I recently started aikidou classes, in which you sit on the mats in 正座 for quite some time. To beginners, this can hurt. So during the week after the first class, I went and sat in 正座 at random moments throughout the day. Dinner? Why not practice sitting. Folding my clothes? Why not do this sitting thing. Most of the times it wasn’t for more than 5 mins.

‘Lo and behold, the next class I definitely held out longer than other students.

I experienced a period of massive development where I worked almost exclusively with timers and time limits (set to 5minutes max) and cycled through printe materials and exercises. Granted, I was already working in music professionally and had developed abilities to concentrate for longer periods of time on practice. But I worked my way through so much material. Success became addictive. I think tis is the same concept as ‘timeboxing’ and the ‘crack’ I’ve heard about here.

Anyway, I’m finding this site/blog very inspirational as it parallels my own excursions into the Korean language. Thanks for the top-notch content.

The challenge is more with organization than with timeboxing it. For example, the original post mentions starting a business. But, starting a business takes more than just brainstorming ideas. Eventually those ideas have to take form and additional work needs to happen if the business is going to be successful.

Ultimately, timeboxing gets you to the table, rather than procrastinating starting on the dissertation until you have a short time left and go nuts trying to get it done. If you hit it in short spurts repeatedly, the short spurts add up.

The other problem is deep thinking, focus, and the flow state. These are clearly critical in some situations, but the question is when are they important? You wouldn’t play a video game like “Fable” or “Assassin’s Creed” in tiny bits because you wouldn’t enjoy it. The whole point is flow. So when else is it necessary? I like the theory about doing things tiny bits over flow for languages and exercise because clearly here it is appropriate. And “The Talent Code” suggests it’s also appropriate for music. I guess I’m trying to figure out when we need to focus for longer than a few minutes to build skills and when we don’t. I think endurance is the key: I’m training for an ultra-marathon, so tiny bits of running aren’t going to be as helpful (though they’re part of my training). But it’s not the only factor: logical thinking and puzzle-solving require deep thought. So I think different tasks will need different approaches.

After my comment I realized I have been adopting this idea to meditation. It occurred to me that meditating for a long time is too hard, but it may not be necessary anyway–I want to bring clear thinking and mindfulness into my daily life, so why not practice it several times a day for just a few minutes? So I keep a timer on me that goes off at set times during the day so I can clear my head and center myself before going on with what I was doing. I was thinking of transitioning from this into longer meditation, but really why bother? I am less interested in endurance than I am in building a certain mindset. And it’s been surprisingly effective. The only caveat is I absolutely must keep it up or I lose the effects.

Little segments throughout the day. Then actually writing out the thing literally takes only 15 mins (for a standard 5 paragraph essay, 5-6 sentences each paragraph). It seems because I was gradually thinking about it all day my ideas just swelled up and burst out with the guidance I already set up.

Then coming back later I edit for a few minutes. Come back later edit for a few minutes. Till its tweaked exactly the way I wanted. I find coming back later actually improves the quality of the papers by hundred-folds, because it almost gave me a new way of seeing the paper as if I were a different person (not really sure how to explain this, but artists often get into their work so much that if they step back for a few days they realize shaping mistakes much more).

I got really great grades this way with all my papers. Good luck on your dissertation though. What’s the worse that could happen trying this out for a portion of it anyhow?

How this might apply to language acquisition: I know that in the first few months of immersion, I used to have a horrendous time of trying to read or do much of anything in my target language, since I couldn’t understand hardly any of it. So I’d end up reading something for two minutes here, two minutes there, never really reading anything for any “respectable” length of time. But eventually, I had done so many of those two-minute bursts that I’d gained such an understanding of the language that allowed me to focus on what I was reading for longer periods of time. Now I can sit with a Wikipedia article and struggle through the whole thing. 😛

Again, whether this can apply to everything or not, I don’t know. 😛 I certainly wouldn’t consider myself qualified enough to make that call. But I can say that if given the choice between writing a paper for five minutes here and there and not writing the paper at all, I’m definitely gonna take the five-minute writing sessions. And who knows? Maybe at some point I’ll get into such a groove that I can’t stop. 😀

But I don’t think we should assume this is the way to go for everything. Deep focus and (the flow state) is also key to productivity. I don’t know if writers would do better to write for one long or many short periods of time, but clearly some things are going to take a long time to do (my dissertation requires a lot of reading and thinking) and some things are done better with a long time (complex thought comes from sustained focus, even spread out over the course of many hours with interruption).

I know the Talent Code talked about leaps in skill acquition in only a few minutes, so this focus thing may be less necessary than I think. It would be interesting to know when it really is important and when it isn’t. (CAN I write my dissertation in bits throughout the day rather than in giant chunks?)