January 2023 – Nithin's Blog

Binge-reading productivity articles: The Cut

I love reading about ways to be more productive. Here are a bunch I read from the Cut that I think others would find interesting:

Everything Always Takes Longer Than You Think
- Humans are really really bad at planning. Like, we exceed our worst case expectations bad
- This is called the planning fallacy. One solution is to use a “pre-mortem”, detailed in the next article
To Reach Your Goals, Imagine You Already Tried and Failed
- One way to get around that is to do a “pre-mortem”, pretend its some point in the future and the plan you put in place went horribly wrong – and write a retrospective detailing what happened and why
How Exercise Shapes You, Far Beyond the Gym
- Exercise is really good for you for reasons other than physical health. It can increase your ability to handle discomfort, and improve your ability to self-regulate
- Also see this podcast about dopamine, and how pain is necessary to feel pleasure
You Need a Schedule
- You need structure – a schedule gives you peace of mind through order and predictability
- People who use to-do lists get more things done, organized paper lists are better than digital or unorganized lists

2023 Goals

In this post, I covered my language goals for 2023. But I realized that I have a lot of other goals I want to pursue, so I want to outline them here.

At a high level, here’s what I want to do this year:

Plan better
Identify who I want to be and judge myself by those criteria
Have strong and healthy relationships in my life (of all kinds)
Be healthier (mentally and physically)
Do something constructive towards fighting climate change
Pursue my interests in cities and urban planning
Pursue my interests in languages, linguistics, and related topics
Make progress on a career that fits well for me
Write and publish things – ideally that are helpful to others
Read – and try to read things that expand my worldview

1:10 to Yuma

Since updating my language goals on January 3rd, I’ve made some progress:

A grand total of 1h 10mins of progress, that is. At least, that’s how much time active time I’ve spent on my Telugu studies. I have done more hours of passive work, like reading some news articles, listening to music, or watching TV in a target language (such as Spanish, French, or Telugu), but my goal is to increase the amount of active study I do. Active study is the hard stuff that pushes you outside your comfort zone and ultimately improves your ability.

Some observations I’ve made so far:

3 hours is a lot of time 🙁

To reach my goal, I would have to do between 2 – 3 hours of study a week. That’s a lot of time. It’s been nearly 4 years since I was a full-time student, which was the last time I was sitting down to really study something. It’s really hard! I forgot how hard it was. My brain hurt after 10 minutes of trying to read Telugu.

Breaking down my language goals

“Old French Road Sign” by Marcel Musil is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

In my previous post, I outlined a new set of language goals. In this post, I’ll outline my plan to reach them.

My plan was to spend 30 hours on French, Telugu, and Hindi, and 15 hours each studying Bengali and Punjabi. That totals 120 hours of studying by the end of the year.

Updating my language goals

“File:Bilingual sign, Southall railway station – DSC07015.JPG” by Rept0n1x is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

In a previous article, I outlined two goals I wanted to accomplish by summer 2024. The first pertained to languages, and the other was about writing. Much has changed since then, and I’d like to update this blog to reflect that. In this article, I’ll update my language goals, while in a future article, I’ll update my writing goals (and add some new ones).