Time Hacking in 2012: 21 Ways I Managed Work, Email and Language Learning

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Archive note: This post records the routine I used during my 2012 Arabic mission. The workload, products and software names are historical, and the sleep section is not current health advice. Most healthy adults need around seven to nine hours of sleep, according to the NHS sleep guide.

This video is part two of how my typical day folds out. I try to explain (in Arabic, with subtitles in English, Arabic and Portuguese) how things go after my 8-9AM spoken lesson. It's a short video, so this very detailed blog post describes the components of my busy day in much greater detail!

This is also the last video which will be entirely scripted. The next one will be my one month point and be made up entirely of a spontaneous conversation with a native.

There has been a lot of confusion from some people for what I do for a living. I like to joke at times when asked and say “I'm an ostrich farmer” or “I'm a professional assassin, so don't ask too many questions!” but the truth is that I'm a professional language hacker. I explained how I got into that in this post.

While I'd love to say that this means that I'm one of those bloggers with an automatic stream of income that lets me do whatever I want all the time and literally spend every single second focused on my language projects, this simply isn't the case.

Blog posts like this 8,000 word one can sometimes take me days to write, aspects of redesigning and maintaining the site behind the scenes can be an epic amount of work, and I find it hilarious when people comment on my Youtube channel suggesting that I “don't work” so I have it easier than they do to spend all my time focused entirely on learning a language.

You can't imagine the amount of work required to prepare a typical video, pick the right locations, post-recording edit it, add in graphical introductions and previews to other videos, synch the sound, upload subtitles in various languages, and actually record the video itself with my equipment set up the right way.

This is very different to sitting in front of my webcam, recording a monologue and then instantly uploading it, which you see a lot of from other Youtubers. That's fine for them, I just prefer to upload more professional looking videos.

A note from the Fluent in 3 Months team before we get started: You can chat away with a native speaker for at least 15 minutes with the “Fluent in 3 Months” method. All it takes is 90 days. Tap this link to find out more.

So much work/emails/blogging to handle

And the emails and comments!! Yikes!

I get over four hundred emails a day, and another hundred or so comments on my blog posts, Youtube channel, Facebook page, Instagram @s. Some of the emails may be for interview requests (here's a recent one I did entirely in Irish on beo.ie for instance), which in themselves will take up a lot of time, and others are sometimes really long emails in various languages that take time just to read.

I could ignore all this to focus just on my language learning project, but I love making cool and sharable videos, writing blog posts, engaging with readers, hearing their stories, and hopefully inspiring a few people to learn a new language. As well as this, on a more practical level, I have to make sure that my site and audience continues to grow so that I can keep the site completely 100% advertisement and sponsorship free, which is quite rare for any site.

The sheer number of visitors the site gets means that I don't have to make a big fuss about my Speak from Day 1 package and people find it eventually if they need to, and at least one person does each day, which covers my expenses, which I don't have a lot of considering I don't own or buy much stuff.

Even though sales of that product are handled automatically, I hope you can see that simply being an active blogger in itself is a huge amount of work! This can require up to eight hours of my time per day, including weekends. Yes, I have to work and learn a language at the same time too! This is time that I'm not speaking or learning Arabic, so it would seem that all hope is lost for investing serious time into learning my language intensively, right?

Not quite 😉 I can now share 21 hacks I apply every single day, to make sure that I can stay on top of all of this and still have plenty of time to invest entirely into learning the language, as well as have an actual social life!

Squeezing more hours out of the day:

1. Get up early

If you watch part one of the video of my typical day, you'll see that my day begins at 5:30AM. I have found that the later I get up, the less time I “feel” I have, so I skip important things like eating well, doing exercise, clearing “less essential” tasks and I ultimately end up less focused and work less efficiently.

When you get a bunch of things done well before 8AM you have the momentum to keep at it all day long. This is especially important if you have to work based on someone else's schedule.

2. What I Tried With Biphasic Sleep

In 2012, I experimented with splitting my sleep into a main block and a short afternoon nap. That was a personal trial, not evidence that other people need less sleep.

Current NHS guidance says most healthy adults need around seven to nine hours a night. Cutting sleep to create more working time can impair health and concentration, so I would not recommend copying the extreme polyphasic schedule I tried.

At the time, I wrote that a 20-minute nap left me feeling rested after about five hours at night. I am keeping that as historical self-report, not a safe target or general recommendation.

3. How I Handled Alcohol and Caffeine

I chose not to drink alcohol and found that this made my mornings more predictable. I also chose not to rely on coffee, but caffeine affects people differently and moderate daytime use is not the same as dependence.

The useful part of this old routine was noticing which habits helped or hurt my own focus. It was not a claim that coffee, alcohol and tobacco have the same effects or risks.

4. Exercise and eat well

People are starting to accept that exercise does indeed improve brain activity. As you can see in the video, I have a jog and try to do other exercise every day in the morning if I can.

Another benefit is that I find that I'm a lot less distracted and can sit still after dispelling a little energy on the jog. Most of my work on the blog and studying requires sitting down, so using my muscles before that means that I do need to recover and won't be getting up every few minutes to distract myself with something pointless.

For some great tips on exercising well, check out Nerd Fitness.

The same goes for eating well of course. I didn't eat so well while travelling in China and the states this year, especially since it's hard to rent an affordable place in some countries that even has a kitchen, but luckily in Brazil it's very easy to get access to lots of wholesome affordable vegetarian food and cook at home too.

By fueling your body well, you can work and focus better.

How I get to Inbox zero twice per day

5. Switch to Gmail and activate filters

If you are on any email other than Gmail, then it's no wonder you are dealing with email overload! There are several reasons to switch over and you don't have to tell your friends you've changed your email, since you can have gmail download it from the old address for you.

One that I especially like is that Gmail has an option to create complex filters. So out of the 400 emails I get, I can immediately reduce this to just 80 that require my attention, thanks to some filters I've set up, such as the following ones:

• Any email that is sent in bulk to many people goes to a special folder that I clear about three times a week when I've time. It never makes it to the inbox, which is seen as a bigger priority since people have written to me directly. Exceptions are made for flight details and other essentials or more urgent email lists
• Obvious spam that is sent just to you not picked up by the system. As a blogger, I get at least five or six a day trying to sell me on some sleazy SEO (Sales Engine Optimization) tactics to get me on “page one of Google”. I have a list of words that I see often that tell me that this is likely going to be spam, and send it to a special filter that I'll check once or twice a week to clear. This very simply includes the term “SEO”, so I don't recommend you have it in your signature if you write an email to me 😉 Note that “seo” is also the Irish word for this, so I've added in exceptions for certain common Irish words too.
• Sometimes people like arguing with me via email. If I've tried to talk to them a couple of times and I can see they are only interested in wasting my time or sending aggro my way, their email or IP address gets its own filter to be automatically set as read and archived, so I don't get annoyed by it any more.
• Any email with Fwd or similar in the title tends to be stupid jokes that I don't want to read. These go to another folder to be looked at with low priority.
• Social media notifications, like messages on Facebook, someone commenting on a Youtube video, each get their own filter, and never go to the inbox. Opening these tends to take me away from the Gmail window which is a huge distraction already, so I have a work session specifically for social media follow-ups.

This means that even though I get over 400 emails a day, I'll only actually see about 80-150 each day that make it to the inbox. There are lots of great ways to make sure I can handle these too!

6. Send AND archive button

Another cool thing about Gmail is the amount of plugins and extra features that you can add to it to make your job easier. One such option if you go into labs is the “Send and archive” button.

After I've replied to an email, then effectively, it should be removed from my inbox, as I've “dealt” with it. This button makes that process automatic. I never use the “send” button, only the “send and archive”, so nothing hangs around the inbox for long.

7. ONE inbox and one inbox only

I have done everything I can to make sure that all the messages that I can handle that come from the entire world, end up in that one inbox (or at least a filter) in Gmail.

So rather than invite people to message me in a host of ways by following a trillion people on twitter and getting DMs, I only follow five people on twitter, and check @s at a specific time each day.

I nuked my far too large amount of “friends” on Facebook, and got rid of people I bumped into once or twice or who I no longer talk to. The only people who can email me such that it gets into my Facebook inbox are my close friends and family – and I only have 70 of them, not 500, not 1000. I don't accept friend requests from anyone I haven't met several times in person because of this, and if a stranger messages me through my personal Facebook, then I will leave it in the “other mail” and simply not reply (I do specifically say on the public description on my Facebook page not to message me via that page).

You also can't message me privately on my Facebook brand page, so I can handle wall posts as social media time and not email time. Same with Youtube – private messages have been turned off. And when I set up a new profile anywhere, such as Preply this year, the first thing I do is disable private messaging and chat feautres. I don't want to check a dozen inboxes every day, just one.

8. Give people other options on the contact-me form

This means that when people want to get in touch with me, they can only 1. Reply to the emails sent after signing up to the Language Hacking League email list or 2. Use this form.

Out of all the emails I get, about 15-20 of them are asking me the same questions day in and day out. So when this happens enough, I go back to the form and add in a notice to warn people before they see the form so they don't send that same message. No advertisement requests on the blog, links to posts that have Frequently Asked Questions they are likely to be asking and so on.

This precursor immediately reduced the amount of the messages I'd get that I'd be sending the same answer to over and over.

I also suggest that they use the forum if it's a “How do I learn a language” style question, since I simply cannot sit down and answer a single email for hours explaining my language learning approach – people are welcome to ask the community or search my site, or watch the TEDx talk to get all my secrets.

9. Canned replies for repeated questions

Sometimes it's a question that I can't really warn them in advance with a quick link on the contact-me form, but it's still something that I get day in and day out. The biggest one by far is a specific question that I answer in a specific post, that they may not have found by using the search tool on my site.

In this case, I have a template set up to thank them for the question and a space to paste in a link to the relevant post. I was even getting enough of these to merit creating a template one for Spanish and French! This way I only have to activate the canned reply, paste the appropriate link in, and the email is dealt with within seconds.

10. See who's writing to you or if they wrote to you before, with Rapportive

Now, the one major catch about using email compared to social media platforms like twitter, Facebook, Youtube and so on, is you don't know anything about that person apart from their name – not even what they look like!

When dealing with languages where even saying “you” requires that you know if you are writing to a boy or a girl and I can't really tell that from their name, and just in general to make my email experience much more personal so I feel like I'm writing to real human beings, it's nice to see a nice photo and any other info about that person.

With this in mind, I have the plugin Rapportive installed. This searches social media platforms for their email address and returns what it can – usually a Facebook photo, and sometimes even a few status updates. I find this helps me get some context for who I'm writing to.

Before this, if I was really confused, I'd take the time to copy and paste their email and enter it into a search in Facebook, but now it's just sitting there for me, saving me some time.

It also gives me the context of if this person has emailed me before. I get so many emails, that it's impossible to keep track and if I write to someone like it's the first time they ever emailed me, but they have done so already, then I can be much more helpful in not repeating myself. All their previous emails are linked to in the side.

11. Add the time dimension to your emails with Boomerang and guarantee inbox zero every day

My favourite plugin by far for Gmail is boomerang. This allows me to 1. Send an email later 2. Have emails returned to me later and 3. Bring an email back to me if the recipient doesn't reply by a certain time.

This has been such a huge help to me! For sending emails later, consider this:

Since a lot of emails that I get might be short and require a short answer, if I reply immediately simply to get it out of the inbox, then that person sees me as a little too available. I've found that more often than not they'll reply back again immediately, with yet another question and it turns into a chat, which I really don't have time for, and that person stays fixed in my inbox way too long.

Instead, I'll reply immediately, but set the email to be sent in two days time. This shows the person that I'm a bit busy and can't reply to such questions so quickly, but they still get their answer and most importantly, I get their message out of my inbox!

Only urgent messages get an instant reply – such as if someone is having trouble downloading the Language Hacking Guide. Generally, you won't hear from me a for a few days. One way this happens is because of the above of me replying instantly, but not sending it until later.

Another way is that I see the email is not something that I can handle right now, but don't want it sitting in my inbox nagging me. So I set it to “boomerang” back to my inbox at a time when I can handle it. For example, if someone sends me a monstrously long email, I'm definitely not going to read it as soon as I see it. I'll boomerang it back to Tuesday, when I set aside time specifically to read long emails.

Or if someone send me a link (which I prefer they don't – generally I prefer that people tweet me links; it's the best way for me to see it quicker), I'll boomerang it to Wednesday, when I set aside time to look at interesting links sent my way. This is sort of like pressing the Snooze button on your email. The important thing is that it's OUT of my inbox, and will come back to me specifically when I know I can deal with it.

Finally, I don't really want to remember to message people back if it's something important, as I'll probably forget it quickly. So in cases where I need a reply for whatever reason, I set the message to boomerang back to me later if they don't reply, so I can follow up. If they do reply before this, that boomerang is cancelled.

This means that I can effectively go through each email and either send and archive, reply to be boomeranged later (and archive), archive if it doesn't require my reply, or create a new filter if that email never should have reached my inbox.

In this way, no matter what, I'll reach inbox zero in each session, despite the huge amount of emails I get. And I do this twice a day too! Morning and evening 🙂

Working more efficiently

12. Task based day

OK, so I've handled my inbox overload and can get to the main tasks of the day.

The problem is that I have quite a lot to do! As I said, I might have a long blog post to write (like this one), videos to edit, website maintenance to carry out, an interview to write or Skype, or hundreds of messages on social media to catch up on. Without an effective time management system, these would consume my day and I've no time left to learn the language!

I tried a few things to get on top of these, such as timetabling out my day with what I should be doing at each hour, but I found that when I ran into problems at any point, the whole day was thrown off balance.

What has worked better for me, has been setting up a to-do list of precisely everything that I need to do that day and deciding approximately how much time it will require.

For this, I use Astrid, which is a web-based app and Android/Apple one. I create the timetable on my computer and check it off on my Android phone or iPad as the task is completed, which all synch between one another.

It's important to create a plan of action at the start of the day, rather than wing it. This way you don't have anything important getting ignored – the big essential things tend to get prioritised to be done earlier in the day, so it's OK if less essential tasks get pushed to the next day.

13. Timeboxing, pomodoro style!

Now, when it's time to do the actual tasks, I will not just sit down and do it until I'm done. If it takes a long time then I'd get bored and distracted after a while and it will ultimately take even longer.

One technique that has worked wonders for me is the pomodoro technique.

It very simply involves working in 25 minute blocks, followed by a 5 minute break. Simple as that.

This simplicity has meant that I don't get distracted and try to do other things at the same time. 25 minutes is a short enough period that something can get 100% of my undivided attention, but still make a serious influence to the task at hand, but not long enough to make you get too bored with it.

Once my kitchen timer or digital timer rings/beeps, then even if I'm mid-sentence, I'll stand up from my laptop or put down the book and do something relaxing. Maybe stare out the window at some birds, or turn on some music to listen to a song I like, or do some busy work like tidy up or do the dishes, which can actually be relaxing when you are otherwise focused on something so taxing.

And then my five minutes are up and I'm back into it again.

That 10 minutes off per hour has meant that the remaining 50 minutes are a magnitude of times more efficient, and I can keep up this efficient work for the majority of the day.

I'm absolutely 100% focused because I know the entire time that I'm never far away from a break. Whenever I'm working on something my by own – whether it's writing a blog post like this, studying, doing flashcards or anything else. It always gets timeboxed into a 25 minute segment.

Any basic timer can do this for you – you have it on your watches or phones or alarm clocks. I personally like to have a large digital display within my view counting down to remind me of the time pressure. There are also plenty of apps and programs that cater specifically to this particular time segmentation if you search for “pomodoro” for your computer or smartphone system.

14. Non-distracting work environment

When there are a million things going on around you, it's really hard to keep that focus. Turn OFF all notifications for text messages, chat messages, new email notifications, tweets and anything else that beeps or vibrates away your attention.

As I mentioned above, when I'm in email-mode, I absolutely will not leave the Gmail window and get distracted by random links. I have a separate working session for investigating links. And I never check Facebook unless I am in a dedicated Facebook session, so it gets its own filter in Gmail too, as Facebook has some of the greatest potential for distractions.

And in the real world, try to make the physical space you work in way less distracting. When I was in Rio, I did not have a very efficient working week. The apartment I was in had such a nice view that I was constantly distracted by it. Here in Belo Horizonte I'm surrounded by dull buildings and my working space is in a corner in my apartment where I'm only looking at the wall. Boring, but much more ideal to work in.

15. Block the leeches

When you work on a computer connected to the Internet, there are so many things happening that your attention can get grabbed in any direction away from your work – especially to sites like Facebook, Reddit or some of your other favourite pages.

That's why I highly recommend you install a plugin on your browser that lets you set these websites as inaccessible during work periods. I like Leechblock for Firefox and StayFocusd for Chrome. Of course, having excellent self control is the ideal, but these plugins let you learn that easier. I don't even use them any more because they helped “train” me so well in the past.

And sometimes the leeches for your time can be actual people. In my case, one side-effect of getting so much traffic is that I get a certain amount of negativity from a small number of people online. I'll almost always engage with people at first and give them the benefit of the doubt, and welcome mature discourse when someone is clearly doing it with an open mind, but some people really do have nothing but a bone to pick.

If their first message is filled with insults then they'll immediately get added to my block list, and if they are simply being a little too blunt and disrespectful over time then after three or four attempts, I really can't be giving them my undivided attention so I turn them off. I wasted so much time unnecessarily early this year with people wanting to drag me down when I was learning Chinese.

To this day, I still don't get this obsession with trolling. I'd rather focus on making my life go as well as it can, than spend my day trying to tear everyone else down and lecture them from my anonymous Internet cave.

During this mission, some abusive comments accused me of supporting terrorism or opposing women’s rights simply because I was learning Egyptian Arabic. I blocked those accounts rather than giving them more of my time.

Think about it seriously – if anything or anyone is dragging you down in life then if there is a possibility of pressing an off switch, or telling the person face to face to go take a long walk off a short pier, or at least peacefully agree to disagree, then do it and move on.

16. Squeeze every spare second out of your day

When people tell me they have no time, I have to laugh, because they clearly have the time to complain about it 🙂

There are a host of ways you can kill the time-suckers and use the empty-hours in your day more efficiently. I wrote more about it here.

17. Outsource and get help for things someone else can do

Now, out of everything that I might do on a given day, there are actually quite a few things that I don't need to personally be doing myself. Answering emails, actually studying and speaking the language, and writing these blog posts are things I must do myself.

But looking at my day and the amount of hours poured into each thing, I found that there were some tasks that didn't require me personally to do them, and that someone else could do, but that were taking up a lot of my time.

You may remember a few weeks ago when I announced this project, that I ran a promotion for people to get an extra if they bought the Speak From Day 1 package? These extra earnings weren't so I could go Mitt Romney style and hire a masseuse on a yacht, or buy a Rolex watch, first class flight or anything of the sort. That extra boost was so that I could invest that money into giving me more time.

I've hired a PA before for very specific tasks, but this time I hired one for the duration of this project to help me with things that would clear up my time. Luckily what I made during the promotion was enough to hire him for a few hours a week for the entirety of the 3 months.

For example, subtitling my videos was always such a chore. I'd have to re-listen several times, make a note of the transcript, translate it, and then start over and get the timing of the captions just right for the subtitles file. It would typically take 20 times longer than the length of the video to get that file – so a three minute video could take an hour to caption in two languages. Some of my videos in this project are already over ten minutes long.

So this is work for my PA! He is from Egypt, so he can caption the videos once I start interviewing people too, and he speaks English, so he can also translate those captions!

He is also the one making all my Anki decks for me! I wrote a detailed email explaining how it works, and now all I need to do is send him the list of words in English, and he will translate them to Arabic, apply romanized script so I can learn them faster and speak the words aloud as audio, so I can hear these while studying. Even forgetting adding the audio, creating these decks with good translations on a regular basis would take me a lot of time that could be spending actually learning the language.

If anything comes up that someone else may be able to do for me, then I consider outsourcing if it's practical and affordable. Unfortunately, the list of ways I can clear up my day like this is very small (so I definitely can't have a four hour workweek like the guy that gave me this idea), but luckily I know that what I do outsource is saving me a LOT of time each week. The resources I use to find these people are odesk and elance [Edit: now they merged and become Upwork] for quality work, and fiverr.com for quick tasks that I'd pay $5 for.

I still need to send a lot of emails to explain the task and find the right people, but ultimately it's time and money well spent.

Learning a language more efficiently

Finally, we're on to what it's all about right now for me! Despite the above five thousand words worth of things trying to grab my attention during the day, I still need to put some serious time into learning Arabic and progressing towards what will ideally be fluency by December 18th.

Thanks to working more efficiently, as described above, even though I have a LOT of work to do during the day, I'll still have plenty of time to focus just on the language.

I apply a similar approach and treat it just as I would treat any work. As above, I block out distractions, timeblock a study or learning session into a 25 minute block, and focus on doing one thing at a time.

18. Give Difficult Study Your Full Attention

Background listening can add exposure, but difficult study usually needs your attention. Use dedicated time for understanding new material, recalling vocabulary or checking pronunciation.

In the video, I listen to audio while taking notes and trying to make out the words. That active task needs more attention than familiar audio playing during a chore.

Match the task to the attention you have. Background audio may suit familiar material, while new or difficult work deserves dedicated time.

19. Fill those empty moments with flashcard studying

The point a little above about finding more time throughout the day can be taken advantage of in language learning if you have a smartphone or iPod using the Anki app (for iPhone, for Android, and for everyone else). In the elevator, you can review another two words. While stuck in a supermarket line, you can learn those essential phrases, and so on.

Anki Flashcarding is a major part of my study day, since vocabulary and phrases (both producing them and recognizing them) are ultimately what will get me into conversations.

Rather than use generic ones, I have created decks based specifically on what I am most likely to talk about. Generic word lists are usually based on word frequencies in newspapers, and as such I find them to be incredibly unhelpful for beginner language learners and the kinds of conversations they are more likely to have.

I write out the words I'm likely to say, get them translated and spoken aloud by my PA as described above, and study those lists. Then in my spoken sessions, I see what specifically is missing and add those new words to my next list to be studied.

And when I get around to grammar, that is also dealt with flashcard style. Grammar needs to be covered at the right time and place, not at the very start. Right now the only grammar I'm concerning myself with, is the kind that without it my conversations are hindered a bit too much.

So while it was OK to use any version of a verb before, I've just added a new deck with basic conjugations to be learned. It won't apply to all verbs, but it will get me a little bit further into expressing what I need. I will continue to accept speaking incorrectly as OK for the moment, and will add more grammar only as it is needed.

Since I find that I can focus on flashcard studying while walking slowly (since I may put the phone down for a second to think of a good image association for the word and use my environment for inspiration), and I like to walk to get around as much as possible, I actually study while walking! You can even see me apply that in this video because I have an app that shows me where I'm going, by making the screen “transparent” with the back camera, so I won't bump into people.

20. It has to be all building up to actually speaking

Speak from Day 1, seriously!!!

As you'll have seen in the previous video, I have a spoken session first thing in the morning at 8AM to get me into the speaking flow, and remind me what I need to work on, and then another one in the evening to work towards.

If your study sessions are for something specific that you can apply in your next spoken session, you will be amazed at how quickly you progress. It's like that last-minute-exam pressure all the time. We all learn the best the hours just before the exam – the same goes with before an upcoming spoken session. I make my “exam” daily, and then I HAVE to keep improving.

21. Stay sane and don't forget to have a life!

The last thing and probably the most important one to make sure you stay focused and work well, is to let your hair down and go out and have some fun at least a few times a week. You've earned it!

I found that focusing too much on the project was a mistake with Chinese, and the stress from not relaxing more meant that I reached saturation point and couldn't focus at all any more!

This time I've corrected that and every single day I meet up with Brazilians for lunch or dinner to hang out and talk about anything but language learning 😉 And once or twice a week I'll go out for the entire evening and dance, flirt with cute girls, make new friends and do whatever else that makes me remember that I'm human and not an Arabic learning and blogging robot.

I pick these relaxing times specifically as social occasions, to make sure that they are definitely relaxing.

If relaxing is just watching TV, or lounging away the evening on Youtube, then if after it you don't feel energized about life, I'd say it's done more damage than good. An evening out (or in…) with friends and fun people can be just what the doctor ordered and make sure that you've recharged your batteries for another efficient working day.

It's not all about work after all – why work so hard if you aren't going to reap the benefits and appreciate that you are a healthy person with friends that want to support you and help you? All of this work with Arabic for me, is so that ultimately I can have the kind of friends in Egypt that I have here in Brazil.

For me, it's all about the people. The more efficiently I can work during my day, then the less distractions I have from that work when it's time to socialize!