After having had two weeks off to get settled in my apartment and being back at work for the past two weeks it really changes my perspective on how lazy my life actually was while I was still living at home with my dad. He cooked all the meals, even though I didn’t always enjoy what he’d cook. He did laundry and did groceries while I was working my 40h work weeks. Now I have to do everything on my own and it’s been a real adjustment. Not that I want to complain, I like having this freedom and I wouldn’t want to go back to living with my dad. I just had to rethink how I spend my evenings now, where to shop for my groceries and how much time it takes me to clean my apartment.

With all of this and working 40 hours a week (meaning I’m away from home from 8-18 every day) my gaming time has been limited a lot. Yet when I had all the time in the world to game I didn’t. I watched a lot of TV, I did a whole lot of nothing but I barely touched my games. It’s a bit of a vicious cycle. I want to game more when I have less time but when I have more time I game less. It is a very ironic thing and it’s something that I hear from some of my gaming friends. I’m not sure how to qualify this. I don’t necessarily have a gaming burnout but I do find it difficult just to sit down and start playing a game sometimes, even though I have nothing else planned for that time and I really want to game. I also notice that I’ve been drifting away from the long RPGs and into puzzle and platform type games. That probably has to do with the fact that platformers and puzzle games generally don’t really rely on telling a story but just let you complete levels, like the good old SEGA days. It’s probably the reason I still haven’t finished Kingdom Hearts 3, even though I try to make progress here and there. I’m still in the Monsters Inc world and even though I really enjoy the game and the gameplay, starting up a session takes a few hours out of my day due to the multitude of cutscenes that need to tell the story. I do want to finish it sometime in the coming few months but I’m not sure when this will happen exactly. Maybe I just need to carve out a few hours on the weekend, dedicated solely to that game. Saturday or Sunday morning would be perfect for this because I’m usually up around 9ish anyway and I don’t really do anything else during those mornings except shower and have breakfast. It would be an ideal time to just sit down for 2-3 hours and play the game untill lunch, after which I can focus on other things like having people over or going out into town.

Perhaps it’s time that I start planning things more regularly in my life in general. I’ve been noticing that I’m “wasting” a lot of my time being undecided about what I want to do during the day or evening after which I simply regress to doing nothing. I know Monday evening is always a bit hard since it’s the first day of work and I tend to get home tired. The same goes for Fridays so I want to keep those nights free to just watch tv or read and not really engage in activities that require either physical or mental efforts.
Tuesday through Thursday are ideal nights to play MMO’s. It’s reset day in FF on Tuesday and in WoW on Wednesday so if I want to get any group content done, those are the days to do it. It’s also easier to just get a few things done during the evenings and still feel like I’m making some progress while doing so. On the weekends my time really depends on the plans I have made. So far I’ve either gone out or had visitors atleast one of my two weekend days. I also need to take into account that I mostly need to use my weekends to do stuff like clean, get groceries and do laundry related things. All of this obviously take time, time that I can’t spend on other stuff.
For now though the weekend mornings tend to be relaxation time and I’m planning to use that time to get sessions in on a few games, starting with Kingdom Hearts 3.

I’ll let you all know how this pans out. Let’s hope it will push me to finish off a few games this way atleast!