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Time logging tips? | ||
Tags: Study Plan | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3576 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 1 of 17 20 April 2015 at 10:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm keeping a log of my Irish (and French) studies, but it's turned out to be more
qualitative than quantitative, because I have such a hard time keeping an accurate log of the time I spend. I'd love to hear about what tools people use to log their study time (notebook, spreadsheet, phone app, stopwatch, timer, pomodoro...). Also, if you subdivide your tally into separate languages, or different learning media (e.g. time spent watching TV/movies, reading, or playing Duolingo), what sub-areas do you track? And finally, do you really remember to set a timer, or do you end up needing to look back and estimate? Murphy's Law ensures that when I set a timer, I end up distracted by some minor household crisis, and when I get sucked into a great study session, the last thing to cross my mind was setting a timer at the beginning. Edited by tangleweeds on 20 April 2015 at 10:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Clarity Groupie United States Joined 3523 days ago 85 posts - 107 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 17 21 April 2015 at 1:15am | IP Logged | ||
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Hi Tangleweeds. Currently I'm trying out a free Android phone app called Gleeo. I am still fiddling with subcategories. We'll see if it continues to be useful over the next few weeks.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3543 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 3 of 17 21 April 2015 at 8:28am | IP Logged | ||
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Don't use a stopwatch unless you're timing some very specific task like "how long does it take me to dictate this paragraph" for benchmarking purposes.
For normal studying, I use a spreadsheet divided into tasks and time units. I use manageable time units (15 minutes in my case). During my study hour if I got significantly distracted one time, then I leave one of the time unit boxes blank and fill in the other 3 for that hour so they get added to the total. The purpose for me is to track the effort towards each task, and to plan when I can finish a particular long running task (such as reading a novel, performing a longish transcription, etc.). The advantage of a spreadsheet over a special app is that you can fill it in exactly how you want in order to meet whatever goal or purpose you have. You don't have to keep the spreadsheet filled out in real-time; just fill it in whenever you change study tasks or take a break. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3576 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 4 of 17 21 April 2015 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm currently using an Android phone app, like Clarity; mine is called Amazing Time Logger
(and like you, Clarity, I'm still juggling categories). So starting my timer is neither like starting a stopwatch, nor like doing a Pomodoro, but perhaps something in between. I've been considering a cloud-based solution, which would let me log not only via my phone, but also on the tablet and computer desktop, via a web app, or whatever it takes to be easily available via all my devices. I've recently found a great list manager that fits this profile, so now I'd love to find a time logger that's similarly universal (I'm a tough case here, as I have an Android phone, an iPad, and a Linux laptop). But I really should learn more about making and using spreadsheets. No one has required me to use them for a job or a class, so while I can plug in numbers if coached and bribed, I've never actually set one up. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 5 of 17 21 April 2015 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Rather than counting time I prefer to count work achieved. So rather than counting 30 minutes reading, I'll count 15 pages.
That seems both simpler and more accurately to count what matters. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 6 of 17 22 April 2015 at 1:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I count time but how I count it varies with the task.
For the commute to and from work I listen to lessons/podcasts. When I get to the end of the journey, I look back over the tracks I've listened to and add up the minutes. For reading I note the start time and the end time. I don't bother counting it if it was just a few minutes. For video (drama etc) I count the running time (rounded down to the nearest minute, minus the credits, since I usually don't watch those). I time Anki too, although I think i could just let it keep track of it for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 7 of 17 22 April 2015 at 2:01am | IP Logged | ||
You really should make use of spreadsheets. They're not just useful on their own, they make it easy to transfer data from one place to another. For what it's worth, on Android I use a program called "Memento" - it's a database app that's quite flexible as far as setting up what I want to track, and you can export entries into delimited (usually tab or comma) files that can then be imported into Excel or another spreadsheet program (such as LibreOffice Calc on Linux, etc.) Memento also will sync your file to Google Docs, and it even makes use of Google Docs' charting functions, which I find pretty useful. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| stifa Triglot Senior Member Norway lang-8.com/448715 Joined 4874 days ago 629 posts - 813 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, EnglishC2, German Studies: Japanese, Spanish | Message 8 of 17 22 April 2015 at 8:49am | IP Logged | ||
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I track listening time (rounding up and down to the nearest minute) by looking at the
video running time on the Youtube/Nico/RTVE etc. I also track the number of page read, usually by dividing the Kindle "location" difference by the total difference and then multiplying with the number of pages: Pages read = (pos. difference / max pos.) × page number I use a spreadsheet to keep track of how much I've read/listened. I don't track any other activity done in the language, like for instance Duolingo. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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