HOW TO: Manage your study time with Asana

HOW TO: Manage your study time with Asana

Read time: 4 minutes


The daily grind, get up, go to work, come home, relax, go to bed.  Where does study time fit in? The answer: schedule your study time.

Sounds scary, monotonous and just a bit like you’re still in the office, right?  Well if you picture the end goal of improving your Japanese a little bit every day, time well spent on planning your study time will give you that daily morale boost to push your studies along nicely 🙂

With Asana you can create projects such as Japanese learning levels – think JLPT N5 – N1, punch in grammar points as ‘tasks’, then assign deadlines to those grammar points

Asana

You may have heard of or seen, or even use Asana at your workplace since it is designed to be a fully fledged project management tool.  But did you know you can use the basic functionality on their free account price tier? That means you can create projects such as Japanese learning levels – think JLPT N5 – N1, punch in grammar points as ‘tasks’, assign deadlines to those grammar points, and basically chart your learning progress on your very own study calendar. Whoa!

Side note: I am not affiliated with Asana, just a devotee.

Task list view

Asana task list view

Here I’ve set up a project called ‘Japanese JLPT N4’, and using my textbook materials I’ve added a task for every grammar point at N4 level.  Then I’ve allocated each grammar point task a day, denoting the date on which I intend to begin studying it.

The usefulness of this view is manifold:

  • I can see at a glance how I’m progressing through this level
  • I keep on top of my daily study routine
  • I feel great when I study more grammar than allocated for the day and see that I’m pushing ahead of schedule
  • I can see how far I’ve got to go before I reach the end (and at the leisurely rate of 2 grammar points per day, 5 days per week, we’re talking a maximum of just over 2 months, amazing!)

Task selected view

asana-task-selected-view

Now here’s where we get our hands really dirty by actually delving into each grammar point task.  As I study a grammar point (on the allocated date of course), I enter details about what the grammar point means, conjugations and how to use it, again gleaning info from textbook materials.  What this means is Asana becomes an all in one study environment!

Think when you’re taking a lunch break at school or at work – you open the Asana app or load up the web app, find yesterday’s grammar points and review what you’ve learnt!

Asana app

Beautiful! 😀

Calendar view

asana-calendar-view

And now for the pièce de résistance.

What would a project management tool be without a calendar? Provided you’ve set up your tasks and allocated them to a date, the calendar just works, and what a wonderful way to chart your progress.  At a glance I can see that if today is the 7th of the month, I’ve already studied 7 days worth of material, and that just feels great 🙂

The next step would be to set up another project for vocabulary for example, listing a number of words for each day and sticking to your targets.  The key is, anything you need to study should be somewhere in some project that will be broken down into scheduled days 🙂

So what are you waiting for?  If managing your studies sounds boring and difficult, trust me with Asana.  It will make your studies more focussed, you won’t waste time going over material you already know, and most importantly you’ll feel like you’re in control of your learning 🙂

Oh, and did I mention it’s free? FREE!

Sign up here https://asana.com/ 


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