Hi, I'm Vanessa from SpeakEnglishWithVanessa.com.
Do you not have enough time in the day to study English?
Let's talk about it.
You're busy.
I'm busy.
Let's get right to the point.
How can you be more productive and find time to study English?
This is one of the most common excuses I hear from English students.
I want to be fluent in English, but I just don't have enough time.
Don't worry.
Me too.
I have a two and a half year old son, a two month old son.
I run an online English business including making these lessons for you, and I still
try to find time to spend time with my husband and relax a little bit for myself.
It's tough to be productive and find time in a busy day.
Time is a valuable resource, but I have some tough love for you.
If you really want to do something, you will find time to do it, but how?
Well today, I want to give you my top three tips to help you find time to study English.
This lesson is short and sweet because I imagine if you clicked on it, you don't have that
much time.
So let's get started with tip number one.
Tip number one, track your daily schedule.
You might know that I had my second son a couple months ago in March, and because I
work for myself as an online English teacher, I wasn't given a maternity leave by a company.
I had to create my own maternity leave and that means that I needed to create materials
in advance, YouTube videos in advance, course lessons in advance and have it prepared so
that I could take a little break after my son was born.
With my first son, it was no problem to create material in advance because I had all the
time in the world, but when you have another kid, it's really difficult to find time to
create two months, three months, four months, five, six months of material in advance.
How did I do this?
Well, the only way to be successful is to create a plan.
So each month I decided what I wanted to accomplish during that entire month and then each week
I decided what I wanted to do each week, and then each day I decided what I wanted to do
each day.
When I broke it down into those small sections, scheduling every part of the day, tracking
what I was going to do.
Also scheduling free time, scheduling time to be with my two-year-old, the things that
I enjoy, I was pretty surprised.
When I looked at my daily schedule, I had enough time.
I was surprised that I actually had enough time because I was working two or three times
the normal amount that I usually do, but I had time in my schedule to do all of the things
I wanted when I specifically tracked my time.
I tell you this personal story because maybe you felt like I did.
There's just too much going on.
It's difficult to balance a work and a home life, but when you track your day and try
to figure out what works best for you in a schedule, you'll realize that you probably
have enough time to study English.
For me, I broke my day into some main sections and these main sections are going to be different
for you.
For me, they were nine to 12, one to three when my son is resting or taking a nap, three
to five and then nighttime after he was asleep.
By realistically looking at each day, I realized how much time I actually had.
For some of those periods of time, I was just playing with my son or going to the gym.
These were things that I wanted to do, but when I tracked my day, I realized I had enough
time for what I needed to do and also what I wanted to do.
You can use a Google calendar and block off your day.
This is what mine looked like, but of course yours is going to look different.
Yours might be get ready, commute, work, lunch, work, commute, see family, eat dinner, evening,
sleep.
It's probably not possible or a good idea to study English while you're at work, but
now you can visually see your day, which leads us to tip number two.
Tip number two is to integrate English into your daily habits.
Now that you know what your daily schedule looks like, how can you fit English into those
different sections?
Let's take a look at the Google calendar again.
If you're like me, when you're getting ready for the day, you're kind of like a zombie
and your brain is not ready for something new like English.
But maybe while you're in the car or on the train commuting to work, this could be a great
time to listen to an English podcast or maybe make a playlist of some English songs that
you like and listen to those songs or listen to a short clip from an audio book in English.
If you're part of an English course like my course, the Fearless Fluency Club, which you
can learn more about up here.
You could download the MP3 version of all of the lessons and listen to it while you're
in the car, or maybe you could talk with another member in the evenings when your home is quiet.
Spend 15 minutes just chatting together in English.
Here's some other ways that you can just easily integrate English into your daily habits,
the things that you're already doing in life.
You could make a grocery list or a to do list in English.
Change your phone's language to English.
You could talk about your daily actions as you're doing them.
I'm putting the sweater over my dress shirt.
These types of daily explanations are great for using English.
If you need to expand your vocabulary to have the words to talk about your daily life, you
can check out this video that I made up here.
It might seem like you're only spending 15 to 20 minutes with English in a sitting.
In a sitting means at one time, but when you have a busy life, you got to do what you got
to do.
This is a common saying that means it's not ideal, but it's the only thing that's going
to work for you.
You've got to do what you got to do, so try to fit English into daily habits instead of
trying to find new time for English.
And this leads us to tip number three, study English in bite sized chunks.
You might be tempted to think, isn't it better if I study for two hours at one time?
Yes, two hours is better for giving your brain a chance to focus, but we have to be realistic,
right?
If you don't have two hours, then you got to use the time that you have.
Bite sized chunks means short, easily finished sections of time.
So if you have a 15 minute commute to your work, well, you can download a 15 minute English
podcast and complete that full podcast during your commute.
Don't feel discouraged if you can't find two solid hours to study English every day.
There's going to probably be a time in your life when you do have two hours, but if it's
not today, that's all right.
Just use what you have.
YouTube videos are a great way to learn English in bite sized chunks because most videos are
less than 20 minutes.
Or you could have a conversation with a speaking partner for just 10 to 15 minutes at a time.
You don't need to spend 30 minutes or one hour talking together.
You could plan to just talk for 10 to 15 minutes before your day gets started, have a quick
chat and then go on with the rest of your day.
You've already accomplished something in a bite sized chunk.
Some of us want to be productive 24/7 but it's not realistic to be productive 24 hours
in a day.
So when you start seeing the time that you have in your day and you can track your time,
you integrate English into your daily habits and you study English in bite sized chunks,
you'll really start to make progress and you'll feel better that you are actually being productive
in this short time that you have.
And now I have a question for you.
When do you study English?
When are you watching this video?
Is it early in the morning and before all of your household wakes up?
Is it during your commute?
Is it during your lunch break?
Or maybe after everyone's fallen asleep and your house is quiet?
Let me know in the comments and I'll see you again next Friday for a new lesson here on
my YouTube channel.
Bye.
The next step is to download my free e-book, Five steps to becoming a confident English
speaker.
You'll learn what you need to do to speak confidently and fluently.
Don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel for more free lessons.
Thanks so much.