Surround yourself with media in the language you want to learn and confront yourself with it daily:

* Read beginner-level books (jump over words you don’t know in the beginning as long as you understand the meaning of the sentence).

* Watch series & movies.

* Switch your computer’s system language.

* Switch your phone’s system language.

I’m happy with it on my gaming PC and switched over to it as soon as it became available without any issues. I don’t see any reason why someone would use it on any other machine though, unless working in a company that lives in the Microsoft world.

That being said, I think Microsoft is going in the right direction with their new products (surface pro 4, surface book), so staying on the ball might be worth it.

I feel that each time I stumble upon fitness advice it's just throwing advice around without having any solid basis at all. It seems that it most often has its root at personal experience and sometimes experience from training others, leading to highly conflicting statements depending on the sites you visit/book you read.

While I don't think empirical knowledge is bad all around for this field, it would be very refreshing to have scientific sources and references to back these statements.

Does anyone know a site or book that at least tries to work more scientifically and states sources?

Could you go into more detail on what kind of goals you have in mind? I don’t think your question can be answered on a general basis, but highly depends on what you want to achieve.

Do you want to be better prepared for the companies in your area? Or make your ideas a reality in a fast and convenient way? Is it mobile, web, industrial, research,… development you’re interested in? Depending on your answers, the recommended programming language(s!) will differ.

Do a little experiment. Calm down for 10 seconds and try to think of as little as possible.

Now imagine you get an email, a message on Facebook or any other notification.

How does that make you feel? If you're like me a few month ago, it might stress you out and you might feel an urge to read it. That's when I turned off nearly all (regular calls ring normally) notifications.

It's not an abstinence from technology, but it is indeed a quieter life. Checking everything when it's a good time for me instead of constantly being ripped from my current train of thought by notifications makes all the difference to me.

From what I’ve gathered from BJ Fogg’s “Persuasive Technology” and Stephen Wendel’s “Designing for Behavior Change”, motivation may not play as large a role for changing behavior as you might think it does. While this may sound counter-intuitive, bear with me and take a look at this section in “Designing for Behavior Change”. You can paraphrase this for yourself to “what blocks me from taking an action”. What’s described is the CREATE funnel, an acronym for cue, reaction, evaluation, ability, timing, execute.

Simplified, this might mean for you to set up a reminder at an opportune time (e.g. at the usual time in the evening when you get home; or piggyback on existing behavior like when arriving at work) to do an activity you find worthwhile and which you are able to do easily(!). This should lead to you taking action more often, and which, in my interpretation, is why the micro self-care approach worked for the author.

I’m actually well under-way of building something during my thesis which respects this model. If you want to discuss this approach, or you’re interested in participating, I’d love to get PMs.

The emphasis on infused emotion is interesting for me. I have a childhood memory of lying on the surgery table just before they anaesthetised me, followed by a memory of waking up after surgery when my mother told me that the nurse was named like my sister. :)

I always wondered why I remembered the last part so strongly, especially because I fell back to sleep immediately after. Strong emotion seems like a reasonable explanation.

I like showering in the morning to help me wake up and feel fresh and ready for the day. Also, I usually exercise in the evening, so I’ll shower after that again anyways.

In my opinion, neither morning nor evening showers are exclusively better. It largely depends on your job and daily activities.

I’m on Hubski since yesterday and thought that I’ll give posting a try with an issue that’s been nagging me for quite a while now:

I was surprised to get great advice that fast!

Thank you so much for your detailed and structured answer! Your advise seems very reasonable and I’ll give each of your suggestions a try. :)

You seem to be looking for one big thing to pursue. But maybe that's not how you can reach your full potential. In my experience, very interesting things can happen if people are knowledgeable in multiple fields.

As for friends and family, you could try to leave them I'm the dark about the things you do. While it can be a strong motivator to tell everyone about your goals and ambitions, it seems to put a lot of unnecessary pressure on you.

The fear of telling others that you've stopped pursuing something again might be what's causing you to stop something you actually like or stop you from trying something you'd like.

Thank you for your very motivating story! Any advice that you would like to give on growing a new business? Did you get any advice from your partner’s father that stuck with you over the years?

It’s great that you mention that issue! No, I have no way of getting over it and I’m still struggling with it. It may help to get back to your/create a business model. What I’d like to try, though, is the approach presented in Stephen Wendel in “Designing for Behavior Change: Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics”. My hypotheses is that after the whole team went through that process together, it should result in a clear vision/goal for everyone.

I’m really interested in your thoughts and ideas on the issue, though. What have you tried already and what do you think could help?

I could have used the advise of being a lot more pragmatic, especially with personal projects.

Nowadays, I try to focus my perfectionism on the core value proposition of a project, and write that value proposition down in order to refrain from perceiving some other feature as also belonging to it, and try to be pragmatic in all other areas. Maybe that approach can help you reach your goals faster as well.

You make a very good point about environments. Being in an environment where you perceive tasks as absolutely crucial can lead to higher discipline in order to accomplish them in my opinion.

I’m not sure if it still counts as achieving discipline on one’s own, but making yourself perceive difficult tasks as absolutely necessary or putting yourself in an environment where those tasks are your responsibility might be a pragmatic way to go about that goal.

The hardest thing for me was to not work myself to complete exhaustion. It took me a long time to recognise the importance of weekends and leisure time. It sounds completely obvious, but my ambition drove me to work more and more hours per week (making me less efficient!), and even if it didn’t feel like ”work”, it had its costs.

Since I always worked jobs besides university, and university is basically free where I come from, I had some money laid aside that made it possible for me to keep my mind on the project. When we actually founded our company, and I quit my other job, we directly started with a big (for us at that time) B2B project that helped us fund our own projects.

I asked two friends from university if they wanted to work on a project I was passionate about over summer together. This lead to us founding a little company in which we still work today, about 4 years later. So, in a way, I've created my own job.

What works best for me is going for a run to the fields in my area. There’s a lot of wildlife there, and taking in the sounds and sights in combination with the constancy of the running motion helps me to reach a kind of meditative state that is very relaxing.

If there’s not enough time for that, though, I usually resort to a good book or computer games.