A little experiment

I don't really speak German.

I know a few words, I can sometimes put a sentence together, I can make myself understood at times and once in a while I'll even understand what other people are telling me. The last part usually involves context quite a lot, and keywords that I know. I can usually piece together all that to figure out what someone's trying to say.

I've been trying, however, to learn this language, through different means, the main one being Duolingo. The little German I speak and understand is mostly the result of repeated lessons on that website, which is a good thing. The bad thing is that I've been inactive on Duolingo for quite a while now.

Once in a while I'll go through a few lessons, and then I'll stop for a week or two, then come back again for a few days, thinking that I'll eventually stick with the learning process. I never do, however, and that is bothering me, because not only do I stagnate when it comes to my learning, but also because there's quite a lot I want to sometimes say to my colleagues that I can't. Even talking to strangers can be useful, and I can't really do it.

I've been trying to figure out exactly what my problem is, why I can't make myself learn a bit of German every day, and although procrastination and laziness might be two possible reasons, there's one more that might actually play a big role - my lack of willpower when having to actively decide to learn German.

The fact that our willpower is limited and that we can only make a certain number of decisions each day is, I hope, fairly common knowledge by now. It's not that once we exceed the "maximum" number of decisions we can make in a day we all of a sudden become unable to make others. But our willpower goes down and with it, our desire or just willingness to choose to do the necessary things when something more fun or relaxing is an option.

In my particular case, I work in two shifts at my job, both of 4 hours, with one break in between of 2 hours and a half. This means that I come to work in the morning and for 4 hours straight I have to work and make decisions all the time. That drains my willpower. Then I come home, exhausted and in no mood to do anything productive, except maybe writing. Then I go back to work again, for 4 hours, making constant decisions and trying to figure out what needs to be done first. Finally, once I am done with all that, I get home once again, exhausted, with another 2 to 3 hours of free time, after which I have to go to sleep.

This schedule forces me to make quite a lot of decisions all the time at work, from what task to approach first, to how certain things need to be done, to what I need to bring to the kitchen or move in our storage room, what food to take first to decorate, what type of decoration to make, what to take out alongside the food, and so on.

All those decisions have to be made constantly and very quickly, otherwise work becomes harder to do and I begin to make mistake after mistake. So, it should be of no surprise to me or anyone that once I get home from work, either in my break or at night, I am in almost no mood to go on Duolingo and learn German. Sure, I can do it if I force myself, but it doesn't come naturally. It's just another decision that I don't want to make.

So, I decided to conduct a little experiment and do something different. Instead of coming home and choosing to go on Duolingo to finish a few lessons, I'll just make it so that my browser opens Duolingo for me automatically, alongside the rest of the websites I use, so it's already available to me there, without me having to actively choose to open it.

I thought of this because of two things: first, the idea that our decision making ability is limited by our willpower and our energy, and so having to actively choose to learn something I don't always like after hours and hours of work isn't something I want to do, and second because I remembered an interesting fact about organ donors and people's decision to donate or not based on their default situation.

What I mean is that there's two types of countries: those in which you need to make an active effort in order to become a donor, because you are not, by default one, and those in which you are by default a donor, and you must make an active effort in order to opt out.

The first type of countries have way less organ donors than the second type of countries, simply because the act of becoming a donor requires more decision making and more energy, something people don't always have after a day, week or month of hard work.

So, I will make my browser open Duolingo by default, so that I won't have to consciously make the decision to learn anything. It will be there, and all I will have to do is to simply learn.

Will this work? I have no idea. But if it does, it will open quite a few doors for me, since I'll try to apply the same concept on other things, such as working in Blender, reading, and so on.

I'll run this little experiment for a week or so, and let you know the result once I'm done.