Consider keeping a journal

It may help to document your language learning journey in a journal. If you’re the type of person who has ever kept a diary this may be for you.

Apart from the obvious function of acting as a log, whereby you tally your hours, a journal may fulfill several other purposes.

It can act as a motivation. If it’s a public one, then the subtle pressure of living up to your intentions could help to spur you on.

But it’s also a place to record your experiments. What worked; what didn’t? It can help you to discover any patterns to do with mood, plateaus, or progress etc.

You can record the interesting tips and tricks of other people as well as your own.

It can be an organizational centre—a mini-desk as it were.

Keeping a journal may be a keystone habit for you, ensuring that you always sit down at your desk at the same time of day for a few minutes. It can act as a reminder and lead on to achieving other goals.

It could be in the form of a notebook or a blog (which may be private or public.) Some people prefer a vlog. Talk to YouTube. A vlog will capture your speaking ability quite easily and effectively.

Institute a routine

If it takes, say, a thousand hours to learn your target language, then that’s at least a thousand times that you’ll need to decide to sit down and ‘do’ an hour. That’s a thousand times that you need to remember, and a thousand times that you’ll need to exert your will power.

Of which everyone has a limited daily ration.

Unless, of course, you get a habit going—a habit that goes under the name of a routine.

Now personally I have problems with routines. I’m good a designing them. I enjoy that part of the process. But I’m no good at following them. I resist them. I resent them.

The trick is to get it slowly into place piecemeal. You can’t afford to have it feel like am imposition or compulsion. You need to retain space to manoeuvre. It needs to be loose. It ought to leave room for doing things on impulse.

A routine that is integral to what you’d do anyway must work best. It needs to fit in with what you’d be likely to do anyway. So it ought to help you, not force you. It should remind you, not order you about. 

You don’t need another parental figure.