S6E5: Taking your time is not wasting your time
Full transcript:
Good morning, happy Friday and welcome to the LCP, the daily dose of language courage for people who love languages and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. And just a reminder, the Language Confidence Project is now on YouTube too, with daily videos of encouragement to help you make language learning more creative, compassionate and meaningful! So please support me by subscribing, the link is in the shownotes, by liking my videos and if you do happen to stop by, I would love if you could like my video or leave a comment. It makes such a huge difference in helping more people to find my work, and word of mouth is absolutely the best way to get more people to know that The Language Confidence Project exists and help me to help them too.
And today I just wanted to come and remind you that it’s okay to take this slowly.
It’s okay to step back from the waves of pressure that tell us productivity simply means doing lots of things, very fast. It’s okay to step back from a society that believes that skills should be acquired in one masterclass or one two-day course.
Taking your time is not wasting your time.
And the fundamental reason for that is that all hours are not equal.
Let’s imagine we asked an author how long it took him to write his novel, and through great serendipity, he’d been tracking his time throughout the whole five year process and he calculated the total to be around 900 hours.
So then for the next novel, the author was like right, 900 hours. Great. That’s how long it takes me to go from zero to novel.
And then he started on January first, promised himself that it wouldn’t take five years this time, because he only needed 900 hours, and created a timetable for himself that saw him block out nine hours per day for the next 100 weekdays, thinking, I’ll recharge on the weekends, this’ll be great. He readied himself to have the manuscript finished in five months.
But in five months, he didn’t have the manuscript ready. He probably could have thrashed out a book in that time, but nothing like the calibre of the last one. And he discovered that 900 block hours is not the same, for three main reasons:
1) No matter how much we want it to be different, there is and always will be a maximum limit for how quickly we can absorb and consolidate information. We need time to process what we have been reading, watching, studying or thinking about, and that time normally happens when we’re off the clock. The author won’t have counted the mulling over time or the consolidation time in his productivity tracking calendar because it will have just happened when he was out on a walk, or doing boring or mindless tasks, and even when he was asleep.
2) Racing through the process does not leave room to be able to take all the separate things you’ve learned and make those interesting and essential connections between them. For the author, that’s joining the dots between character interactions or nuances in the subplots that can really add to the richness of story. For us as language learners, it’s spotting patterns and understanding the language in terms of a whole system that we can predict, rather than just memorising and having everything still feel quite random. So much of the creative process, and this 100% includes language learning too, not just artistic things, is about making connections between words and concepts and recognising patterns. Rushing that process means that quite often, we’re depriving ourselves of the opportunity to have those a-ha moments, and it also means our language learning feels surface level and we feel less fulfilled and less connected with it as a result.
3) When we are always in a hurry to get to the next checkpoint, we miss out on the opportunities that our previous milestone has opened up for us. Our language or in the case of our author, his book, just becomes a blur of to-do lists and obligations, and the present moment, our current progress, isn’t good enough. We don’t see what we can do with the skills we just acquired. We don’t have the time to stop to think about all the new conversations we can now have, or the creative projects that we’re now fully prepared to undertake if we want to. We don’t look for ways to apply our new skills, to enjoy them. We just rush onto the next thing.
And in that blinkered frenzy, did we really save time at all?
When you choose to slow down, you are not wasting your time. You aren’t being lazy. You’re being present and you’re looking. When you nurture your skills, they don’t just become more items to list on your resume, but an whole fleet that knows its own worth, recognises its own utility, and actually works for you.
There are times that call for tunnelling into one thing. But if you want to create deep, rich tapestries of creative work or knowledge, it takes time. And that’s okay.
Have a wonderful day, have a wonderful weekend, don’t forget to check out my YouTube channel, the link is in the shownotes, and I will see you on Monday.