Short-term goals

I have ten habits and non-habits set up to be checked off every day, which I listed in my February 2^nd post. Most of these don’t lend themselves to performance goals. For example, I read because I need something to do at night to relax and fall asleep, not because I have a certain number of books that I want to read. Eliminating these habits left me with three—Japanese, programming, and exercise. I have already made a short-term goal for programming—to make my memory program usable before returning to the US. I think I need to make this goal more concrete though. What features exactly do I need to implement for it to be considered usable? I have some ideas, but I want to revisit my program and feature checklist before stating them definitively. Exercise is the easiest. I recently expressed a desire to be able to do a five-minute plank. I’m going to challenge myself and say that I want to do it by the end of February. I also want to have a goal for dancing, which is a bit difficult, but my idea is to choreograph an entire dance. The choreography will be loose with a lot of repetition, but even so, three to three and a half minutes is quite a long time, so I’m a little skeptical that I can do it. The main point of this is to learn how to transition between moves, as well as to demonstrate concrete progress. For this challenge, I’ll give myself until the end of March.

Finally, for Japanese I had the goal of learning 20 words over three days until I learn a thousand and beyond. Although I don’t doubt the effectiveness of this method, and I know that I will feel gratification as I see the numbers go up, this goal feels a bit useless and is definitely endless. The real goal is to read the newspaper every day as I mine for these words. It’s difficult to demonstrate or quantify achievement in reading. Anyway, for now I will stick with this goal, but I’ll try to look for something more concrete. I’d also like to have a production goal of some sort—two sentences a day or something like that. The blogger mentioned above had a goal of conversing in Hebrew for thirty minutes about the future of technology, and to that end he wrote a few sentences to express his ideas, memorized them, and pulled from them when he conversed. I thought this was a great idea, but it does require having an expert check the sentences. Come to think of it, until I move, I do have free access to experts, so I have no excuse not to try this method. When I move home, if I want to continue, I might be able to arrange classes with Japanese students at the local college. Honestly, language production is an extreme chore to me, but I know it has great benefits. I think I’ll wrestle with the idea and try to make a plan by Friday to enact on Saturday.

I have one more habit to add and an accompanying goal. I want to memorize scripture every day using my software. It’s difficult to make a definite goal because verses and chapters vary so much in length. One verse a day is almost always doable, but sometimes it’s too little, and it makes for a very slow pace. Rather than that, I think the best thing to do might be to decide on a target text, estimate the amount of time it will require for memorization based on the whole length of the text, and then set an ambitious daily goal that would allow for some days to spare. I think I’ll start back with the Psalms, which generally have short and consistent verse lengths. By the end of February, I want to be able to recall with 95% accuracy (according to my program) the first ten Psalms. This might sound like a lot, but I reviewed these Psalms consistently for almost a year when I last lived in the US, so it might actually be too easy. I only have ten days though, so it’s a convenient target.