Feel free to add but one thing that i find that really helps me see me reach my goals is charting my progress. I dont know why, but crossing off boxes or colouring them in has the remarkable effect on me... its like i really really want to colour the next box in on my chart. This is usually strengthed by promising myself a treat after the nth box such as "opai figurine and gundamu cos play outfit" *ahem* each to their own i guess.

anyway it seems this is quite a popular motivational tool. So low and behold i present ye with an online version

http://www.joesgoals.com/

(i am not affiliated with the site in anyway)

make it your homepage and add your kanji goals to it....

anyone else got any tips n tricks for those hacking away at it?

I never found such motivational techniques or tools useful for me. If you have the willpower to hold out on getting stuff you want to make it into a reward, you have the willpower to just do whatever it was you're trying to do in the first place. Most people I've known who tried that method never did stick with it for very long. Rewards you directly control aren't huge incentives. It can work if you don't control your own money though (who is married? ).

Good rewards are things you can't directly control. In fact, they are usually the same thing as your goal. For example, trying hard so you can hurry up and graduate on time, get a certification to put on your resume so you can get the job you want, etc. "I'll let myself eat a cookie" doesn't really compare to something like that. Those goals are definitely more long-term than buying an oppai figurine, but if you see progress it's not hard to keep them in sight in my experience.

Personally, my reward is better Japanese comprehension - I don't need anything else. Understanding music lyrics, tv/movie dialogue, or a book that I previously couldn't brings more joy to me than an oppai figurine ever could.

Hm. I've been planning for a while to make a goal-tracking website. My idea is fairly different from that one, though.

I'm hoping to have a working version of my idea by the end of December, barring any hang-ups.

I track my progress with excel document I made.
Every day I add the number of reviewed kanji, failed kanji, and added kanji and it calculates my recall rates.

Works for me!

my main use for charting and stuff like this is for setting up new habits. Though I set out to do something everyday etc its easy to either a)forget that your meant to be doing it b)procrastinate about it c)rationalise why you should watch tv instead of doing it d)think its impossible and will be a waste of time/effort (i.e. quit smoking).

So a chart in the beginning focusses you on getting it done asap everyday. I did that for kanji. First habit was wake up earlier to get my half my reviews done. 2nd habit - use every stinking minute on the bus to work and back creating stories 3rd habit - use lunchbreaks to study 4th habit any time im staring into space at work sneak in some more kanji 5th come home and finish my kanji quota. Id make sure to look at my chart everyday and cross off each thing i accomplished.

As a result I was able to knock out 50 a day and review around 100-200 a day with that and finish the book in 2 months. The charting just helped me focus on what needed to be done and get used to this new intense schedule. After that all those habits were set and like second nature i stopped charting them. I moved onto next habits that needed to be setup i.e. setting up my japanese environment, switch to japanese websites instead of english ones (i still sneak a look at digg...naughty) etc etc... having it all written down and monitored helps me to get it all done.

I guess this sites front review page with the boxes is in a way a motivational tool. I just couldnt bear to let those cards from box 4 slip to red.

A little background... I stopped doing RTK1 before around frame 700. The first time my problem looking back was probably studying too much too fast, and having unrealistic goals, then the reviews overwhelmed me and when my life got busy I couldn't keep up. My eye was always on the finish line. "If I study 100 kanji a day i can finish in 20 days...". (Try doing that with a job & family and see which one you lose first, your job or your family )

A great testimony for Heisig's method is that even though I did no reviews for 5 months it only took 2 days to get back on the horse and continue studying from where I had left off, so that was encouraging.

This time rather than worrying about the kanji I have left to do, I enjoy each one that I learn. The glass is half full rather than half empty. Every day I know more kanji than the day before. That's cool.

My goal is to do all my outstanding reviews, and learn about 21 kanji each day, which is just over 1% of RTK1. I've stuck to this almost 1 month, without straining myself, so its become routine. The cool thing about getting into a good routine that is it becomes like breathing: you don't worry about it, it just happens. When you start thinking about your breathing, it seems like a chore .

After I learn them, I add them to ReTK review stacks but I don't review here. I just like to look at the progress chart and see when I finish lessons. I will push sometimes to finish a lesson, or if there is a lot left in a lesson then I'll try to find a good place to stop, like when a new primitive is introduced.

At the same time, once I'm reasonably happy to have learned the day's kanji I add them to Anki for review. Anki shows various statistics & graphs, that I like. It also has % of cards that are left to study. Since I add at least 21 kanji a day, the percentage goes down at least 1% every day but sometimes more. I have 38% to go now so I'm excited that in about 5 days I will have passed 2/3 of the book. Its nice to have short term goals, as well as long, and have fun doing it.

Cool website. Simple but effective.

This immediately reminded me of the original motivation journalor himself: Benjamin Franklin

I find tracking information such as this not so much a motivator as effective information display. Visual representation asserts a much stronger influence on our habits than our flawed and short memory. I don't think it so much motivates us as tracks where we've been and helps us decide where we need to go.

(a little more in depth explanation here)
(really in depth here)

[ファブリス]

dingomick Wrote:I don't think it so much motivates us as tracks where we've been and helps us decide where we need to go.

I agree. The last few years it's become more and more apparent to me that there are two factors that really stop you from changing from the better : awareness of where you are now (the good and the bad), and memory of what it was before. Because some changes are difficult, they are progressive, but since positive changes often take you to a more "natural" state (say "peace" for example instead of stress), you tend to ignore the changes because it all seems like it should always have been in the first place! And that is a problem because if you can't see what changed and what progress you have made, however small, when difficulties arise you are easily led off track and stop progress. Tracking how good you did at something over time is one way of keeping memory of changes, and also every time you assess the situation it's a way of bringing awareness of the current situation.

Thing is no matter what "track keeping" method I try, I tend to abandon after a while because it's cumbersome. I've been wondering is this is what Tony Buzan is doing with his "mind maps", because he seems to use them for pretty much everything in life. Perhaps he uses mind maps a bit like Benjamin Franklin's plan above, but with the advantage that it's always there.