I’ve been busy with schoolwork lately. Even though everything is going fine, it’s stressful for me.
When I’m stressed, it’s hard to make myself do anything requiring self-discipline. That doesn’t mean I can’t do anything, though. Many useful things are more about habit and enjoyment than effort and discipline.
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I keep my list of future post ideas and add snippets of writing when I can. I even drafted another blog post, but haven’t written it up.
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My list of interesting links has been steadily building in length, ready to be transferred to the cardfile when I feel like devoting some time to it.
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I have begun to engage with learning Chinese again, after a year away. I’m not studying actively, but I watch ‘comprehensible input’ videos, put on vlogs and music for ‘immersion’, and have picked up a few bits and pieces. I copy song titles into my diary (people call this ‘shadowing’), and challenge myself to write various characters and form sentences. And I started keeping a vocabulary list, which I can transfer to Anki when I am actively studying again.
That’s right, I am building backlogs. I try to view this not as a load of work for the future me, but a useful resource.
For example, since I enjoyed writing my post about stationery so much, I also decided to start a whole stationery blog. At the moment, it’s easy to write for this blog because I have been passively building a backlog of thoughts on stationery for all these years, when I just used my pens and paper without talking about them.
I’m not the kind of person who can continue doing the same things year-round. I used to think that made me fickle, until I realised that I always return to the activities I really care about, often with a new attitude or resources at hand. The off-season does not mean you’re doing nothing, it means a chance to build the backlogs.