“All failure comes from trying too hard.” / NAKATANI Akihiro

1 is bigger than 0.

Obvious, I know. Common sense, I know. But common sense isn’t common. Common sense is the least common of the senses, as other people have pointed out.

1 is bigger than 0. How often we forget this simple fact.

You know how it is. We all learn about mathematical concepts like negative numbers — which were probably considered a wild and crazy idea at one time, and perhaps for good reason — so we tend to think of 1 as only being slightly bigger than 0.

But it’s not. ¹

In RL ², 1 isn’t just slightly bigger than 0. 1 is infinitely bigger than 0. Because 1 is the start of everything. While 0 is the path to nothing. No matter how many 0′s you string together, you get nothing. But a bunch of 1′s adds up. A bunch of 1′s, multiplied by a bunch of time, adds up. And it doesn’t just add up — it even compounds, like interest.

0 is a white shirt. 1 is a blue stain. 100 is a red stain. 1 is much closer to 100 than it is to 0. No, 0 isn’t even a shirt. It’s a transparent Ziploc bag. No, it’s not even that. It’s a vacuum. 0 is the total absence of existence. Add 0 to anything and…you get the same anything. Add 0 (nothing) to 0 (nothing) and you get…nothing.

The current evidence from places like Swaziland suggests that humans have had math for some 35,000 years, give or take. Yet for most of human history, we didn’t have the number 0. Apparently, mathematicians in Greece and Egypt were like: “Dude, how the FXXX can nothing be something?!”. The entire Roman empire ³ started, rose, declined and fell all without the number 0. Engineers in ancient Rome implemented public works projects — roads, aqueducts, indoor plumbing, massive buildings — on a scale and to a standard that was not equaled in Europe until about last Tuesday ⁴…without 0. We’re talking about people who had to write the number “2347″ as ”MMCCCXLVII”.

Here — count to 0. Where’s your zero finger? 0 is a very weird number-slash-concept. It sits next to ⁵ 1 on the real number line ⁶, but the real number line, names notwithstanding, isn’t “real”. In content and character, 0 is nothing like 1 or any other number. 0 is not of this world; it is of the math world.

So when you do 0, you’re not just doing slightly less than 1. Doing nothing is of a fundamentally different character than doing something. And doing something is of a fundamentally different character than doing nothing. Something (1, etc.) and nothing (0) are not the same; they’re not friends; they’re not neighbors; they’re not cousins; they don’t know each other; they don’t even live in the same universe.

It’s not doing too little that kills you(r projects). It’s doing nothing. No need to hit home-runs. No need to hit 100. Go easy. Take it easy. No need to swing with all your might. Screw that. Just bunt it. Just do 1. Right here. Right now. No big deal. No fanfare. No parade.

Don’t listen to Japanese. Just play a Japanese song and turn up the volume.

Just do 1.

The tortoise mindset has been good to Michael Johnson

Rest follows every race. Purge follows every binge. Binge on kanji now, and you might end up having to take a break from them for the rest of your life.

And all for what? For a 0 duecount on Anki? Is that what your life has come to? Suffering in order to game some stats?

What gets measured gets managed. You want to milk that Hawthorne effect for all it’s worth.
So don’t get me wrong: gaming stats is a good thing.
Until it stops being a game.

There is no happiness on the other side of that kanji binge. No gumdrops and rainbows. Only burnout and bitterness. You will hate yourself. You will hate the kanji.

So play the game, but be the tortoise rather than the hare. Even just 5 new kanji a day comes to almost 2000 kanji a year. Time and mathematics are on your side; they will work for you if you’ll just make friends with them.

Pheidippides. He binge-ran. From Marathon to Athens. His body needed to rest, needed to purge. Forever. He died. Ran to death.

Are you going to run your kanji self to death? Or are you going to be sensible and take breaks? Take it from a man like Tony Schwartz. He calls modern sprinters “Greek gods“. Because they run themselves to death, right? No, because they look sharp. Because they sprint. Short bursts. Short sprint and long rest.

Are you going to be a chump like Pheidippides? Or are you going to be divine? Your call.

“Dearest Khatzumoto,

If you’re fluent, why do you still use SRS? I mean, it’s not like you use SRS for English words ¹“.

I get asked this question or some variation of it quite a lot, so I thought I’d answer it here. In twelve words:

“Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.”

When I first came to Japan, I started to feel a George W. Bushian sense of “mission accomplished”. So I stopped SRSing altogether.

What happened?

Well, my core, daily-use, 日常 vocabulary remained more or less constant.

But what I like to call my 教養 vocabulary, my “cultural literacy” vocabulary, like knowing what 魑魅魍魎 means…that fell apart. Also, knowledge of somewhat rarer kanji and their readings — 夕凪 — that fell away. Even certain expert terminology —  words like “輻輳” (a term you’ll come across in networking and queueing theory) — started to escape me.

And that’s just loss. My new acquisition and retention rate was more or less zero. So not only was I losing both active and passive vocabulary. I wasn’t gaining ground, I wasn’t progressing; I wasn’t moving forward: I was shrinking. Whatever new words I learned or was taught simply did not stick.

In short, the knife still cut in the middle, but it was blunt and rusty along the edges. I wanted a beautiful, gleaming, dangerously sharp blade.

I stopped sucking at Japanese but I didn’t lose the ability to relapse into suckage. I didn’t lose the ability to forget. And I didn’t lose the will to/enjoyment of learning new words. It’s kind of a living testament to Carol Dweck’s work — skill is not fixed: it’s dynamic, alive, mutable.

So I started SRSing again and haven’t really looked back.

It’s  been suggested that there is such a thing as a law of diminishing returns with respect to learning vocabulary. Certainly, this is true with regard to frequency of usage. However:

1. The socioeconomic rewards that a larger, deeper, more precise vocabulary brings far outweigh any frequency differential. At least in my experience. In fact…
2. The socioeconomic rewards that any given word brings ² are distributed in inverse proportion to the frequency of that word.
• I’m not advocating the use of unnecessarily grandiloquent phrasing here; you’ve seen me talk; you know I speak and write quite plainly, regardless of the language in question. But when you need to know what 齲蝕, 領土的一體性 and 家事消費 are…you freaking need to know.

Pretty much all societies reward the articulate profusely and punish them only lightly (if at all). Those who communicate ideas and concepts in great volume and with great precision — those who have expressive power — enjoy many benefits. This is true not only of words but also of physical gestures — so, like, sport and dance.

In a very real sense, words are almost — perhaps not quite, but very nearly almost — a quantifiable economic asset, somewhat like stock or real estate ³: you don’t buy books for the paper, you buy them for the words. So words are literally assets. SRS, then, is a tool that helps you build and maintain your portfolio of assets.

Your nice, round, J-Lo assets ⁴.

When Pablo Casals reached 95, a young reporter asked him “Mr. Casals, you are 95 and the greatest cellist that ever lived. Why do you still practice six hours a day?” Mr. Casals answered, “Because I think I’m making progress.”
They Did Not Give Up

1. Practice time
2. Game time.

I’m not just pointing this out in order to create filler content here. I’m not doing this for my health. I’m making this distinction because far too many people get practice time and game time confused.

They come to practice with the haughty, cagey, know-it-all, calculating self-assuredness that works best in the game, and then when it comes to game time, they’ve suddenly changed their legal surname to Humble.

These are the people who, during practice time, are too good to seek advice, to listen to it, to try out new ideas and techniques that might help their sorry behinds ¹, but when it comes to speaking to real Japanese people about real Japanese stuff where real time and real money are on the line, they clam up. They have a conveniently scheduled panic attack. They’re far king helpless. They go fetal. “Intense face” gives way to puppy dog eyes. They run to mommy-girlfriend — they’re hiding behind her skirt; they want an interpreter; their once-wheelbarrow-sized unisex ovaries shrivel up.

The time to be humble is during practice time. The time carry your cojones in a wheelbarrow is during game time.

Practice time is where you go to find your weaknesses. Game time is where you go to hide them, to work around them, to win, to score at all costs.

Practice time and game time can be fluid; they aren’t necessarily set in proverbial stone. Even a relationship with the same person can shift from practice to game and back depending on time, place and occastion.

Whenever the person you’re with has both the time and the will to correct you, it’s practice time. Whenever they lack either of these, it’s game time: it’s time to use what you know and what works to get the job done; it’s time for surgical strike.

Both practice time and game time require courage, but a different kind of courage. Practice time requires inner courage — the courage to eat humility and drink shame in public. Game time requires poker-faced outer courage — the courage to act as if the world belongs to you and you have the right to walk anywhere you want in it.

Just to make things clearer for you, let’s compare and contrast ² some more practice time / game time distinctions in terms of direction, attitude, core concepts and questions:

So, practice time and game time. Get them straight. Keep them straight,

When you’re trying to get stuff done, it’s game time. Don’t be clever for the sake of being clever, don’t try out that new word you don’t quite know yet, work well within your repertoire, go for the goal, get the thing done. Get the package/email sent; get the ticket bought; win the negotiation; settle the deal; get on the right train.

Practice joyfully, lavishly, with childlike abandon, so that you can rightfully hold your head up high and get things done like an adult during game time. Put your baby face on during practice, so you can wear a true poker face during the game. Earn the right to be serious by first being playful.

[Update: 2011/9/10: AJATTeer Neoglitch suggests better terminology -- I prefer his word choice to mine. Executive summary.

• Practice Time = Game Time
• Game Time = Show Time

I personally don’t like Khatz’s wording on this one.
I would rather name “practice time” (or the training grounds) as Game Time, the time where you just goof around, enjoy yourself to the max, learn (and practice) like crazy, make mistakes, learn from them… and you just play mainly to have fun, whether you “lose” or not.
And I would name Khatz’s “game time” (the boss battles!) as… Show-Time! The time where you actually show-off what you have been learning and practicing, and stick strictly to the language “moves” that you need to “win” (instead of trying to be fancy).]

1. Do nothing.
   • “I’m tired”
   • “I’m burned out”
   • “I can’t”
2. Do something hard.
   • “It’s good for me!”
   • “Suffering builds character!”
   • “I need discipline!”
   • “I have to”
   • “I should”
3. Do something easy.
   • “No way!”
   • “This counts?”
   • “But it’s so much fun!”
   • “This is so easy!”

You’re like, “but wait, that’s three things!”

No.

Because 1 = 2. Telling yourself to do something hard is the same thing as telling yourself to do nothing at all. Why? Because either:

• You never do hard stuff, or
• You do do hard stuff (like, once), but you don’t keep doing it

So again: telling yourself to do something hard is the same thing as telling yourself to do nothing at all.

Stop kidding yourself. You’re not gonna do that hard thing. You’re just not. It’s not going to happen, and even it does happen, it won’t keep happening. It’ll happen once, and it’ll hurt so much that it’ll never happen again.

So do something easy instead. Do something small. The smaller the better. The easier the better. The choice is not all or nothing: it’s easy or nothing.

Deletion is the best kind of turnover.
Doing reps is the second best.
Deleting while you do reps gives you the best of both worlds. 一石二鳥 (one stone, two bird), if you will.

An SRS deck that doesn’t get cards deleted is like a house that doesn’t get the trash taken out. It doesn’t matter how nice the furniture is — how nice the stuff you add is. Sooner or later, if you don’t take out the trash, the trash takes over. And then it’s all trash. When trash is not removed, everything becomes trash.

A clean house is one where there is a frequent motion of trash in the general direction of out.

No matter how good the food you’re eating is (or isn’t), there have to be waste products that leave your body. You can’t hold that…stuff…in. It’s not good for you. Waste products — bad cards — are a natural results of the “metabolic” process of SRSing.

Delete. For happiness, for hygiene, for the smell, for sanity, for fun. Declutter. Delete.

Yes. Kanji, too. Delete.

So where does the fun come from?
Wow, that sounds like…a line from an Oompa Loompa song.
Wait, no, so…back in topic.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his rap name, Mark Twain, once wrote:

“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and…Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”

People will climb mountains for sport, risking life and limb, but will be hard-pressed to wash their dishes.

Fun is all about choice. Fun comes from choice. Your choices. Your choices of things and people are what make Japanese fun.

So for you who have had your innocent, childlike souls crushed by years of indoctrination disguised as education, here is a systematic method, an Al Gore Rhythm, for discovering and generating fun.

1. Experimentation: Try out lots of stuff.
2. Rejection: Stop doing things you don’t want to do.
3. Acceptance: Keep doing things you do want to do.

There. It’s almost insultingly simple. But I know that a lot of you get royally tripped up on steps 2 and 3: You stop doing things you do want to do, and you keep doing things you don’t want to do. As Hajji from “The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest” used to say, “this is not good”.

The only reason you’re not having fun is because you either don’t try stuff, or because you reject whatever fun you do discover. Or both.

You’re not going to learn this language by suffering. You’re just going to burn out. And it won’t be the language’s fault, it’ll be your fault for being a freaking masochist. If you deliberately choose to do boring crap most of the time, don’t be surprised if you hate yourself and your life.

It’s time to outgrow pain. There is nothing to gain there. Remember, pain, like evil, makes you stupid, because it leads you to conflate suffering with progress. It makes you choose to hurt yourself by default. “This hurts so much, it must be good for me”. No.

Pain makes you stupid. Stop getting hurt. Start getting addicted. Experiment. Reject. Accept.

Boredom, like poison, is a matter of dosage. Some things are fun for 3 seconds, some for 3 minutes, some for 3 hours, some for 3 days. Do not exceed the dosage. Stop when you’ve had enough. Move on. Switch it up. Come back for more later. Or not.

I know I’m repeating myself. But you need it. Drop the whip. Pick up the honey.

This is a gracious guest post by E Dub Kendo. In it, he introduces a sweet mod[ification] he made to lazy kanji cards to increase their effectiveness. Effectiveness and preference can and does vary by person. Nevertheless, I think this mod is a valuable improvement that definitely deserves to be part of AJATT “canon” .

Though I have no hard data, my hunch is that “Lazy Kanji natives”, i.e. people who go straight into lazy kanji with, say, less than 1000 characters’ worth of previous experience, will benefit most from this mod. Heisig did not pen RTK for naught — logical connections matter.

Due to a variety of factors involving chronic pain and fatigue, I found my kanji studies grinding to a halt around #700 in RTK. I just could not get motivated to keep going. Typing up stories, writing out kanji, and trying to remember keywords that meant the same thing despite having completely unrelated kanji was just too exhausting, and made my hands and wrists ache.

Then Khatzumoto-sempai came up with something that sounded like just the thing for me, Lazy Kanji, which turns the process of memorizing kanji into something more like repeatedly dialing a telephone number until it’s memorized. With renewed hope, I made an initial attempt at some Lazy Kanji cards.

However, what I quickly discovered was that it became too easy to forget about breaking the kanji up into its component parts and I was relying on rote memorization and visual memory. In other words, it was too slow, and even more painful than writing Heisig-novels. A little bit of thought fixed the problem though. A simple modification to the front of the cards could, with little effort, bring back all the benefits of Heisig’s mnemonics without nearly as much work.
So, here’s what the cards look like:

Front
党
The TEENAGER went to a _______ in the LITTLE HOUSE.
Back:
party

The task looks like this. First, write the kanji. Attempt to write it just from glancing at the sentence, if necessary, however, it’s alright to look at the kanji. That’s why its there on the front. Then, look at the kanji and say the keyword out loud. The keyword can be any synonym that carries that meaning. So party, gala, shindig, bonnaroo (joking) — would all be correct.

Grading [Anki scale]: If I get the keyword and I can write the kanji just from the sentence, I mark it “Very Easy”. If I have to glance at the kanji I mark it “Easy” or “Hard”, depending on my feeling about it. Missing the keyword entirely gets it marked “Wrong”.

Adding the fill-in-the-blank sentence does two main things:

1. First, it serves as a reminder to break the kanji up into its components, which is the strongest part of the Heisig method in my opinion.
2. Second, it works as a bit of “context”, providing a mental hook which is easy to grasp on to and gives the brain something familiar to grasp at while learning something that initially looks like random squiggles to it.
   But, because of the combination of SRS and blending writing and recognition, it is no longer necessary to use complex or wordy stories to memorize with. A simple sentence that links all the primitives together and to the keyword in some sort of logical structure is all that is necessary.

My deck, which contains all the kanji from RTK1, is a shared deck on Anki, and can be found by searching “Lazy Kanji + Mod”. Some of the “stories” are idiosyncratic to my strange tastes and sense of humor, but most of them are generic enough to be useful to anyone.

Having worked through all the kanji making the cards, and hundreds of them in late stages of review, I can definitely say that Lazy Kanji is efficient and far more enjoyable than the more traditional method. While your grasp on the kanji will NOT be as strong initially as someone who worked through the book the normal way, over time it will balance out. That’s the power of the SRS combined with motor memory and adult logic.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Fists? ¹ Put ‘em up!

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

“I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.” ~ Sara Teasdale

“Do not wait; the time will never be “just right.” Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.” ~ Napoleon Hill

Sidenote: according to The Pedia, Sara Teasdale committed suicide by ODing on sleeping pills, so…someone clearly forgot to read their own writing that morning.

Which reminds me of a funny story from Napoleon Hill. In one of his taped seminars, Hill describes how at one point when he was feeling really down, facing a major problem, he actually went and read one of his own books and (lo and behold) found a solution to his problem. Pretty sweet.

Inspired by Hill, I’ve actually started doing that myself — I read AJATT, my own writing, for advice…a lot of the advice I don’t agree with, but there are some gems in there! If you can get past the self-absorbed, unfunny writing. Haha. No, really. How do do you guys read this and stay sane? Wait, don’t answer that.

The Symptoms

Anyway.

Taxes. Kanji. Massive reading assignments. The Big Uns. Big, important, things…tasks…stuff.

We put these off. Because they’re big and important and scary and need to be done right. Need to be done perfectly. Need to be done right. Can’t screw around. This is major stuff, right? No room for error.

“I’ll get round to it”, you say.

“I’ll put it off till the last minute — the time pressure helps me”, you say. [That's true and false...what it is is that last-minute work forces ad hoc timeboxing. It forces us to deal with real time (hours, minutes) instead of "days". "Days" are a meaningless work unit. Unless "day" means 24 actual working hours -- 1440 actual working minutes --  no one has "days" to do anything].

“I’ll do it when I have time…yeah…this weekend…I have the whole weekend…48 hours, I can do this!”

Weekend comes. Weekend goes. Sunday night.

“I’ll start Monday! I needed the weekend to rest. New day, new week, new beginning!”

Monday morning.

“Lemme just check some email and Facebook here. Life is about friendship and networking!…”

Almost lunchtime.

“Slashdot! I need to learn! I need to broaden my technical and intellectual horizons. A couple of minutes of Slashdot never killed anyone! Micro-managing is unhealthy. Besides, I don’t know how to start.”

Lunchtime.

“Well, I have meetings and stuff. I’ll do it when I do it. I still have like a month…two weeks at least…I’m totally fine. I have all the time in the world. No need to get riled up”.

Thursday.

“Well, it’s past midweek, and these things are best done at the beginning of the week. I’ll get round to it!”

Day before duedate.

“$&$”! Where’s the “‘#’”#? $’”#$! How do you fill this in? Who’s this supposed to go to? CRAP! I need an extension!”

Gets extension. Promises to start again on Monday. Monday comes.

“Slashdot! I need to learn! I need to broaden my technical and intellectual horizons. A couple of minutes of Slashdot never killed anyone! I got an extension so I still have loads of time. I’ll get right on it tomorrow”.

Next day.

“OK time to really hunker down! Time to get serious! No more games! But first — Hulu! I deserve a break! I’ve been so stressed out!”

Next day.

“OK time to start. I’ve got this extension, so I need to get serious about this. Keep it real. But first…this room is a mess. Let me tidy it up a bit. An orderly environment will lead to an orderly mind.”

…Day before extended duedate….

“MOTHER OF PICARD! Oh my…animal reproduction in the feces of mother-fondling moldy bread and other fungal interventions…”

I’m not saying I know any of this from experience . And I’m not saying you do either. But other people pull this kind of insanity all the time, right? Yeah…other people are idiots.

The Cause: Too Much Reverence for the Important

Why does this story happen? Because the procrastinator isn’t serious? Can’t this idiot see the enormity, the importance of the task at hand? We’re talking about [insert important thing here]! You can’t just not do [insert important thing]! It has to be done, otherwise the world will end! You’ll be dead meat! Fear! Pressure!

That’s just the problem. The procrastinator is all too well aware of the importance of the task.  And I literally mean “too” aware. Excessively aware. How do I know? Just scroll back up and look at all the parts highlighted in red — those are all the fallacious ideas that the procrastinator has. You’ll notice that they’re vague and very all-or-nothing — a bad combination: extremism based on faulty information.

Our procrastinator is avoiding the important task because it’s important. He doesn’t know when to start. He doesn’t know how to start. It has to be right. There’s a lot of time to do it — all the time in the world, in fact — so it has to be done right. And when he starts, there’ll be no time for play, so he’d better rest now before really hunkering down and going to town on this thing, for, you know…hours…days…as long as it takes. This is all stuff that Neil Fiore talks about.

Far from being lazy, our procrastinator has too much reverence for the important. He values it above even himself. But what he’s finding is that overvaluing important things actually causes them to be neglected.

The (Well, A) Cure

Care less. Give less of a…one of those.

Know less. Do more.

But don’t do it well. Don’t do a good job.

Do not hunker down.

Do not wait until you have all your ducks in row.

Do not get serious.

Why?

Because [a crappy job on something important] > [a good job on something unimportant].

[a crappy job on something important] > [a good job on something unimportant]

A gram of gold is worth more than a gram of sand. An imperfect, dirty, uncut, soil-covered diamond the size of a Tic-Tac is worth more than…I dunno…a perfectly polished leather shoe.

Put another way: a trivial amount of work in a nontrivial direction always has nontrivial significance.

Not knowing how to file your taxes, not having your documents, and just taking yourself to the tax office — early in the year — to get help is worth way more than (pretending to) prepare for a perfect surgical strike.

Starting your visa application — incompletely, imperfectly, without all your documents in place — is worth more than almost all the perfectly washed (dried and stacked) dishes in the world.

Go to your SRS. Get it wrong. Miss a few. Miss many. 90% knowledge of 5000 kanji is worth infinitely more than 100% knowledge of 100 kanji.

The bigger and more “important” the thing is, the less seriously you need to take it if you want it to actually get done.

If someone tells you to read 1 page, you can do a nice, perfect read right before class or whatever.
If someone tells you to read 1000 pages…you skim and start and stop and start and stop and start and start and start again in little bursts.

The bigger and more “important” the thing is, the more it will benefit from being done even crappily and partially.

The bigger and more “important” the thing is, the more just starting on it, just nibbling on it will be worth it.

The bigger and more important it is, the less perfectly it need be done.

If it’s big and important, then don’t finish it. Don’t finish. Start. Just start on it. Then go play. Then come back and start again.

Don’t have a deadline. Have birthlines. Decide when to start. Decide when you’re going to touch it for just 1 minute even. And then leave it alone for a while. And then come back. Treat it like Farmville. You don’t hunker down to do Farmville. You just do it. And somehow, Farmville gets down. Oh, Farmville gets done all right. Novels don’t get written; grandmas don’t get kisses. But Farmville? Farmville gets doooone, esé.

Things that aren’t important always get done. So if you want stuff to get done, don’t give it importance. Just give it a minute. 1 minute? You can do one minute of SRS, right? Do 1 minute of SRS and spend the next 20 minutes…drinking chocolate milk, playing WoW, whatever who cares. Just be sure to come back after 20 minutes – but only for 1 minute. Then go back to hookers, blow and WoW.

If you want it to get done, make it fun.  If you want to make it fun, make it easy. If you want to make it easy, do it in smaller chunks — timeboxing — and give yourself a small reward for each chunk. Your reward could be a break. I’d go as far as to say make your breaks longer than the chunks if you can.

That’s the basic idea…I don’t have time to go into operant conditioning and rewards and random reinforcement schedules today. We’ll save that for another post! I don’t know that this will instantly make everything perfect for you. I hope it at least helps a bit.

Take it easy (literally). But do take it. Take a nibble. Do something. Anything. If the direction is important enough it’ll be worth it. Something is better than nothing.

Don’t score. Dribble. Don’t knock out. Jab. Don’t hit the target. Just shoot lots of bullets.

This article sucks. This website sucks. But at least the ball is rolling. And that is the point.

[a crappy job on something important] > [a good job on something unimportant]

Now go do a crappy job on something important.

Today’s all-star comment is from きのこ, an active contributor of back in the recent day. The original post was about how to have fun all the time. Here she is in her own words:

“No sentences I have to type in. No, none, never. If it’s from a book or a movie and I have to pause and type it out, it’s not going to happen. If the word or phrase is that important, I figure I’ll meet it again somewhere more convenient.”

Logistics is (are?) a huge dealmaker/breaker. It’s not just about doing Japanese, it’s about making it convenient and doing it in convenient ways. Maybe not all languages can be treated this way just yet, but with the plethora of electronic materials available in Japanese — everything from the Hiragana Times to Tae Kim to MFSP —  きのこ‘s is a highly effective, workable and blood pressure-reducing heuristic.

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 you: 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 they’re so easy to run repeatedly.

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 still 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.: 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 the 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.

Make/Model/Version	Pros	Cons	Comments
DRETEC T-186	Silent mode (time-up notification provided by flashing light) Short (1-second)   alarm mode Long (15-second) alarm-mode Big, easy-to-push start/stop button Display designed specifically for easy viewing on a desktop	Crappy, low-quality construction — every time I touch this thing, it makes creaking noises and I feel like I’m going to break it. Hard to set longer times — no shortcut buttons like the T-135	Despite the crappy quality, the pros outweigh the cons. It’s a great for studying and other desktop activities.When doing dual timeboxing, I use this as the small timer and the T-135 as the big timer.The massive start-stop button is very satisfying to push. You get a great feeling of…I dunno…something. Accomplishment? “Yeah, motherlover! *PUSH*!”… A good buy overall, despite the flaws. The silent/flashing mode makes this great for places like libraries and cafes.
DRETEC T-135	Solid construction Very easy to set, with buttons allowing you to go up in 10-second, 1-minute, and 10-minute increments, respectively Easy to see Easy to hear, makes a nice big sound Great size Has a  nice big, strong magnet on the back, so it can sit on, say, the fridge Gives a warning beep at T minus 10 minutes and T minus 5 minutes	Not very portable, i.e. it could never be carried around like a stopwatch. Beeps with each button push (and there’s no way to disable this function) Gives a warning beep at T minus 10 minutes and T minus 5 minutes…which, again, can’t be disabled. The T minus 5 minutes warning can be quite distracting sometimes. No warning beep at T minus 2 minutes…I’m just saying.	I have 3 of these in my little Japanese abode. ’Nuff said.The unit’s a really nice size, about the size of a stopwatch. Unfortunately, since it is essentially a kitchen timer designed to be stuck on flat surfaces like refrigerator doors, you can’t really carry it around like a stopwatch.But then…that’s sort of like complaining that your screwdriver makes a bad fork…
DRETEC T-180	Waterproof	Too many buttons, all of equal size Buttons are unresponsive and hard to push Sound is barely audible  (and it’s supposed to be “the loud model”). Friggin’ sound doesn’t even match a T-135′s lowest setting.	Good from far, far from good. Seems like a good idea on paper, but sucks in the flesh. Strongly disrecommended.
SEIKO TIMEKEEPER VIB SSBJ023	Nice model number Vibrate mode, for when you need to timebox quietly, or your environment is too loud for an alarm Highly portable Stopwatch functionality Incredibly easy to set using the preset times on the dial. Great for interval training in sports and stuff. Maybe you want to make sure you spend a certain amount of time each day outside.	On the pricey side for a timer.	Dials rule. More things should have dials on them. iPod taught us that.The all-black SSBJ01, the little sister model to this one, looks nicer and costs less, but (AFAIK) doesn’t have the vibe feature.I use this in shops a lot because I actually used to get lost in a “selection trance”/”decision loops” ["maybe I should get this one...oh wait, but this one's cheaper...but I like this other one more...maybe I should check the other store first...oh wow, they have these around corner; I wonder what else I've missed!"], trying to make perfect decisions. By timeboxing my shopping, I can get in, stay in long enough to have fun but not so long as to be wasting life, get out, and get on with life. The silent/vibrating mode makes this great for places like libraries and cafes.

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.