A popular technique for the past seven years or longer—at least amongst self-students online—has been timeboxing. The basic idea of timeboxing is that study sessions are based on time, rather than the completion of tasks. Various means of time management and task switching come into play with timeboxing. I think of these techniques as time hacks. These are used for expired cards, not new and failed cards. For those see this entry.
The (10+2)*5 hack
One of the more popular techniques I discovered and attempted to spread in the Japanese self-study community is called the ‘(10+2)*5 hack’, where the learner spends 10 minutes on a task with 2 minute breaks between each 10 minute block, for a total of 5 blocks, or 60 minutes. The idea is to force yourself to take these breaks, which has the strange trick, once you get in the zone, of making you not want to take breaks. A neat solution for procrastination. It may be related to the spectrum of disruptiveness when tasks are interrupted, based on the factors of cognitive load and time constraints.
Originally the hack involved task-switching rather than focusing on a single task, not necessary for Anki study, but admirable and useful for reducing the buildup of mental fatigue by differentially using cognitive resources and alleviating the load. Not to mention it helps keep things interesting.
Additionally, multitasking, which is really just task-switching, is a skill that can be trained, making the above time hack quite useful.
Null media
What I came up with for those two minute breaks, to maintain this mobile one hour block of Japanese immersion, was to peruse null media as I called it. Null media involves Japanese written and spoken language, but in a minimal way that requires zero or little effort: Japanese music, particularly with vocals that are skewed in some way that gives space for attending to or ignoring the content of the words; or Japanese tumblr sites and other microblogs that contain a minimum of text and are heavy on images for the multimodal, multiplexed aspects. Microblogs are also useful because of the extensive reblogging that allows for quick shifts to similar sites.
Nested timeboxes
The above hack and the null media, and another time hack I came up with based on high-intensity interval training or HIIT, is a form of nested timeboxing: blocks of minutes within an hour within a day. The HIIT-based technique I use involves descending, nested timeboxes.
You begin with a sizable block of time after setting aside an hour: say 20 minutes, followed by a brief break, followed by a 10 minute session, another break, a 5-7 minute session, and on down as low as you like. Often I would use very small sessions to begin with, depending on how much I felt like procrastinating when I began.
The aim here is to increase intensity of reviews, which might make it better suited for a single task rather than switching tasks. In this case my strategy might be ideal for fluency development exercises, similar to Paul Nation’s 4-3-2 technique, referenced here.
An idea that came organically here was the use of three timers to track the large, medium, and small timeboxes. My recommendation to use multiple timers seems to have gained some popularity already, but I will go over it again in the tools section.
What I found over time was that when task-switching in a way that’s centered around a central goal, such as switching between multiple related Anki decks, nested timeboxes and breaks aren’t really necessary.
Tools
For the multiple timers, you can use Tea Timer (PC), or what I have done is use it for the largest (e.g. one hour) timebox while Anki’s Study Options timer takes care of medium boxes and Tea Timer for the Firefox takes care of the tiny null media intervals, as they often included browsing.
For null media I use a Greasemonkey script to shuffle tumblr pages to avoid the tedium of manual scrolling and augment the reblogging links. I also use the add-on randomflip for a portable version of Firefox with only Japanese bookmarks I wish to use for null media imported and dynamic links disabled in randomflip‘s options.
Alternately you can use Chrome’s Random Bookmark extension, with a custom folder. The downside of this is the lack of the tumblr shuffle script and the lack of Rikaisama for instant card creation.
- randomflip – Visit a random bookmark on Firefox.
- Random Bookmark – Visit a random bookmark in Chrome.
- Tumblr Shuffle Anywhere (Greasemonkey script) – Shuffles Tumblr pages.
References
- Bogunovich, P., & Salvucci, D. (2011). The effects of time constraints on user behavior for deferrable interruptions. Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems, CHI ’11 (pp. 3123–3126). Vancouver, BC, Canada: ACM. doi:10.1145/1978942.1979404
- Dux, P. E., Tombu, M. N., Harrison, S., Rogers, B. P., Tong, F., & Marois, R. (2009). Training improves multitasking performance by increasing the speed of information processing in human prefrontal cortex. Neuron, 63(1), 127-138. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2009.06.005
