I’ve been spending a bit of time improving the balance of my life recently with a number of changes and one thing I find that some mornings my mind is sharp while other mornings it isn’t.
Do people find it’s better to do lessons/study in the morning before reviews as it gets their mind firing and ready? Is there any benefit?
Additionally. Before you start study/reviews, is there something you find helps get your mind started and prepared in the morning that when you don’t expose yourself to, your mind isn’t as ready and focused?
In future I plan to go for a run in the morning but still training on my core fitness and last time I ran on concrete and not the treadmill I had to take a few weeks off running from knee injury.
From my experience, it doesn’t matter too much, either way I usually get a couple wrong at least once or a few times before I start getting something right. With that being said, I’ve noticed that doing lessons before I sleep, like not ready for bed super tired, but pretty soon before I sleep while still having energy and ready to learn, I wake up with the knowledge more resonated and tend to get stuff correctly, I also have noticed that having more energy and sleep helps with these things too.
That’s a great question, I’d like to know about other people’s routines too.
I always do lessons first thing in the morning (before work and before going to the gym) so that I don’t miss the subsequent 4h+8h apprentice review windows. I’ve tried doing reviews first, but as their number increased, I sometimes ended up being distracted and delaying my lessons in the end. Probably worth mentioning that I’m doing 15 lessons a day, so not a speedrunner type of guy, and I clear my review queue every day.
As for “getting my mind started”, well, drinking coffee while doing WK lessons works just fine, it seems. I’ve noticed that I perform slightly worse if I try to do reviews right after a gym session, actually.
So I’ve spent the past 8 months roughly laying out a routine for the day that focuses on Sleep, Diet, and Exercise. I’d go into the science but I don’t want to bore people and critical hit them with massive paragraphs!
My morning routine is always the same before I start the day. Wake at 4AM, prep and cook breakfast then eat it. Roughly 5AM I go for my walk. Once I get home, shower, brush teeth and by that time it’s roughly 20 to 6. I would then start my reviews and once they’re done I would start my lessons. I only do 7 lessons a day, I also do Genki 1 lessons. For the moment, my reviews are not high, about 50 in the morning so it’s not overwhelming with the amount of focus and time I must invest in one sitting.
I’ve always been one to push towards maximising my efficiency and optimising everything. I think that’s the perfectionist in me which comes from my diagnosed generalised anxiety. This is probably a case of me over thinking it and maybe just doing what I find comfortable will always be better than what is ‘correct’. I finished Genki lessons just now and I actually do feel more confident. I guess I see reviews more like a test and lessons being more of following and repetition. I get stimulated from the lesson without over loading my mind by trying to force myself to remember yesterday or X amount of time ago.