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1. Start Small: Micro Habits
   1. If you don’t have an existing language-learning habit to build on, focus on building a tiny habit. To do this, focus on achieving your “daily minimum.” Your daily minimum is the minimum amount of study and immersion that you think is reasonable for you to accomplish (even on a busy day when language learning is the last thing you want to do).
   2. Techniques and tools: Daily Minimums
2. Be Patient
   1. It takes about 6 weeks to solidify a new habit and 12 weeks to make it automatic. If you don’t have your daily habit established yet, set very low, achievable goals for the first 6 weeks and make sure you hit them every day. Once your habit is solid, you can then consider increasing the intensity/quantity (how much time you study/immerse for each day).
   2. Techniques and tools: Basic habit formation theory
3. Start Tracking Your Routine
   1. If you’re not tracking your routine, you aren’t self-aware. If you aren’t aware of your behavior, you can’t fix problems that arise.
   2. It’s crucial to understand what you’re doing, what's going well, and what's going wrong so you can fix problems before they completely derail your routine.
   3. During the week you should track:
      1. Whether you complete your daily minimums with a Habit Tracker app
      2. Your time spent studying or immersing with Toggl
      3. How you feel about your daily routine throughout the week. You can record this anywhere that works for you. You want to track how much you enjoyed specific activities, whether you had more or less energy for certain activities than you expected, and so on.
   4. Tech & tools: Habit Tracker app, Toggl, your favorite note-taking app or pen & paper.
4. Review Weekly
   1. During the week, you put your head down and focus on executing your plan.
   2. Once a week though, you need to lift your head up to see how things are going and adjust your routine, if necessary.
   3. Set aside time every week to do your weekly reflection. Review the previous week and look for opportunities to improve.
   4. Tech & tools: Advanced Weekly Reflection and Planning worksheet
5. Identify Opportunities
   1. Once you've reviewed your previous week, you’ll have the information you need to make the necessary adjustments to your learning routine.
   2. Choose your focus for the next week:
      1. Consistency: Build or solidify habits
      2. Quantity: increase the amount of time per day
      3. Quality: Change activities or content for more effective learning
   3. Decide how you’re going to improve your focus
   4. Tech & tools: Advanced Weekly Reflection and Planning worksheet
6. Plan The Next Week
   1. Now that you know what you want to do, decide how and when you’re going to do it.
      1. How are you actually going to put those changes into practice this coming week?
      2. Schedule exactly when and how you plan to do each activity. Try to make all the decisions now so you don’t have to decide during the week.
   2. Tech & tools: Advanced Weekly Reflection and Planning worksheet
7. Plan to Adapt
   1. “Plans don’t survive first contact with the enemy” - Winston Churchill
   2. It’s normal for things to not go as expected. Changing your plan is okay.
   3. Advice
      1. When things go south, fall back to your daily minimums. Avoid zero-days.
      2. When making changes to your plan midweek, do so intentionally. Don’t flop around like a fish gasping for air.