Good luck! 🙂

That way, you don’t have whatever dialogue the subtitles contained crammed into your head, but you just know “Oh, this character does ____ during the _____ arc” and from there, you can get a vibe for what they may be talking about. 

You might even catch a word or two here and there that you go “Oh, I know what that word means, at least. He was probably talking about his brother’s pain,” or some such similar situation.

Lemme tell ya, I started about 3 weeks ago and I went on an anime search, I found a few fun ones… And I just want to BLOODY understand them. I mean, watching them without subs is still fun (despite what I used to say like a year ago), but it bugs the hell out of me, all the story-essential stuff I miss that has to be picked up from the dialogue. But still, my stubbornness (that’s a funny spelling) won’t let me turn the subs on (and it’s actually easier to find raw anime).

*sob*

Thanks for hearing me out. I need some sleep now. 

I think it basically is because writing, at least academic writing, requires more precise and thorough thinking and synthesizing information rather than simply saying whatever is at the forefront of your mind.  Its a a particular kind of creativity and problem solving… although the actual physical work comes down to “just writing something” the task of writing isn’t just making sentences, but first thinking and then organizing those thoughts and turning them into comprehensible sentences.  Its different even than just writing about your own personal overservations (as you might in a blog, or a journal, sorry katz). You can break down the process, sure, but its all based on putting together ideas in your head in a way that makes sense to someone else.  Sometimes the words flow out because you have a clear picture in your mind of what you want to say, but more often than not, they don’t and getting to that point requires certain thinking steps where its not merely one action followed by another–they’re all jumbled together, and loop back on each other, and it’s nearly impossible to predict how long putting together a thought will take.  Therefore the axiom of “just putting words down on paper” in a given space of time can even be counter-productive— if a sentence is not really fleshed out.  Now of course, you shouldn’t need make every sentence perfect on the first try, because editing and re-working sentences is part of the process too. Anyway figuring out what the heck you want to say is the first step… and unfortunately one that requires an unpredictible amount of time.
Because of this, I think, short burst timeboxes don’t work so well for technical writing. However, “long bursts” time-blocks do work quite well, and still conform to the spirit of timeboxing of “starting often.”  These require that you actually plan and set aside significant distraction-free chunks of daytime to implement, which requires a different kind of discipline than small-chunk timeboxing.  A reasonable minimum to make this work is to try to aim for doing 20 minutes workign on a specific aspect of your project–that’s almost always enough time to get something small done.  Ideally, you might try to write in blocks of 1~1.5 hours, and if you have time to do multiple back-to-back blocks, separate them with 5~10 minutes of non-project break time (like doing flashcards for instance).  “working time” is also structured around specific tasks: don’t just sit down to “write something”, but decide before you start a time block what to work on: “make notes for article X” “write about <specific sub-topic>” “edit section X” rather than “write paper.” 

Basically, sorry to disagree with you Khatz, but I think even though technically you “can” write a sentence in a minute shorter timeboxes don’t work well for productive essay writing, but longer boxes do. The basic difference is the type of work involved with essay writing and other creative work vs. making cards, reviewing, or even reading.  The latter, while having some element of creativity, are pretty mechanical and straightforward in comparison to putting together well-thought out words on a page, which is a very complex and knotty task by its nature even for the best of writers.

So you have to reconcile the essay task from one big 20hr monolith into smaller parts. I’ll work just on the intro for X time. Then part I, etc…

-kk

/timeboxing-trilogy-part-10-timeboxing-tony-schwartz-and-recovery

And his Google Talk:
www.saisin.biz/youtube/youtube.cgi?page=1&xxx=0&orderby=relevance&route=word2&sp=word&word=tony%20schwartz%20google