2024-03-26 Journal Entry

Created: March 27, 2024 10:50 AM Tags: Daily

I’m attempting to get back on the wagon with some sense of organized daily goals — having some sense of making progress on a bunch of different goals and actually actioning on them. My starting list of daily things is journal writing, fiction writing, meditation, learning kanji, and JP listening comprehension. So far, much of today was lost having fun doing some Japanese study, and I’ve been milling around the idea of committing to doing the JLPT N3 by the end of the year. I think that’s eminently doable and would be a good milestone to have in terms of learning. It’s a great stepping stone to N2, where things start to really matter, and having a deadline would be a good motivator, as I’ve learned. (I find that not really having a deadline on anything means I never do it — finding ways to make deadlines for writing would be great, although there’s not really much in the way there unless I said I would submit for some kind of competition or something, but I don’t actually know if that sort of thing exists!)

I’m committing to only doing each of these things for 5 minutes a day, which is quite doable I think. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes once I’ve got a job going as well, plus all the work with the house and so on, but I’m trying to put the practices in Nick Winter’s The Motivation Hacker into practice, since I think being able to consistently summon motivation for things I want to do would be really powerful. Nick talks about ways to have excess motivation, which is something I never really have, so I’m curious if they’ll be practical and effective and so on. Plus, some of these goals will get me closer to my long term plans too!