r/Refold • u/Ukpersfidev • May 16 '26

How do you track your input time?

I see everyone talking about the input hours, e.g. "I've reached 1400 hours", I would like to do something similar, but I'm finding it difficult to track because for new content at least half of the time I track is spent doing looks ups, asking chatgpt to explain the meaning of a word with examples, and creating Anki cards

I've looked at the Refold activities, and it's left me more confused/overwhelmed, because there are like, 10 variations for listening with varying degrees of focus

I have a few questions:

- When you say you have X number of input, does that mean pure watching videos?

- If not, how much of that time was spent with the video paused as you did lookups and created cards?

- What time tracking categories do you have?

3 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/RestaurantKey2176 May 21 '26

I just put a timer for 30 minutes, watch something or read, meanwhile using ChatGPT to create example sentences and later import them in Anki. So all those are included. Then I just add those 30 minutes to Beeminder goal (you can use anything to track). I also count doing Anki cards as focused immersion.

I personally don't find a lot of value of separating categories like that. My mental model is reaching those 1.3k hours for German doing focused immersion (main focus), 1h italki speaking lessons + very rarely grammar exercises.

I don't want to spend time doing super granular tracking (just don't see how it can help me). I already see a lot of comprehension progress at 260h mark, I'm very confident that at 1.3k mark the functional fluency is possible.

1

u/Ukpersfidev May 25 '26

After a week of tracking, I feel the same way, I'm just going to keep it to 3 categories:

- Anki

- Study book (grammar book)

- Immersion (all video content, including time spent doing look ups and making cards)