Last night’s weekly tandem learning session, in which I teach my friend English for an hour in exchange for her (a qulaified teacher) teaching me for an hour tunred into a session for us to express our mutual frustration at not being self-disciplined enough to make much progress in our studies.

For me, the main issue is not that I am inherantly lazy, but that I have so many other things I want to do more. Japanese study often gets pushed to the back burner, only coming into focus in those situations when I find myself struggling to communicate some idea and become ‘angry’ at myself for not trying harder.

Learning Japanese is Important but not urgent, and thus tends toget sidelined by things that I perceive to be urgent, but that in the long term are not all that important [Time management matrix].

My friend, having recently returned from the UK to visit my classmate Phil, had already decided to take action. She will be going to work a little earlier every morning to study.

I’ve decided to do something similar. I’m going to get up at 6am every day between now and February 28th. The 2 or 3 hours I have between then and when I leave to work (it differs depending on the day) will be filled with a combination of study, exercise, and time spent on my projects.

Every night I take out the beautuful little handmade notebook given to me by a friend, and write down all that I’ve acomplished that day. I then write down my goals for the next day.

Whilst today is only day one, I:m already delighted by the results. This morning, I spent an hour studying the text books I bought ages ago, I transferred the acompanying CD onto my iPod, did a good workout (pressup and situp reps), and then had a relaxing bath. I’ve had time to eat breakfast, and am even able to get a quick blogpost out.

The sense of accomplishment and satisfaction is delicious.

I’m giving this routine the label ‘experiment’ and setting an end date of February 28th . It’s important that that I have a time limit, a goal to work towards, to prevent my trailing off.

Anyway, time for work.