Habits

Listening to Cal Newport interviewed on a recent podcast, something he said resonated. I’m probably paraphrasing, but a key piece of advice was: “Delete any app that makes money off your attention.”

Seems like really good advice. A smartphone is a collection of tools embedded in a tool. Use it like a tool and not an entertainment device and you’ll be find. For a while, in an effort to pry myself loose from the psychic hold of the smartphone I went back to using some kind of old flip phone. But I realized that I went too far. So much of our communication is via text now, it was really hard to communicate. But now, though I’m back to using a smartphone, I find that I’m much more careful about what I install on it:

This month I worked very hard on re-establishing some important habits, including habit-tracking, that had lapsed after some setbacks. The stats are a little odd because I didn’t start tracking everything until sometime well into the month.

Habits

Russian

In an effort to complete the 10,000 word Brown Russian vocabulary list by the end of May 2020, I need to do at least 15 words a day. This month, I logged 395 new Russian words in Anki. These words are often, but not always accompanied by example sentences that I study in a separate deck. This month, I added an additional 348 new sentences and 83 new grammar cards.