Goals, Sub-Goals, And Why I'm Swithing My Language Learning Up
A walk with me through my start of Q2 reflections
I woke up on March 30th realizing the first quarter of the year was about to end. 91 days. A full 25% of 2024. It scared me.
Had I accomplished anything in this Q1? Was I, at least, on my way to accomplish anything I had set to?
I didn’t even need to check my goals set in late 2023. I knew I had just glided my way through the quarter as I spent a month in Korea, 3 weeks in Taiwan, and 5 weeks in France. I had no routine whatsoever. No real setup I loved and focused mainly on visiting or getting ready for “the next thing coming.”
With only three quarters left and no wish to look back at 2024 without any real accomplishment, I decided to get organized about the next quarters. Stop lazying my way through the year so I could feel proud of myself later on.
I knew I wouldn’t if I kept going without any change.
I already felt horrible for having started the year on a good foot by keeping track of my time rather well despite moving around, and losing track of it once I settled back in France.1
Side note: I’ve started tracking activities again, and improved my system based on Victoria’s great advice. Go read her and get as inspired as I always get.
One of the things I felt most behind was my goal of running 20k by the end of the year. The most I’ve run in my life was in 2020 when I aimed (and reached) running 10k. Since then, I’ve gotten healthier2 but lost practice so I needed to ramp up training ASAP to even dream of 20k by the end of 2024.
I had my first run of the year on April 1st. 2.2 kilometer.3
I’m getting ahead of myself.
Here’s what I meant to say: I noticed all I wanted to do had sub-categories.
1 Quarter, 3 Months, 13 Weeks, 91 Days
I could keep dividing it further but you get the point.
The year can be divided. So can the quarter. So can each month. Etc.
Last year, I thought of 2024 as one big thing. Maybe two if you take into account Pre-leaving Asia and Post-return in France. Too vague, too large, too useless.
Let’s stick to the running example first.
Running a 20k obviously won’t happen without training. That training will change depending on the previous training and so on. I can’t hope to run a 20k before I can run 15. Nor can I run 15k until I’m back to running 10k. And I can’t hope to get back to a 10k before I can ramp up my most “recent” longest run of 7k from last November.
I’ve therefore chosen to aim to get back to running 10k within this quarter. I’m spending April evaluating how far I am from it and setting a real routine.
May is planned to push further, hopefully, reach 10k once or get close to it so I can make June a month where I turn 10k from a “What?! I actually did it?!” situation to a “Nice. Let’s do it again in a few days” one.
What’s it like for the rest?
Well, let’s talk language learning.
Goals, Sub-Goals, and Activities
One thing I took from my failed tracking in Q1 was how lost I was as to how to record my activities. I wanted something simple enough to be as frictionless as possible, but I also wanted enough details to get some useful stats out of it.
Throughout this, I noticed I rarely tracked my reading time in Korean as a separate entry from the English reading I was doing. The only remaining “language study” ended up being my study of Mandarin with textbooks.
I didn’t even take into account watching videos even though that was my main activity when I learned my previous languages. What a logic.
As a result, I changed my setup and started thinking in more precise terms.
What did I want to do for Q2?
I wanted more Chinese challenges and that’s when I thought of Victoria’s plan to watch the Chinese version of Three-Body Problem (三体) and my immersion-like experience with English 20 years ago: I chose to start watching Chinese TV series entirely in Chinese with only subtitles in Mandarin. No English at all.
I knew it’d be mentally straining so I chose to increase my time as the months went: 4 hours in April. 5 in May. 6 in June.
I then divided that into 1 hour a week for April and added an extra hour in a random week for the following months.
I also set a goal of 4 conversations in Chinese by the end of the quarter. I then divided this into 2 in May and 2 in June but the quarter goal takes over the monthly ones. If I don’t make it in May, I’m fine with having more in June.
I’ve also divided how I’m approaching my continuous study of Korean, my health, and even my writing as a part of my life.
A look back and forward
It’s only been two weeks since I started but I’ve already done more than I thought I would. I’ve spent more time with each of my languages, gotten used to running again, and written more than I have in a while.
These more precise and middle-term goals are still vague enough to leave some leeway based on the time I will have available this quarter.4
Keeping track of them will also give me more visibility for the next quarter and the next again, hopefully leading to reaching more of this year’s goals than I have in the past few years.
Then again, these yearly goals probably won’t feel as important by the time we reach 2025 as life keeps changing!
Cheers for reading,
Mathias
Turns out being on the move constantly and therefore doing most tasks through my phone makes tracking much easier.
Most notably, I don’t smoke anymore while I was a heavy smoker back then.
With my dog pulling back and forth on the leech. Maybe not the best idea but whatever. I ran. That’s what matters. 😁
For instance, I’ve just received yesterday (15th) confirmation that I was accepted for a 2-month free course about translating and interpreting Korean to French, at the King Sejong Academy in Paris. I’m psyched about it but I’m also sure this will impact my schedule overall.