OK, so remember how last time we talked about “nested timeboxing”? Well, today we’re going to talk about the first type of nested timeboxing — dual timeboxing. We’ll talk about the second type (decremental/downward spiral timeboxing) next time.

So, Why Dual Timeboxing?

Dual timeboxing is just personal timeboxing using two timers. I first started using it when I noticed that I was missing a lot of trains.

If you live in Japan, then you know that our trains run the heck on time. It literally takes a death to make our trains late. So, under normal circumstances, missing a train, in Japan, is like failing an open-book, open-notes test where the answer was given in advance and there was only one question.

I mean, the schedule is written, published and distributed in advance for all to see.  It’s publically searchable from any of dozens of train websites like Ekitan and Jorudan. You can even get a little wallet-sized copy at your local train station. All for free! IMHO, unless death, injury or natural disasters are involved, missing a train in Japan really isn’t morally defensible, at least as far as the pure logic of the situation is concerned. I mean, come on, it’s not like the train is gonna fake us out! Unless someone dies it will leave at the exact time it says, and not a second earlier or later, every time, every day. All you have to do is be there for it and let the magic unfold.

So I started using normal, “vanilla” timeboxing to help me make it to the trains I needed to make it to. But that actually didn’t work too well. Why? Because I would wait until the last two minutes of the timebox to actually start getting ready. Unfortunately, it would take me about 5~10 minutes to prepare my things. Now, those of you who have mastered kindergarten mathematics will realize that 10 > 2. The crocodile wants to eat the 10. So I kept missing trains.

And what if I just took the next train? Well, the same crap would happen, dawg. Wait until the last two minutes and then be running late. Maybe missing a train isn’t that big a deal. But for me it was and is a metaphor for life itself. In life, I want to be able to say: “I shall do thing X at time Y”, and actually have that happen.

The fact that this “have all the time in the world, but then wait until the last 2 minutes to start　getting ready and still not make it” pattern of procrastination followed by panic kept repeating itself, showed me that the problem was not the train schedule, it wasn’t “the Japanese people and their love of rules” or any other prejudicial nonsense like that. The problem lay in my behavior. My behavior needed to change.

I knew I had to “master” the art of meeting trains, because this same procrastination-panic cycle was cropping up in my other work, like translating video games or creating products like the QRG, MFSP and even AJATT+.

Herein lies the paradox: I needed more time, but I also needed less time. In other words, I needed not one but many two-minute timeboxes. Thus was dual timeboxing born.

How Does Dual Timeboxing Work?

Again, dual timeboxing is just regular timeboxing but with two timers — “the big one” and “the small one”.

• The big timer measures the total or absolute time remaining (until, say, I need to leave my place of residence to catch the train. Example lengths (minutes): 90, 60, 30, 10
• The small timer measures the subtotal or relative time remaining within the current nested timebox. Example lengths (seconds): 120, 90, 60

Clearly, dual timeboxing is good for more than just making it to the train. It’s good for anything where you have a clear, hard, absolute deadline with a longish time horizon (dozens of minutes to a couple of hours?), within which you have to do some creative or otherwise amorphous work — work where the content is not so hard and fast, work where the details are not fully predetermined.

So, personally:

• I don’t plan out what I’m going to do in the big timebox.
• I have a “theme” (e.g. “study X” or “write Y” or “get ready to leave”), but within that theme…
• I act spontaneously…I just pick something productive to do for 90~120 seconds (or whatever the length of the smaller timebox is) and give that all my energy.
• It’s like eating chips or popping bubblewrap. Sure, there’s a bag, but I’m just eating this one chip.
• Occasionally, I even use some of the small timeboxes to take little breaks. I keep both timeboxes running as normal during the breaks…no clock-stopping since that (for me) creates the illusion we can stop time, which is the one thing we cannot do. We cannot (yet? hehe) stop time — all we can do is position ourselves and our tools in such a way as to use the ever-flowing river of time productively </OverlyPoeticStatements>.
• If my breaks get too long (use up too many small timeboxes), then I take it as a sign that the big timebox is too big and/or that I shouldn’t be working anyway, so I’ll just stop working altogether. Remember, the point of timeboxing is to limit work time, and but also to be actually working during work time. Yes…”and but”.

Complex (i.e. made up of many pieces), amorphous, ambiguous tasks are the kind that seem “hardest” to us, whether it’s cleaning house, writing an article or doing our SRS reps. Breaking it up like this helps me focus on just doing, not on freaking out about the enormity of the task (which, as we all know, leads to avoidance behaviors like our good friend Procrastination).

Timeboxing Turns Work Into Play

[This section got spun off into its own post. Click here to read it].

OK, Kenfucius, I’ve Drunk the Kool-Aid, But How Do I Use This For Learning Japanese?

• SRSing
• Reading (you could switch books every 90 seconds…this actually works really well when it’s your L2 — a language in which you are a mental child — and you can’t concentrate for too long)
• Watching/listening to media — think of it like channel-surfing.

Anyway…that’s the basic idea. Tune in next time for the second type of nested timeboxing — decremental timeboxing.

There’s so much I want to say on this topic. But it would take too long to put it all together, so I’m going to do what we always do here at AJATT — give it to you piecemeal.

As with everything on this site, the advice here is just based on my personal experience. I’m not an expert. Take what works, leave what doesn’t — the overall principles matter more than the minutiae of technique. Your mileage may vary and all that (then again, I am quite confident that it won’t vary by that much — otherwise I wouldn’t be writing it, eh lads, eh?).

Also, an interesting thing happened. While I originally intended this advice to be specifically directed towards languages we suck at (i.e. early- and mid-stage foreign languages), I soon found that it applied just as well to reading languages where we have native-level skill. Yay!

Anyway, first, a little bit about:

The Sucky Way We Read

By “how we read”, I mean “how we are taught to read in school”. Fortunately for me, growing up, I did a lot (indeed, most) of my reading entirely outside of the school framework, so for a long time I wasn’t “infected” as much by the school disease — at the very least, I was asymptomatic for many years.

But over time, it did get to me as well. So much so that I had to reach back into my childhood and reflect on what I had been doing outside of school, why it was so much fun, and why it worked so well, in order to get my then-stalled reading habits back on track _{(in the early years of my adult life, I went through a stage where I was basically not doing any reading, despite having a strong desire to read and a history of reading)}.

The style of reading that is typically taught and/or encouraged in school is all about:

• Hitting every single word.
• No change of pace or shifting gears.
• No skipping unless teacher says so. Any self-directed skipping is “cheating”, and is to be punctuated by feelings of guilt and remorse (aren’t these, like, synonyms?).
• Zero or severely limited choice in terms of start time, stop time and duration.
• Zero or severely limited in terms of reading material, with no option to change after initial choice.
• The order in which the book is written and presented is the One, True and Only Correct Order. You have no right to permute it or ignore it. You earn the right to read page p+1 only after perfectly reading page p.

It’s no wonder that so many adults never pick up another real book once they leave school. If you’d never ever been allowed to set or change the channel on your TV, and never been taught that you even had the right or ability to make such a judgment call, then you’d probably hate TV, too — no matter how many “TV-worms” (think: bookworm) told you that TV was the shizzle and that there were tons of great channels and shows out there.

The above is a style of reading that is, on the surface, well -suited to an early-stage student. After all, does someone who can barely read or who barely knows the subject matter at hand, really have the ability to decide where and what to skip? (Actually my answer to that is “yes”, but, school’s answer tends to be a resounding “no”).

Why How We Read Sucks

My guess is that the core reason why this reading style came about in the first place is because, at one time, in many parts of the world, there simply weren’t that many books, period. So, reading one book a year was fine, since you only owned one book and maybe had access to a few more. Oftentimes, the books in question were these massive, dense, metaphor-laden sacred texts, which probably do lend themselves to a special style of reading _{(then again, judging by how few people of any religious persuasion actually read sacred texts, perhaps these too could benefit from techniques like those I’m intending to share).}

Of course, things have changed. A lot. At least in terms of the number of books available. But in most schools and classes, the reign of tyranny of a single source of information continues. Moreover, the semi-compulsive behavior of reading (or, attempting to read) every-single-word-on-every-single-page-so-you-get-exactly-what-was-said-and-don’t-miss-a-single-thing is exacerbated by the earnest student’s fear of “missing” something that might be “on the test”. In fact, many tests are designed to reward this one-tree-matters-more-than-the-entire-forest type of reading.

There’s just no sense of priority; everything becomes equally important. It’s as if the Pareto Principle never existed. Indeed, some people might argue that that was the point: it is said that most school systems in the world today are based on a design that aims to produce compliant, docile factory workers — people who unquestioningly obey pre-made decisions, not people who make them. Those who go on to be managers get let in on the secret that most decisions are arbitrary, but people lower down on the ladder are to be left in the dark, believing that the pre-made decisions are absolute, based on the perfect or near-perfect knowledge of their elders and betters (“experts”, “superiors”), and carrying all the weight of divine decree.

OK, social engineering, blah blah whatever. Let’s not get too worked up. The deeper problem is that to force yourself to read everything is to force yourself out of your growth/true-comfort zone and into either your boredom zone or your panic zone (both of which are places where you are just going to…wait for the pun…”zone out”).

This leads to stress. Stress makes you forgetful: short-term memory gets pwned. No short term memory → no long-term memory. No long-term memory → no learning new information. No new information → less intelligent choices, far less brilliant flashes of insight. Less intelligent choices → more stupid choices. In short, the way school typically teaches us to read, makes us stupid. As in, Republican Gilmore Girls the end of Prison Break running out of cheap jokes stupid. The phrase “dumbing down” starts to take on a whole new meaning..

And now that we’re done complaining and making sweeping judgments and dubious historical references, it’s time to talk about how to fix the problem! But for that, dear children of the AJATT, ye shall have to wait for the very forthcoming sequel to this article — part deux! Wherein shall be demonstrated reading techniques that can help you have more fun reading any language, including Japanese.