, I often found myself in situations where everyone knew my name, but I was drawing blanks. And I felt bad about that; it just made things unnecessarily awkward.

Whenever I meet people from the kanjisphere, all I ever do is talk about kanji, starting with their names. I’ll get them to write down all the kanji; we’ll talk about variant characters and name distributions — South China has lots of 呉s and Kansai has lots of this and Okinawan names have lots of syllables and all that good stuff. But for all that talk and writing, I was having a really hard time actually remembering those names…

At times, the happier the encounter, the worse it seemed . You know how it is. You’ll meet someone really cool and you’ll have this great conversation, and then you’re like “I’m sorry, what was your name again?” Or, the conversation went so well and you had so much fun, that you actually feel bad about asking their name, so you tell yourself you’ll get their name through the person who introduced you in the first place (so you don’t look bad), and then you and the cool person part ways, but then you meet this cool person again another day and they’re all excited to see you, but you didn’t get around to asking their name and to ask now might imply that they were forgettable and you don’t want to hurt their feelings and…

…yeah, awkwardness…

For a while I thought I must just be a cold person. Indeed, Kenyan women often describe Kenyan men as cold, arrogant, boring and poorly dressed [particularly in comparison to Zairean men, the lords of the earth. And by “Zairean men”, I mean Kanda Bongo Man ], So…I figured I must just be fulfilling the national dream. Maybe I was just a cold man who only loved kanji. And toys. And tall women.

And Ann Coulter. Ann. It’s like…there’s so much hate, the only response left is love. Kind of like when you’re so happy that you go over the edge and wrap right back around to crying. It’s integer overflow, but with emotions. Incidentally, being a real man, I never cry…except when I’m in your mother’s arms….

Where was I? Oh yeah. But the thing is, Kenyan or not, I do like people and hanging out with them and playing ultimate frisbee with them, so…I knew that wasn’t the problem. I realized that all I had to do was turn learning people’s names into a fun game, just like learning kanji. So I came up with an SRS card format to remember people’s names. Here’s the basic structure:

Front

Any relevant details about the person that I feel like adding. Even pictures (if convenient) are OK. Usually I fill in the more salient features of their body/gestures/persona (e.g. “buck teeth”, “hoarse voice”). It can be quite blunt, but no offence is intended. Having said that, given the lack of tact in these descriptions, offence would be taken, so…I don’t exactly go around showing these decks to the people in question. Besides, they’re probably happier that way: they get to think that their names were remembered only because of their good looks and charm and not because of clever memory games.

Back

Full Name [and nicknames for reference]

Objective and Structure Details

Pretty much anything goes on the front, but the name (and any nicknames that are too much of a giveaway, which is most nicknames) is only allowed on the back. The object of the game is to say the person’s full name, given all the details on the front. Nicknames are for reference only. IMHO, one principle of good SRS cards is that there be one and only one correct answer, and that this answer be short, clear and concise (BTW lazy kanji cards kind of violate this principle to some extent, which bugs the side of me that wants a simple, straightforward game with a clear, unambiguous objective…but we’ll leave that for another post).

Actual Sample Cards

Here are a few actual sample cards. Observe that while these cards are in English, most of my actual cards are in Japanese.

FRONT

Big nose. Incredibly loud laugh.
Dad looks like Don Knotts.

BACK

TANAKA Taro

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

FRONT

TANAKA Taro’s girlfriend.
Looks like Jane Doe from OmniCorp, but somewhat taller and with less chest (hey — I’m trying to remember names here…anything goes)

BACK

SUZUKI Sadako

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

FRONT

Spikey hair.
Likes to tell jokes.
Looks just like the kid from Battle Royale/Death Note

BACK

SATOU Saburou

Grouping

I arrange these cards into decks grouped by location/situation. So for example, my frisbee buddies are in one deck, my bookstore buddies are in another, people I met at a certain wedding are in yet a third. The decks have names like “rolodex-frisbee”, “rolodex-taroswedding”, “rolodex-hokkaidolads” and so on…

More Amateur Sociology

I find that people don’t mind details about their lives being forgotten, but they do mind their names being forgotten. Put another way, if you can only remember one thing about a person, remember their name, because this will make them really happy. If you have their name, you have the key to their…whatever…heart…or…chastity belt…I dunno. As Dale Carnegie famously discussed in How To Win Friends and Influence People, everyone loves their name: it’s their favorite word.

In RL, people walk around with their faces, voices and personalities in full view, but very few walk around wearing nametags. At the same time, we can only really call people by their names, at least if we want to be even moderately polite. “Hey, you, whatsyourface-that-looks-like-the-kid-from-Battle-Royale!” can be pretty hit-and-miss in terms of “winning the hearts and minds”, to put it mildly. So memorizing names is important. And thanks to SRS, it’s now easy as well. So even if you’re a cold, distant, arrogant, poorly-dressed, self-absorbed geek, you don’t have to “get social skills” in order to work well with people…you can just geekify the process itself.

When you’re living in a new country, like I am, remembering names can speed up and smooth out the process of making new friends. And as we all know, good friends can really make any place amazing.

If you were thirsty, would you deny yourself drink because you were thirsty?

If you needed a blood transfusion, would you deny yourself blood because you needed it?

Rhetorical questions.
You wouldn’t starve yourself to death to punish yourself for being an “innately hungry person”.
You wouldn’t dehydrate yourself to punish yourself for being “born with thirsty genes”.
You wouldn’t deny blood to someone because he showed “no signs of a talent for not needing blood transfusions”.

So why do we do this with languages and other large-scale habits and skills — indeed with long-term projects in general?
Why do we practice this mindless, illogical “mob triage” on ourselves ?

Surely the thirstiest man should get a drink?
Surely the hungriest child should get a bite to eat?
Surely the hot chick who’s bleeding to death should get the blood she needs because she will bleed to death otherwise?
Surely the thing that’s going to take the longest to do should enjoy as early a start and as many starts as possible? — kind of like how we stick the biggest suitcase into the trunk first, and then fit the small stuff around it…kind of like how we stick the rock into the jar first, and then fit the pebbles around it.

Sucking at something is a natural — but temporary — state. It can only become permanent if we choose to make it so. Once we starve the child to death, whatever food we throw at her thereafter shall be of no use.

If you still, relatively speaking, suck at a language, then feed yourself the language in a biologically appropriate (i.e. tasty i.e. fun) form until you are no longer hungry…until you no longer suck.

We often run away when we suck. But maybe that’s exactly when we should be staying. Just as no animal needs its parents’ attention more than when it’s a baby, you, a virtual (but very real) Japanese baby, need all the Japanese you can get right here, right now, right when you suck, precisely because you suck, because you are hungry, because you are weak, because you are vulnerable, because you were not born in Japan, because you were not raised in Japan, because your Japanese baby will die if you don’t feed her — regularly. Multiple times per day. You need Japanese and you need it badly. In fact, you need it more than a “real” Japanese person does: they’ve had their fill; they can wait. Many of you have gone the entire first 10, 20, 30, 40 or more years of your life, without Japanese. Enough is enough. Eat.

It’s one thing for a fully grown, healthy, strong, “well-fed” Japanese person, born and raised in Japan, to go hours and days and weeks and even months without Japanese. But that kind of neglect would kill a baby.

No group in society contributes less and takes more than babies[*]. Yet they get all that food, love and attention. Your Japanese — the Japanese baby inside of you — won’t give back to you for a long time yet; it’ll take and take and take…and all you’ll have to show for it is the enjoyment you get out of it. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore her until she’s “big enough”. If you wait until she’s big to start taking care of her, she’ll never get to be big. She’ll just die. She needs you now.

Feed the baby. Water the baby. Feed yourself Japanese.

Infanticide = very uncool. Stop killing babies.

• OL2L: YouTube – NMA 2010.05.22 動新聞 4人肉毒桿菌中毒 又傳豆乾惹禍
• YouTube – ファミ通TV　2010年5月14日配信

OK, so after all that talk, let me show you a few examples of the SRS cards I’ve been using with the Unified Reading Process (URP). Remember that the URP was designed (which seems a bit of a posh word for how simple a thing it is, but, there you go) by yours truly to solve problems with both (a) native-level languages and (b) sucky-(not-yet-native)-level languages.

So, while it is a single process, it does have two rather different motivations, and this produces two broad types of cards:

• (a) With native-level languages, one is trying to remember ideas through vocabulary.
• (b) With sucky-level languages, one is trying to remember vocabulary through ideas.

(b) is the type of thing we typically discuss here at AJATT. So, it uses the same types of SRS cards as we’ve been talking about all this time. No changes, no surprises. In this article, we’ll focus mostly (though not exclusively) on  type  (a)

But before we hit the example cards, let me answer a couple of your questions all nice like.

Do you use one massive deck for all of your SRSing, or switch off between decks?

Currently, I have a bunch of different decks. I think this is definitely the way to go, as:

1. Different subjects lend themselves to different types of SRS cards, and mixing them all together would just be jarring.
2. Splitting helps with performance management and analysis.
3. I switch subjects by mood. I mean, logic.
4. Surusu makes it very easy for me to switch between decks, both when adding and doing reps. You like that plug?

My current deck breakdown is:

• Japanese – the “original glazed” deck. It contains Japanese sentences.
• Kanji – Heisig-style kanji reviews. I still learn new kanji and reinforce old ones. You never stop learning, you just stop sucking.
• Math/Science/Engineering – very broad…basically anything technical or scientific goes here…I also have quite a few math cards
• Humanities – extremely broad; this has everything from legal stuff to funny internet quotes, to insight on random social issues. I even have the occasional piece of English vocabulary (like “anodyne”…didn’t know what that was…).
  • The English vocab thing is made even more ironic by the fact that one American blogger has decided that my accent is so weird and Christian-Baled up that I could not possibly be a native speaker of English…I guess those AJATT “method-acting” chickens have finally come home to roost and Japanese really is my native language now? Maybe I should just start cross-dressing…I always did enjoy hanging out in women’s restrooms with the freaking…couches and TVs and herbal tea and free massages from sporty Swedish women…
  • No?
  • The legal vocab is there because on rare but significant occasions, it helps me in Japan to be a bit more-eloquent-than-average – as if to demonstrate that “I-am-not-a-roll-over-play-dead-and-cry-myself-to-sleep gaijin, so if you try to brush me off with a spurious explanation you just made up, life will get difficult for you”…I know that sounds jerky, but even in Japan, once every 6~12 months or so, I find the need to project stubbornness and erudition at the same time. Of course, I’m bluffing because I’m not actually erudite or stubborn, but it works every time – people treat you differently when you signal that your crap threshold is low).
  • No, really, though…women’s restrooms are…the shiz.
• Original Ideas – I just throw my own original ideas in here…Everything from long-term projects, to Surusu feature concepts.
• Business – business vocabulary and good ideas from business books and blogs.
  • As a programmer, I was “raised” to look down on business people. After reading Johnson O’Connor’s vocabulary research (executive summary: there apparently exists a powerful correlation between vocabulary and social position), I started to realize that many “business”-type people used vocabulary that I didn’t actually know well enough to use myself. (I think Paul Graham also raised this point once, actually). It occurred to me that they were communicating things that may actually be of some value to me; they weren’t just dumb people in suits throwing buzzwords at each other. I mean, there’s that, too, but that’s not all there is to them.
• Cantonese – Cantonese sentence cards, using a format that I developed (again, a rather OTT word to describe something very simple) after my trip to Taiwan. Basically, it’s full of sentence cards. The format still uses sound, but is much less labor-intensive than some of the Canto cards I’ve previously shown. Look out for another Chinese Project Notes post on these.
• Personal Development – the main difference between this and the “Business” deck is that it is purely focused on inspiration, where the business deck is more about vocabulary and procedure. The purpose of this deck is to increase my self-efficacy (self-confidence?); it is pure “positiveness”. It contains quotes from PD books, affirmations, afformations…all that good stuff. I’M A GOOD PERSON! LoL.
• Mandarin – Mandarin sentences. Originally, a lot like the Japanese deck in format, but has since morphed to be more like the Cantonese deck because, me loves that sound. Chinese cards + sound = gold.
• Hangul – I just wanted to learn to read Hangul. All this contains is the alphabet. This is an extremely low-priority deck for me. It doesn’t even contain all the Hangul yet.
• Recipes – I brainwash myself with good recipes: this influences me to default to healthy food. I usually read recipes for ideas, but I never follow the recipe to the letter myself. I just take its main concepts and then put my own spin on it. A metaphor for all reading, perhaps?
• Unconfirmed/Questionable Cards – This contains mostly Cantonese cards I made by transcribing movies, where I have things I’m not sure about, but I don’t want to just throw the card away, so I save the card here in order to ask a native speaker when I get the chance.
• Pre-Dump – This just contains things I want to throw into the SRS, unprocessed, to maybe make “proper” cards for later.
  • It gets a LOT of deletion. I am not sentimental – that kind of feeling holds too many people back, as does too much hypothetical (counterfactual?) thinking: “what if…”, “maybe”….No…not fun or useful now = no right to be in the SRS.
  • When I’m at a loss for what to learn next, but want easy pickings, I just flip through this deck.
  • If sentence-picking is fishing, then this is fish-farming. Rather than go out to the sea of Japanese/Chinese media, I have my own tank I can pick from any time.
• Links to Websites – Can you see a pattern here? The SRS being used less and less for its traditional/original purpose, and more like a card management system. Anyway, since the SRS I use (Surusu) is web-based, I’ve started adding links to websites I would like to get into the habit of visiting. This, for me, basically means sites in Chinese and Japanese.
  • It’s easy to stumble upon a good site, but hard to find one when you’re looking for it. Also, simply throwing things into bookmarks doesn’t lead to sites getting seen, for me. Previously, I had been using a program to open sites randomly, but that got rather out of hand…websites opening left and right.
  • A more streamlined alternative to using Surusu for storing websites is WhatPage, a web-based, no-install browser homepage rotator. Unfortunately, they have a ridiculously low limit on the number of websites you can store. So if you know of any alternatives, please let me know.

How do you score your cards?

I just kind of play it by ear, to tell you the truth. I use the scoring principles outlined by Dr. Woz at SuperMemo. Namely:

• 0 = Blank. Total. Memory. Blank.
• 1 = Well in’ dat cute…but it’s WRONG! (Two Stupid Dogs…anyone? Anyone?)
• 2 = Slightly Wrong
• 3 = Just…Barely…Right…By The Enamel of the Teeth
• 4 = Correct…amundo.
• 5 = Psssh…Piece Of Cake, Be Arch, Why You Even Be Showing Me This, Motherlover? You’d Best Believe I Come Correct, Son. Perfect! Flawless victory! Correct and Fast and Easy.

So basically a card is either correct or incorrect, but then within that binaryness, the 0~5 scale gives uz a finer-grained way of explaining the correctness. 0~2 is all incorrect, 3~5 is correct; it’s all a matter of degree and the specifics don’t matter too too much. SRSing isn’t so ossified a field that these things are hard and fast yet.

We are living in a golden, lawless age where no one’s telling you what to do*: enjoy your freedom. In any case, once you decide what constitutes correctness and incorrectness for your cards, then scoring is smooth sailing. The key is that you recognize that most decisions are ultimately arbitrary, that there’s nothing wrong with that, and that you have the right to start making some of these arbitrary decisions. You are the rules. That’s my take on it.

Besides, I don’t like other people controlling my whys, whens, whats, with-whoms and hows, because they’re not very good at it .

*For example, some idiots went and decided that socks + slippers = lame, before I was even born. From birth, I have known that socks + slippers = a prudent foot-hygiene choice in any urban environment. But now, on top of making good decisions for myself, I’m beating off the social inertia of someone else’s ancient opinions. Is that what you want? Coz you’re asking for it! Don’t come asking me to make rules that don’t exist.

How would you grade something like a personal development quote card?

• If the quote is a cloze deletion, then I grade myself my ability to fill in the (one-word) blank, just like any other informational card.
• On the other hand, if the quote is in full view (no blanks), then I grade myself on the extent to which:
  1. I have internalized (i.e. am living) the content of the quote. So if, for example, I have been blowing a setback out of proportion, then a quote about setbacks would get a low score.
  2. The quote is boring me. So if it’s a quote that I’m not quite living up to, but that I have seen so much that it feels cliched, I’ll give it a big score anyhow to get it out of the way. Conversely, if the quote is feels very “fresh” to me, then it’ll get a somewhat lower score.

So many decks, do you go through them all every day?

I choose decks in order of fun/priority and I delete extensively. If I’m avoiding a deck, then I go on a deletion spree, and I keep deleting until the deck feels good again.

Also, while there are many decks, many of the decks contain only a handful of cards (80-20 rule) or are information-only decks, so…there are no reps to do as such.

So, no, I don’t necessarily touch every deck every day without fail . Rather than try to “work harder” to correct this, I instead tweak things to make it so that I want to touch the relevant decks — again, deletion is big here. Also, if, for whatever reason, time is short, then priority rules take over. Japanese is a top priority deck for me. Humanities is not.

Surusu does automated rep-capping and deck-switching for me, so a lot of the thought/selection/management burden is taken away.

Show us your cards, motherlover!: Actual Card Examples

Yeah, and it was your mother I was loving…jerkwad.

What? No…Um…OK card. The simplest way is to just give you a nice, pretty table, much like in “My First Sentence Pack”, except MFSP is even better.

To make things easier for myself, these cards do not have links to actual audio files (even where applicable). In a real, live SRS, they would…I just wanted to save myself a few steps since this article is so long already! … ‘Told you I was lazy

So are you offended by the “jerkwad” part or the advertising?

That’s about it. I look forward to your insight and feedback .

Jimmy isn’t just good-looking. He’s also blindingly insightful. He has put his finger on something I, in all my verbosity, had not been able to express. You see,  Jimmy has managed to verbalize what it is that makes the Heisig method so great.

And it is this: order. It turns out that the true genius of Dr. James Heisig’s kanji-learning method — his greatest gift to us kanji-learners — is not actually the keyword system. It is the idea of learning kanji in a deliberate sequence based on incremental logic rather than straight usage (i.e. not car, book and house (車、本、家) but big, plump and hound (大、太、犬)). Having said that the keyword system is a pretty freaking sweet idea that has made the kanji world a better place: attempting to learn every nuance of a kanji from the word go does not scale well. Keywords only start to pinch when we spend more time building, maintaining and collating them than actually kanjiing it up.

Anyway, here’s Jimmy’s email [formatting and emphasis added by me]:

Hey Khatz,

A[n abridged] version if you’d prefer brevity:

• “Lazy Kanji” format = Good!
• Dictionary Meanings instead of Keywords = Good!
• Color instead of Stories = Good!…

I just entered my 600th kanji card using the “Lazy” format you talked about a short while back. I just wanted to let you know that I’ve found it to be far, far more effective than the straight Heisig method that I was using before.

The problem with the Heisig method is the very thing that makes it so great: the singular keyword. I’ve come to find that very often the keywords are somewhat off of what is actually implied, or it’d be exactly the right word and I was using it inappropriately because I had no context for its usage (God bless double meanings…).

With this new format, I have simply been taking the kanji (in the order that Heisig presents them – I believe that to be the true genius of his method), and taking the dictionary entry for that kanji and pasting it directly into the answer field. No longer is the keyword an issue, because now I actually have a sense of feel for the broader idea and meaning of the kanji.

But I also think that book you’ve been recommending, Brain Rules, has played a large part in this new formats success as well. In the chapter, I believe it’s in the chapter about attention spans, he mentions that memories tied to emotions stick the best.

I am a person who feels “in color”. That is, when I think back upon a sad memory, it has a certain hue. Happy has one, angry has one. So what I’ve been doing is using color with the cards that highlight the general mood of the kanji. Coupled with the fact that it makes the cards more fun - which also makes the meanings stick better – I’ve seen a dramatic improvement.

Well, just wanted to let you know how your suggestions have been helping your readers. Thanks a lot. I know I’m only 1/4 through and that I’ve a long way before I’m out of the kiddie pool, but I think it’s been a good re-start, and the enthusiasm is doing a great job of propelling me forward.

Thanks, Jimmy . As I said before, this is still very much an experimental thing, and neither of us have any long-term data — yet. But, the short-term data are very promising; I find that I”m:

• Enjoying my kanji reps a lot, and doing them in greater quantity and frequency (consistency) — which is what counts, because if we don’t practice, it’s game over, no matter what the system is.
• Actually making contact with the kanji — not just “thinking about” how I “should” be making contact with them, and
• Actually actively starting on learning new characters rather than queuing them up in some inert “to learn” list somewhere.

That’s all from us — let us know any insight/experience you may have on the topic.

Keep in mind that this is just what I do right now. Yes, I am the Great Khatzumoto, but you know what? Really I’m just a 27-year-old boy who drinks peppermint tea and plays with his cats. I don’t know jack about jack. This is just what was most fun and least annoying for me. You’re bound to have a better idea and I’d love to hear about it if you’d like to share .

Put another way: a lot of AJATT strategic principles are universal, I think. But the tactical stuff is totally a matter of “what works for you”. I mean, we might not even be running the same OS, so…you know. Anyway, here we go!

The Steps

1. Have a song that you love, love, love and wish you could sing along to
2. If at any point in this process you get bored…stop. The worst thing you could do for your Chinese/Japanese/any language is start to associate it with boredom. That there is the gateway to failure. Having fun with and in the language is the name of the game.
3. Get an mp3 file of the song.
4. Split the file into 10~30-second clips with ~5 seconds of backward overlap
   • I add a 5-second backward overlap because a split on strict time boundaries is bound to be imperfect in that it’ll cut right in the middle of something good.
     • Adding the overlap provides a way to automatically compensate for this without going through the psychological and computational heck of attempting to split on something like silence-points.
   • I use EZSoftMagic’s MP3 Splitter & Joiner for this automated splitting
     • They’re not paying me for this endorsement, but they should
     • If you know of any other software that does a good job at this, feel free to share in comments.
   • The reason we split the file and not just throw the whole thing into the SRS is because we are trying to do what the SRS does best – optimize the management and memorization of discrete chunks of information. Throwing the entire song in there is (1) boring and (2) defeats the purpose of even having an SRS.
5. Get the lyrics of the song
6. Put the audio clip into the SRS on the back of the card
7. Put one line or less of the lyrics on the front of the card
   • i.e. the lyrics of a segment of the 10~30-second clip, not of the whole clip
8. Put the lyrics of the whole 10~30-second clip, or of the entire song, on the back of the card.
   • I prefer putting the lyrics of just the whole clip because it’s easier to read
   • But sticking the lyrics of the entire song on the back could save you a lot of fiddling
9. Do your reps.
   • The task is to read aloud or sing the line/segment of the line of the song
   • Check your “answer” against the actual song clip
10. Final note: if any of this feels like too much work, then stop. Abort. Delete. Whatever. Because you obviously don’t like the song enough. You may like the song, just not enough, not that much. And that’s fine. Remember, the idea is to be like Soviet Russia: let the media motivate you — that’s its job.  All you have to do is put yourself in the path of the media.

Sample Card

FRONT

男兒當自強

[Youtube]

BACK

[media: naam yi dong ji keung- 007.mp3]

廣闊浩氣揚　既是男兒當自強 昂步挺胸

jìshì【既是】
…であるからには．…である以上．

gei si naam yi dong ji keung

Benefits of this method

• Over time, with very little effort, you learn the entire song
• As per SRS principles, the parts of the song that give you the most trouble – and that therefore need the most practice – will get seen the most
  • Ever notice how almost everyone knows the chorus of a song no matter how complex the vocabulary? (I remember being about 6 years old and singing Bobby Brown’s “it’s my prerogative!”). That’s because the chorus gets repeated so much. SRSing the song turns the entire song into a “chorus”, in that all the parts of the song will get repeated to the degree necessary to ensure their memorization.
• No need to fiddle with carrying lyric sheets in your bag or on your computer – it’s not like you can ever get them out on time anyway.
• Even after the song stops getting playtime on your mp3 player, the SRS will ensure that you keep getting practice with it. This is a microcosm of how the SRS is a powerful partner to an immersion environment – even after you stop immersing in, say, technical documents from a certain field, the SRS will guarantee you keep getting the practice in that field that you need to retain your proficiency in it.