{"id":23481,"date":"2019-02-12T00:01:53","date_gmt":"2019-02-11T13:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/?p=23481"},"modified":"2019-02-11T00:51:08","modified_gmt":"2019-02-10T13:51:08","slug":"like-sand-through-the-fingers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/like-sand-through-the-fingers\/","title":{"rendered":"Like sand through the fingers: Time waste and Campaign Prep"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image courtesy Pixabay.com\/annca<\/p><\/div>\n

\nI’m writing and uploading this week’s article in advance because right in the middle of the time when I’m supposed<\/em> to be writing, I have a medical treatment scheduled.<\/p>\n

This article isn’t my first choice to fill the breach – I planned to present something on politics within RPG settings- but it bogged down, mostly because I started doing all the things that I said I wasn’t going to do within it; despite my spending most of Saturday on it, there was no way that it was going to be finished.<\/p>\n

I’ve been holding on to the article below for quite a while, actually. It was written eight or nine years ago and held to be modified into the introduction of a book series that Johnn and I were planning at the time.<\/p>\n

Well, the book series didn’t happen. And the subject seems appropriate given the circumstances described above. Enjoy.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s always a little annoying when people tell me they don’t have time to do things. There are only a couple of simple rules to follow in order to have more than enough time.<\/p>\n

Rule 1<\/h3>\n

The first rule is time management. When I take on a new task, I work out how much time it is likely to consume in total (or in a given period of time, for an ongoing task). Then I look at how much free time I have to devote to the task. Dividing one by another tells me whether or not I can commit to the task, and how far in advance I need to start work in order to have it finished in time.<\/p>\n

Rule 2<\/h3>\n

The second rule is to multitask whenever possible. While watching the TV, I will have my computer up and running so that I can write during the ad breaks. On Australian TV, that generally means that 12 minutes an hour can be spent on something while ostensibly doing something else – but because I’m able to devote a little thought to the writing task, and work out more or less what I am going to write during the next ad break before I actually get there, this work is actually done at a higher efficiency standard than would be the case if I were just doing nothing else. I think faster than I can type, so let’s say that this gives me an extra 15 minutes of time in each hour.<\/p>\n

Rule 3<\/h3>\n

The third and most important rule is to do a little each day, at each opportunity.<\/p>\n

If I can devote 30 minutes a day to something – which I can achieve by watching 2 hours of TV a day! – that’s 3 1\/2 hours a week spent on it. Since there are roughly 52 weeks in a year, that comes to 182 hours a year, equivalent to more than 4 1\/2 weeks of working a 40-hour week on the task!<\/p>\n

If I can sneak an extra hour a week into my schedule, that alone is worth 52 hours a year, or more than a week of normal time spent working exclusively on a project.<\/p>\n

Game Prep Scheduling<\/h3>\n

So let’s look at Game Prep. I spend more time – an average of 6 hours a week – on Game prep – than I do on most other specific activities. In general, that’s one 3-hour block of time (an evening) and 6 half-hour blocks (each other day) – the 30 minutes on game day being last minute revision. So let’s call it 5 1\/2 hours a week. If I work a 40 hour week, spend 2 1\/2 hours a day on other things, sleep 9 hours every night, spent 6 hours a week actually playing, and do nothing else, how many campaigns could I actually (in theory) run?<\/p>\n

Well, the total cost in time of running a game is 11 1\/2 hours\/week, including actual playing time. Work is 40 hours\/week, sleep adds up to 63 hours, and miscellany consumes 17.5 hours\/week. Each week is 24×7=168 hours – so that’s 168 – 40 – 68 – 17.5 hours of time available for gaming, or 42.5 hours. Divide that by 11.5 and you get 3.7 campaigns. So I could run one game on Friday Night, one on Saturday, and one on Sunday, and still have a little time left over each day – while matching every hour of play time with an equal hour of game prep.<\/p>\n

That requires campaign prep while traveling to work, and while eating, and – well – while doing just about anything else. So it’s a fairly extreme example.<\/p>\n

Assumption Validity Breakdown<\/h3>\n

Most people don’t need 9 hours of sleep, but they do shower and talk to friends and family on the phone, and so on – activities which almost certainly add up to an hour a day, possibly more. So as rules of thumb go, this is not a bad one.<\/p>\n

Three-point-seven games a week. If you take up another activity – perhaps you like going out to the movies once a week, or going to a restaurant, or whatever – you might have to drop one. If you have kids, you might have to drop another 1-point-6 – that is the equivalent of more than 2\u00bd hours each and every day spent doing nothing but being with the kids, something most families don’t even come close to! That STILL leaves time to run 1 game a week, matching game prep and playing time hour for hour!<\/p>\n

What most people mean when they say they don’t have enough time is that they don’t have enough time available in a contiguous block – they can’t spend 6 hours at a stretch on the game. That’s fine – make it an afternoon, and play for 3 hours. It also cuts your prep time in half, from 6 to 3 hours – half an hour a day on the days you aren’t playing.<\/p>\n

Lost Time<\/h3>\n

And the other thing that most people will say when they claim not to have enough time is that they don’t know where the time goes. Well, I do: If you waste 5 minutes an hour for the 16 hours a day that most people are awake, that’s 80 minutes a day, or 9 1\/3 hours each week, or about 485 hours a year. that’s 12 working weeks at 40-hours-a-week! Twelve Working Weeks a Year! How much could you do with Twelve extra working weeks each year!? Well, run an extra 4.5-hour-a-week playing time campaign, for a start…<\/p>\n

The good news is that the power of geometric expansion also comes to your rescue on the other side of the coin. If you can find ways to waste just 2 minutes less each hour<\/em> – by being better organized, or better prepared – that’s 194 hours a year more in your pocket, or almost an extra 5 working weeks of free time!<\/p>\n

Practical Solutions<\/h3>\n

So, let’s look for a few practical ways to find you two minutes an hour over the course of a 16-hour day.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Plan things. I try to plan everything – from what I’ll watch on TV and when, to when I’ll do grocery shopping and how long it should take and what I want to buy. I’ll even include an allowance for treats and specials so that if something catches my eye, I don’t have to think about it, just add it to the shopping cart. This also saves me money in the long run – my last shop was A$252, but I had A$290 budgeted for it. That $38 isn’t a lot, but it’s WAY more than my usual disposable income – and will add up to about A$440 if perpetuated over a year. Not enough for a new refridgerator should I need one, but enough for a new 29-inch TV with money left over should one be needed, to put that into perspective. In terms of time, this has to save me at least 5 minutes a day, more probably ten.\n<\/li>\n
  2. Don’t waste time deciding what to eat at mealtimes – have a list prepared in advance for the week. That saves me two minutes a meal, or eight minutes a day (I’m on a four-meal-a-day diet regimen). It might only save you six minutes a day, though.\n<\/li>\n
  3. Take regular breaks from whatever you’re doing – 5 minutes an hour is a reasonable minimum. Then think about what you have to do in the next hour during that break – break it down, plan how to use your time, etc. While this won’t help if you’re serving customers all day, because your time is responsive to their demands, in most lines of work the savings through efficiency will be more than double the time lost. But, let’s be pessimistic and say that only saves you 2.5 minutes per working hour, and that since you’re obligated to stay at work from time X to time Y each day, that half of that<\/em> gets chewed up by the clock. That’s still 1.25 minutes an hour for 8 hours, or 10 minutes a day.\n<\/li>\n
  4. If you use PT to get to work, let’s talk about what you do while waiting for the bus or train, or travelling on it. If you can do that for 5 minutes less per trip, and spend that time thinking about your game and coming up with ideas for your next session or next adventure, then invest 2 minutes at the end of it making some quick reminder notes, that’s 10 minutes per day (less 4 minutes) equals 6 minutes a day. And your prep will be more efficient when you get to it, which has to be worth at least another couple of minutes per prep hour, or a minute a day.\n<\/li>\n
  5. Do you read books? Silly question for most people reading this, I guess. So here’s a harder one: do you wait until you’ve finished your current book before deciding what to read next? Blair does. If he reads three books a week, and takes five minutes each time for this selection, that’s 15 minutes a week. If, instead, he planned his entire week’s reading at once, i.e. what his next three books were going to be, that’s maybe an eight minute task – leaving 7 minutes a week gained, or a minute per day. (If it takes him ten minutes instead of five, and three-books was a 12-minute task, that’s 18 minutes a week saved, or about 2.5 minutes a day).\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Let’s run some totals: 5+6+10+6+1+1 = 29 minutes a day, a shade under the 32-minute target. 10+8+10+6+1+2.5 = 37.5 minutes a day. Likely average: 33 minutes a day or so. Target achieved.<\/p>\n

    These are trivial changes to make, with just a little effort, and I’ve done my best to be conservative in estimating time savings. These measures could easily save double or triple these conservative estimates – but I’m assuming that some people will drive to work and those savings won’t be applicable to them, so the average should come out about right.<\/p>\n

    So don’t tell me you don’t have the time, unless you mean it. Tell me you can’t manage your time, or that interrupted routines make planning impossible, or that your time is already over-committed to something to which you give a higher priority: those I can believe, and respect. Those are what I mean when I say I don’t have the time.<\/p>\n

    \n

    Health Considerations<\/h3>\n

    One additional impacting factor that I didn’t take into account in the preceding article is health. There was a time, about a decade ago, when I could easily do twice as much in a week as I do now, if not three or four times as much. At one point, I was able to invest 80 hours a week into game prep and rules writing, on top of a 40-hour a week job and watching at least 4 hrs of TV a day!<\/p>\n

    The losses are in little bits here and there – things that I would previously have categorized as wasted time. The need to get up and walk around for a minute or so, regularly. Taking a little longer to get from task A to task B. Not being able to walk as fast or as far. Struggling to do basic things at times like washing clothes and cooking a meal or even making a sandwich. Sleep Disruptions and consequent mental fog.<\/p>\n

    I rarely if ever say it, but sometimes when I say I don’t have the time these days, I mean that I don’t have the health.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’m writing and uploading this week’s article in advance because right in the middle of the time when I’m supposed to be writing, I have a medical treatment scheduled. This article isn’t my first choice to fill the breach – I planned to present something on politics within RPG settings- but it bogged down, mostly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29,67,70,74,91],"tags":[100,108,155,218,136,331],"series":[],"class_list":["post-23481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-management","category-dnd","category-gm-ing","category-mike","category-plans-and-prep","tag-adventure-prep","tag-campaigns","tag-dd","tag-pathfinder","tag-philosophy","tag-time"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1toiD-66J","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23481"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23481"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23485,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23481\/revisions\/23485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23481"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=23481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}