This is an All Ears English podcast episode 91.
Easy, unexpected ways to improve your English.
Welcome to the All Ears English podcast where you'll finally get real native English conversation and fluency for business and life.
We believe in connection, not perfection when it comes to learning English.
Now here are your hosts Lindsay McMahon, the English adventurer, and Michelle Kaplan, the New York radio girl, coming to you from Boston and New York City, USA.
Hey.
Is everything you are doing really helping you improve your English?
Today, learn how to take an English study inventory and pivot to speak like a native in less time.
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What's going on, Aubrey?
How are you today?
Hey, I've kind of been wasting a little bit of time today.
Oh, no.
I know.
I'm really bad about that.
Sometimes, if I don't have every hour scheduled, I just find myself sometimes doing things that are not as valuable.
I need to prioritize tasks sometimes.
Do you ever do that?
Just find yourself wasting time.
Yeah.
Well, I've seen over the years that my tasks expand to the time I have.
Right.
Yes.
So my tasks expand and then how quickly I get the thing done.
Right.
If I have one thing I need to do and if I have half an hour versus three hours, I'll get it done either way.
Because this stuff comes up, right?
You'll get distracted.
The other things will come up.
You'll start Googling.
You go into like a rabbit hole of finding out.
I went into one today that was like, could Noah actually have lived 600 years?
That's so weird.
And with the Internet, it's even more dangerous now that we can actually go down every single one of those rabbit holes.
I know.
It's so true.
So it's so vital to really prioritize time management.
Yeah.
And that's where we get the Pareto principle, the famous 80-20 principle.
That honestly, this is genius.
It applies to everything.
Yes.
And I love thinking about this.
It's so true.
It's true for business.
It's true for life.
What is the Pareto principle?
It's that 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions.
This is so true that, if you think about what you really do, that's quality work, quality time.
It's probably about 20 of the actual work that you do.
And it's the same for all of us.
Yeah.
And you know we like to.
There's the opposite of this, which is you got to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.
But right, that's a good expression that we have in English guys write that down.
But there's a time for that.
And then there's a time to sit down and look at a list of what you're doing and decide what.
What's the 20 that's getting you the big results?
Because really, time is our most precious resource, right?
It's non-renewable.
And you want to make sure that the time that you have is spent in the most effective way possible.
Yeah, it's so true.
It's just like when you have a business.
Every month you run a PL, a profit and loss, and you look at how much money the business made in every line of business, every product, every service service, everything you do.
And then you usually sit down and you say oh okay, I have three things that are making a minimal amount of money versus this one thing that's really working.
Let's do more of that one thing and forget about the other three.
Exactly.
And if you don't sit down and do that, then you just continue either wasting time focusing on the wrong things,
So it's really important to do that analysis often.
Oh, totally.
And so we want to encourage you guys to make your own sort of P&L for your English.
Right, Aubrey?
How would our listeners do this if they wanted to sit down and write out a P&L?
Yeah.
Yeah, well, you can write out a list of all the things that you are doing to improve your English.
Really be thoughtful about this, right?
Listening to podcasts, watching TV, reading books, meeting with a study partner.
Write down everyone as a line item.
And then look at that list and think which of those are really helping you and which might be a little bit of a time suck, a little bit of a waste of time.
I love that expression, a time suck, right?
Something that's just sucking away your time like a vacuum cleaner.
And think about also when you measure what's really helping.
Don't think about just your speaking.
Think about your listening.
You're reading, you're writing, because something might really be helping your listening and it could later help your speaking.
Like this podcast.
You might not necessarily be speaking better, but you're listening better, which is your first step to speaking better, right?
Yes, exactly.
And you can be really thoughtful about the things on that list.
Like how could I use... the time spent on that more effectively.
Over on the IELTS Energy podcast.
We talk about, like you know, multiple ways.
You can use one podcast.
You can stop and do mimicking or shadowing after about 10 seconds to improve your pronunciation.
You can summarize it at the end, writing as well as speaking out loud.
So you use if you listen to a podcast for 15 minutes, don't just stop there, right?
Really make that time valuable by accessing all the different ways you can learn from that content.
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Yeah, that's a good point, Aubrey.
So it's not necessarily about putting a line through things and dumping things from our list.
It's about okay, this sort of works, but what can I add to this to really make it work and put it in that 20?
That gets me the 80 right.
Is that what you mean?
Yes, exactly.
Right.
It's not all about none of this is useful.
Cross it off.
How can I make it more valuable?
If I'm going to spend 15 minutes listening to a podcast, I want to really maximize my learning from that.
Love it.
So here's a question.
If we're going to do this inventory, if our listeners are going to take an inventory or take a PL of their business of learning English right.
How often should they do it?
What do you think?
How often should we do this?
Well, I would say at the very minimum monthly, but I don't think it would hurt to do it weekly.
At the end of a week, review what you did that week, what was really effective, and that's going to just take a couple of minutes.
Whereas at the end of a month it would be hard to remember what I did the first week of that month, right?
Yeah.
I would envision, if you do it, at the end of the week it'll be very fresh in your mind exactly what you spent time on that week.
And then you'll have a better idea of how effective was that activity.
So yeah, actually, now that I've talked it through, I would definitely say at least weekly.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I mean, I'd love to know what our listeners end up deciding on here, right?
So guys, you know, I want to let our listeners know we are on the socials, aren't we, Aubrey?
We are on all the socials.
And that would be a great place to share with us what you guys eliminated, what you changed, what you kept, wouldn't it?
Yes, exactly.
We're always posting new vocab and ways to use it on every... social media platform.
And we love when you guys comment, engage with us and let us know there, right?
What if you find a podcast that's amazing and helpful?
Share it there for the rest of our audience, right?
All of our other listeners.
And we want to know to let us know what's working for you.
Yeah.
So we're on Instagram.
If you're in China, we're on WeChat.
Okay.
We are on TikTok.
We're on Facebook.
We're on Twitter.
We're in all the places, Aubrey.
So guys, whatever your favorite channel is, you can check us out, watch our videos.
It's a really fun place for you to leave a comment and engage with us, connect with us.
Okay, exactly.
And then you guys do.
After you do this inventory, you will want to focus, think about the time right and give more time to those actions or activities that are very useful.
You felt like, okay, that I can see how that helped me.
I learned vocabulary there and was able to use it.
So you could devote a little more time there and then eliminate anything that you definitely feel is not helping you learn.
Right.
And before you know it, you're going to be fluent a lot faster by spending less time.
It's like we get the results and we spend less time wasting time.
It's so good.
I love it.
Yes, exactly right.
Don't get stuck in a rut with your daily routine.
Switch things up.
Make sure that you are very aware that everything you're doing is useful?
Is time well spent?
Then you'll feel confident that you're getting the most out of the time you have to spend on language learning.
Yes, this is so good.
It is really easy to get stuck in a rut with anything.
We get habits, we get routines, we get comfortable, we kind of sink into them.
And then, but we have to ask ourselves, why are we doing these things?
Right?
That's so important.
That's huge.
Okay.
This has been really good, Aubrey.
I'm going to go make my language learning P&L.
Yes, me too.
See what I'm doing here or not doing.
Bye.
And all right.
Thanks for hanging out on the mic.
I'll see you in the next episode.
All right.
See ya.
Okay.
Bye.
Thanks for listening to All Ears English and if you believe in connection, not perfection, follow our show wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you don't miss anything.
See you next time.
