Trios

Day three went well, not as well as yesterday I don’t think, but okay. Again I worked from 6am until just after lunch, I went for my first run, but not my second. My afternoon was spent building armour with a friend for the Medieval Tournament this weekend. So I think it was a fair trade really, I strung the cardboard bow I had made and cut a few stickers we then put around the local shopping mall. Then after he left I found I had half an hour before starting to write my blog, so I logged half an hour.

Previous day total	1:2	1:1	2:1	Game time	Current Game time
217min || 3hr 37min	44	6	7	-35	239min || 3hr 59min

Today wasn't a bad day really, I'm still not doing anything any web design and I've racked up four hours of game time already, maybe my run is giving me too much game time. I think I might re-evaluate every Monday.

Also, I might not be able to incorporate WoW back into my life, it turns out that I definitely have a speed capable of playing using my phone, but I don't think my data cap will hold through to the end of the month seeing I only have 3 gig. Turns out day one cost me ~300mb of downloads + the 200mb I needed to finish patching. Though I think I've found which part of the game I would like to play.

Now this is more like it

Today went much better, I actually stuck to my daily plan and I can see it working quite well. I had work at 6am this morning so that was a nice and early wake up. I didn’t finish until 1.30 which sort of pushed my running schedule into the afternoon, there was about five hours before I went for my night run. I ran for 20 minutes and about 2.1 kilometres each session, I’m really starting to enjoy running. Otherwise I did some cleaning today and racked up a half hour of game time then helped cook dinner for another 10 minutes, so including half of the time its taking me to write this I should end up with a bit of extra time!

Now to minus my game time for today, I logged an hour and 24 minutes of game time today which is 84 minutes, putting me out on top! While I was playing today I just unlocked the molten front dailies and it got me wonder what exactly I want to do in WoW none of my PVP bud’s were on and I wanted to go for my run so I couldn’t run a dungeon. Leaves me in an awkward position of what I want to play for me. I’ll have to put some more thought into it. So here’s my update.

Previous day total	1:2	1:1	2:1	Game time	Current Game time
155min || 2hr 35min	84	47	15	-84	217min || 3hr 37min

Got to do some dailies and it only cost me my running time for the day. I think this could work out well.

In other news, I have a mate who is experimenting with building iOS applications, I asked if he would consider building me a timer with everything I need as practice, so who knows, I might have a better way of keeping these times sometime over the next couple of weeks.

Day one

Well... This is embarrassing, the first day of trying to healthily incorporate WoW into my life I completely cave and play all afternoon. Not quite the right thing to do. It was awesome catching up with everyone though, got to PVP with the RL friends and run a heroic with my guild. Was really nice. Now I just have to get back into the right attitude and know when to put the game down, tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow I will just take it easy and make sure I stick to my plan.

I didn’t track my WoW hours today, however I did track the other time spent doing the right thing. I managed a 20min run today and spent an hour and a half on stuff for my birthday... Sooo... yeah I managed to rack up a little bit of time. So here’s the table of what my minutes look like now.

Previous day total	1:2	1:1	2:1	Minus game time	Current Game time
0	40	115	0	0	155min || 2hr 35min

So I'm writing today off saying my game hours don't count for just today. Tomorrow I'll be on the straight and narrow. I only went for one run today as well, I was going to go for the second when the server went down, but that was a lot later than I expected. Lets hope Day two turns out a little better.

Attack plan

Tomorrow is D-Day, the first day where I put my plans into place to work World of Warcraft back into my lifestyle, this time I won’t let it take over my life and I won’t let it hamper my studies. I’m going to keep it at arms length by simply restricting my play time by self regulation. Starting tomorrow I will be keeping track of various things I do over the course of the day, allocating a certain amount of game time to them. Some of them are things I already do, others are things I should do and a couple miscellaneous bites are to encourage me to not be quite as lazy and do little things. Most of the time on any activity will be 1:1 however I’m thinking others will be double, or half and they may change as different things in my life become more important.

1:1 activities

• Building my own website
• Building the Wamuran Community Website
• Cleaning
• Preparing for my 21st

The idea here is that I want to spend equal time practicing with web technologies as burning time in WoW. Cleaning is included because I feel I need to contribute more to my household and this will hopefully push me to make the effort to add the 15 minutes to my game time.

1:2 activities

• Fitness

I have put personal fitness as 1:2 because I feel it is an important part of my life, I like to run morning and night from anywhere between 13-20 minutes so this will give me a little extra time to indulge myself or take the edge off negative time. I don’t always run twice a day, and my weekends are too busy sometimes to run at all, but the time it will grant me should allow me to raid about one night a week. If I find it is giving me too much time to play, I might scale it down.

2:1 activities

• Working on websites at work
• Writing this blog

I work in a very simple retail job and I can use the time to learn new technologies or read about new standards, I didn’t want to put too much worth on this because I should really be doing my job so it is time already spent, but it’s just a bonus instead of slacking off and I wanted to put my blog on the clock because I want to be motivated to maintain it.

Miscellaneous time

Are just little ways to reward myself for personal quirks, like when I remember to do my daily tangram puzzle I want to reward myself with 2 minutes of time.

These are the ways I am going to accrue time, and playing WoW will decrease that time, my game time available can go into negative numbers until I log off for that session but I can’t log in again until I’m back in the green, pretty good practice for other things like credit cards. I plan on keeping track with a stopwatch and an app on my phone called iSum essentially all it does is store a number and you can add or subtract from it. Nice and simple.

So now, I just have to wait until tomorrow to get the ball rolling and see if all my numbers will line up and I can play WoW without sacrificing time that I need to spend on more important things. Tomorrow is maintenance night though. Inconvenient.

Scope

Hello world.

Honestly that's the best way I could think to start this, must be all those initial scripting tutorials seeping into my psyche. Maybe I should have stuck with something along the lines of "Hello, my name is Phillip and this is my Blog."

This blog isn't my sob story, it won't be about where I've come from or where I might be going or my personal inner most thoughts. This is a blog about making progress, pushing myself as a designer and web developer whilst forcing my addiction to work for me. That's right addiction, I have a problem, I know it, I've broken free from it twice but now I want back in, that's right, I've kicked the addiction and now I'm ready to ride the beast again and this time I’m going to put it to work for me.

My beast, my demon is really quite common, it isn't drugs, alcohol or cigarettes, it isn't work, money, pain or simply procrastination. My kryptonite is a creature of the time sink, possibly the most dangerous time sink with a face, World of Warcraft.

The land of Azeroth calls to me like no other, her vast immersive landscapes, the turmoil of her bloody past, the allure of what her cloudy future holds, epic quests meshed in harmony with the creatures and magic... On the lesser scale of grandeur there's always progression, friendships, achievements, mounts, pets and the unholy grinding. Lord how I love a good grind, reputations, dailies, mats, fishing or mobs it doesn't matter, I would do them all with a smile on my face.

That's enough of my love affair for this post, there is a little more to it, really I miss the connections with real life friends and the people I met in the game itself, I'm a social player, I want to game with others. The secondary reason for choosing WoW to sink free time in is because it makes me feel like I am progressing, it makes me feel like I'm doing something of worth when really all I'm doing is burning time better spent.

This blog will be a record for my own accounts equally as it is for you to enjoy. The idea is to incorporate Warcraft into my lifestyle using it as an incentive and reward for spending time wisely and developing my skill set as a print and web designer. In my mind I see these updates reading more as a journal of my developing habits, skills and lifestyle directly associated with positively abusing my addiction. So there will be no blogs crying about girl troubles, my weekend escapades or what I think about the latest movie, there are enough of those around to sink a battleship, this blog is about self improvement and digital substance abuse.

I'll try to keep them short, sweet, informative and interesting for you to read, I intend to write one every weeknight starting tomorrow with the plan to grab the reigns and wrestle the beast into my life without it destroying my future.