[T-946] Experiment: what if I ignore Refold advice and broaden my immersion sources?

Dear Rine,

Today I got close to my target of one hour of immersion time:

However, I must admit that my attention drifted. A few times I wandered off to check my Instagram, if only briefly.

The urge to check instagram and tabloid newspaper headlines is an excellent indicator. It means that my interest in whatever I am doing at that moment fell below some base-line level.

I know active immersion is supposed to be intense. But from all we know reading the works of Woz and like-minded thinkers, intense doesn’t mean boring. In fact it should mean just the opposite.

Boredom is a signal that learning isn’t taking place.

This is not to say that my daily immersion is some kind of torture session I barely slog through. Far from it. I’m not constantly battling the urge to check Instagram. It happens only a few times throughout the session.

All this means is that there’s an opportunity. If I figure out how to make these sessions more engaging, I will be learning more from each one.

The obvious thing to do is to try watching another TV show.

But I was thinking, why should I limit myself to one show?

Even when I’m watching Netflix in English, I have to resist the urge to switch from one movie to another. My brain yearns to channel surf.

So here’s the hypothesis I want to test:

Switching between multiple immersion sources makes immersion more fun which makes learning more effective, in the same way incremental reading is more engagin than sequential reading of books one by one.

I’ll start the test tomorrow. The key indicators to monitor are:

1. Total sentences mined in session.
2. Total number of times I felt the urge to open instagram.

Let’s see what happens!

P.S. I don’t have a spell checker now that I’m writing in org-mode. I just didn’t get to figuring it out. So please tolerate a typo here and there until I get everyting in order.