Time Management is a complicated problem. You spend the day working on projects; balancing many acts together. Thus, you hardly seem to make any sense of the day flying by. Consequence: by the time I get ready to shut down work mode and switch into the personal mode, I am already drained.
This has had a huge toll for me. I love reading books and listening to music. I also harbour ambitions of writing books and composing music. But owing to my time management constraints, all this has come to a standstill in my life. Besides, I end up spending a major chunk of my day either sitting or sleeping – that has huge health implications.
“I hardly get time to read anymore” is a constant complaint from me. Nowhere is it more evident than on my blog here. I have kept restarting this blog for I don’t know how many years now, each time promising to be more regular. There was a time when the only posts on my blog were about restarting and promises to write more regularly.
Then in April this year, I started playing a little “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” with some of my friends. I am not a big fan of the shooter genre, which is why I didn’t play much of CSGO earlier but with this set of friends, I started playing almost every day. At least 2 hours of CSGO every night – with only exceptions when work would encroach on my time. And yes, I don’t write that lightly.
Because, from not having the time for anything due to work, I started making time for CSGO – about 2-3 hours a night. At least 10-12 hours a week. While I understand how social dynamics work – how any activity is more fun with friends, and how peer pressure makes you more disciplined; amidst all the things that are happening in life at the moment, it was a very curious respite.
Soon the respite gave way to immense guilt. I was still not reading anything. Still not listening to music. Still not writing. But I was playing 2 hours of a game that is not really soul food for me. That is when I have a library full of games I want to play but can’t find the time. Well, long story short, I kept dealing with the guilt, kept denying myself, kept playing CSGO.
Fast forward to the present day. I finally decided to cut short on CSGO and spend more time writing blog posts here. And to do this, I applied the same CSGO with friends logic – I teamed up with my friend, Shayon Pal, to write blog posts together. From now on, every Wednesday night (today being the first one), we will sit together for 2 hours and write a blog post each.
It’s a small exercise in discipline, let’s see how it works out. If it works out, then you already know what I am going to do next. I have been tinkering with the idea of game streaming for some time now, and that’s the next frontier.
So far the experiment seems to be working, this post is an outcome. But before I jinx it for myself, allow me to sign off. Until next Wednesday, that is.
