Seinfeld’s Secret To Productivity
“To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.” - Jerry Seinfeld
I recently read an article about Jerry Seinfeld, where he revealed the ways in which he kept himself motivated to get better and I thought it would be a great thing to share with you (you can read it here). Although Seinfeld was talking about jokes, it was very applicable to Japanese language learning as well.
Basically, Seinfeld said that in order to get better at writing jokes, he wrote them every day. Fair enough. To get better at Japanese you should study Japanese every day. There’s no secret there.
Figuring out how to get yourself to study every day is the difficult part. Here’s what he did to overcome this:
Seinfeld uses a wall calendar with the whole year on it. Every day he writes jokes, he puts an X through that day. After a few days, he has a chain. Then, the important thing doesn’t become writing the jokes, it becomes not breaking the chain.
There’s a couple of things that make this (really simple) strategy so useful.
First off, he’s using a year calendar, that way you can see the chain. If you used a monthly calendar, you’d break the chain (at least psychologically) every time you switched to a new month. This would make it too easy not to start up again at the beginning of each month (despite how trivial this sounds, the chain is delicate!).
Second, he’s transferring the importance over to something completely different. “Writing jokes” is really broad. You can’t “do writing jokes,” as it isn’t really a specific action. By using the year calendar, and working towards a chain, rather than “writing jokes every day” he’s taking away the issue of “the how” (i.e. the choice) and just making it about not breaking the chain. If the important thing is not breaking the chain, then everything else will work itself out. You’ll figure out what’s important (just because you’ll shave off unimportant things) and you’ll end up getting a lot more done. Plus, you’ll have the satisfaction of checking something off, which is always nice.
The only difficult part of this is getting started (which is always the most difficult thing, right?). Once you get 3-4 days under your belt, though, it’ll start becoming all about keeping it going.
So, here’s my recommendation. Pick one thing you want to do every day (and only one thing, preferably). Since this chapter is about keeping up with your vocab lists, that would be what I’d go with. Your goal could be to go through everything Anki tells you to go through every day (then you aren’t making choices about what you have to study, either!) and when you do it, mark it off on your year calendar.
Although this isn’t a calendar, and it’s small (I still recommend a year calendar, and something bigger), I’ve made a sheet of paper with 365 boxes on it for you to use to check things off. Feel free to use it if you’d like, and I hope it helps you with studying your lists every day. Remember, it’s all about daily study and daily work – not about lumping things into 10 hour study marathons. Use this to help yourself study every day!
The “365 Days” sheet has 365 days on it (with an optional spot for leap years). Really try to make yourself keep your goal for 7-10 days. After that, you should start feeling like keeping the streak is more important. Once you get to that point, you’re golden! See if you can keep it up for a year!