If you’re like me, you want to accomplish a lot in life. Unfortunately, your biggest enemy is the one you can not control — TIME. Here is how I try to accomplish quite a few things.
“Continuity Precedes Intensity.”
We all are guilty for starting something with enthusiasm and leaving it completely after some time. The number of New Year Resolutions are themselves a testimony to this fact. So, how can one accomplish important goals in one’s life.
As a famous person once said, “Invert, Always Invert.”
If starting big isn’t the answer then is starting small?
To conclusively answer this, I’ll design a self experiment. What better way to test a hypothesis than by doing something you always wanted to do?
I’ve always wanted to learn Italian because of —
The nerds among you would start the Italian and Sicilian debate. But why I stuck with Italian and not Sicilian is a story for another time.
How does one learn Italian in small steps? The answer is Duolingo. Now, before you close this post to read another one, let me clarify something. The effectiveness of Duolingo is still questionable. (If my experience answers this question then that’s a bonus!)
The reason why I’m using Duolingo is because I want to start a habit. A habit of “Learning Italian.” Duolingo is a good tool for getting familiar with a language. Familiar enough to translate. But I believe is won’t make you fluent in that language. And I’m okay with that. For the initial part, I want to be a good translator till “Learning Italian” becomes a habit. Once the habit is established, increasing intensity should be less painful. According to the framework of habit outlined by Charles Duhigg, one needs cue and a reward. Duolingo’s gamification concept takes care of the reward part. (One less thing to worry about). All I have to do now is to find an effective cue.
Once I find an effective cue, I believe making “Learning Italian” a habit won’t take much time. Mulling over few days, I have made myself to believe that an effective cue would be an already existing habit. I consider “Learning Italian” not a mentally straining activity. Therefore, for me, this activity should be done later in the day. My evenings are largely unstructured but there are some things that I do every night. A few of those are dinner and reading books. Therefore, I believe that using “Dinner finished” as a cue for “Learning Italian” should work.
In summary, to check whether starting small for habit formation really works, I will conduct an experiment. Further details of the experiment will follow in later posts.
