I recently had someone tell me that their problem with learning English was ‘time’. Not having enough time is often given as a reason for not doing things, not just language learning but lots of things that we say we would like to do. Of course, we all have the same amount of time; twenty-four hours each day. So how is it that some people seem to have more time available than other people? What’s the solution to the time problem?
The solution is to decide what we want to do with the time we have. How do we want to spend our twenty-four hours each day?
Life is full of distractions and one of the biggest challenges we face is paying attention to anything for even a short period of time. Being conscious of distractions will help us to avoid them and to refocus on the task in hand. This will help us to ‘find the time’ for some small tasks that can make a big difference, like learning a language. I don’t mean sitting down and studying for hours. I mean learning a new, useful phrase. Learning a phrase can take just a few minutes and if we do this for a few minutes on a regular and frequent basis then we can quickly develop language skills, even without studying grammar rules which can often be confusing anyway.
The little things that we do every day are the things that make a big difference. We just have to pay more attention to what we’re doing and, perhaps, less attention to the ‘beep-beep’ interruptions that steal our time from us.