Tag Archives: Planning

Struggling with Structure

Posted on by
1

As part of my healing process I’m trying to add more structure to my days and weeks. I’ve never been a very structured person when it comes to time management. I don’t eat or sleep at set times nor do I plan my days and weeks out ahead. I know what I need to do roughly each week and then just do that task whenever I have the time to do it. I show up on time for appointments and I’ve only been late to work twice in the 6 years I’ve held this job, both times because I forgot to set my alarm the day before and overslept.. And even then I was only late by 30 minutes. When there’s commitments where other people rely on me I’ll block my time in advance and prepare to be on time for wherever I need to be. If it’s somewhere I haven’t been before I’ll look up the route beforehand and calculate when I’ll have to leave.
When I’m mentally doing well I’m normally also pretty organised in my house. Every object has it’s place and I try to keep things as neat as possible (although sometimes when I feel bad or tired things can get a bit messy). It helps me later when I’m looking for stuff that I know where things can be found. Which is the polar opposite to how I grew up in my dad’s household where mess was normal and things would always get lost. That’s probably why I prefer it not to be that way.

However. Outside of work and meetups I’m terrible when it comes to managing my time. Often times I don’t know what to do with myself and waste hours upon hours of just not doing anything I really enjoy. I’m terrible at forming new habits, because I’m bad at sticking to them and then I feel bad because I abandon things not even halfway through. I was committed to doing 10k steps a day and I would go on walks after work every day. I managed to do that for a week and a half and then abandoned it. I can’t count how many times I tried starting a new evening routine only to give up after a week. Or going to the gym, or going swimming or picking up a new hobby. I’d set a time to do X and then just, not do it. I can’t even cook dinner around the same time each day, let alone commit to anything else.

I’ve tried anything from different planners and bullet journals to just making lists each day of the things I want done to setting timers for me to start or stop doing things. I’ve planned my day down to the minute and I’ve thrown everything to the wind and just let it all loose and see whatever happens happens. Nothing seems to work and it’s costing me a lot of energy and giving me a lot of frustration. I often look at people in envy who seem to have their shit together and are able to get up at the same time every day, go to the gym, have a good evening routine and overall seem to have a nice structured life. I desperately want the same and I just don’t know how to achieve it. Even when it comes to hobbies I can’t seem to manage my time between the things I enjoy. I feel like I always just go towards an extreme end of the spectrum and it’s tiresome.

I realise that my depression plays a major part in this as well. I’m so often overwhelmed and exhausted and feeling down that I just can’t seem to pick up anything else. But I don’t want that to be my excuse. My mental health can’t be what defines me for the rest of my life. And so I struggle on, trying to find something that works for me. Eventually I hope something will stick, but for now this is just another thing kicking me down. I can’t even structure my days or weeks right, how am I supposed to get through another 40-50 years of my life like this? I guess only time will tell.

Slow leveling

Posted on by
4

After hitting the gym for the third time in eight days I came home quite exhausted this morning. It’s a good type of exhausted though and a phase that I need to push myself through as I start getting my health and stamina back on track properly. I may have set a bit of a harsh schedule for myself with trying to workout four times a week but I know that if I limit myself to once or twice a week it’s so much easier to just start skipping days than when I do it like this. So far the hardest thing has been getting up and actually getting myself to the gym or the pool. Once I’m there it’s fine and I’m happy to push myself as hard as I can before returning home sore and exhausted. Because I went in the morning this time I have all the rest of the day to do other stuff, so I went out and did groceries for the weekend, folded the immense pile of laundry that had been collecting over the week and vacuumed my bedroom and hallway. I still have to do some more vacuuming and I’m about to start working on the dishes once I finish writing this post but I feel like I’ve actually had quite a productive Saturday so far.

The other thing I wanted to talk about in this post is my return to the World of Warcraft. I spent about an hour and a half playing my Warrior just now, slowly working my way through all the quests in Tiragarde Sound. Even though I don’t really read the quest text anymore, seeing as I’ve done this zone on my Rogue at the start of the expansion, it’s nice to retrace some of the old quest steps again. I’ve adventured with Flynn to Freehold and beyond to stop the assault on Katherine Proudmoore. I’ve been fighting the corruption in Anglepoint Wharf and I’ve been doing horseback riding in Norwington Estate. It’s quite a nice zone all things considered and being able to fly everywhere has been a major boon. I’m about halfway to level 117 as of writing this and I’m not sure what level I’ll be once I finish up all the quests in the zone.
What I do know is that I’m taking it easy and just enjoying the ride. I really want to get back into the groove on my Warrior and start working on the Legendary Cloak that has been introduced in the latest Patch. I’m not sure how fast I can start tackling the new content once I hit 120 but I hope it’s fairly quick. I mean there were catch up mechanics present for Nazjatar so I hope there will be now aswell. For now I’ve parked my Rogue, and my other characters, and will solely focus on the Warrior for the time being.

Another thing I’m slowly leveling is my Bard in Final Fantasy XIV. Choosing to level it up with Trusts has kind of slowed down progress a lot when it comes to my goals in that game. It’s a concious sacrifice though. I’m kind of scared that if I ignore Trusts and just powerlevel everything to level 80 I will never go back to level them up. So I figured I might aswell combine it with leveling up the last few battle classes I still have left. Right now I’m trying to do one Trust dungeon a day and Pixie dailies and nothing else. It’s really easy to outlevel your Trusts if you do anything besides those dungeons and I’m probably going to hit level 80 way before any of them do. I’m not sure yet what I’ll do in that case. I may just park that particular group of Trusts and use my Machinist to finish off the final few levels as I’m leveling that up or I could just bite the bullet and keep leveling up my Trusts with a class that is level 80. I guess I’ll see when I get there. For now it’s just slow going and that’s fine by me.

With me reserving two evenings a week for working out and effectively my weekend mornings aswell I am even more limited in the time I can spend on playing games. It doesn’t help that the League of Legends NA and EU championships have started up again aswell, meaning that I’ll be watching that whenever I have the time. I guess it becomes more important now than ever to have a bit of structure to my days and weeks instead of just seeing where stuff goes whenever. So I’m trying to figure out what I want to do in my games, how much time said activities take and then when the best time to play them is. For FFXIV it’s easy since I just do my three Pixie Dailies and a Trust dungeon so I’m done in about 30 minutes. For WoW it’s a bit trickier. I want to level my Warrior and that can take whatever time it takes. So I’ll plan an hour or two to just play WoW and see where that takes me.  Anyway this is starting to turn into a ramble a bit, so gonna stop right here.

What are you up to this weekend?

Blaugust prep!

Posted on by
Reply

Today the first day of the Blaugust schedule started and we are calling it prep week. I know it’s not officially August yet but nonetheless it can’t hurt to start a few days in advance laying out what I’m planning to do for Blaugust exactly. Writing a blog post every day isn’t necessarily as easy as it may sound, especially when you don’t have a variety of topics to write about. So today I’m going to talk a little bit about how I want to tackle the every day blog posting and what kind of posts you can expect from me over the coming five weeks.

FFXIV progress posts. This will probably still be my main game over the coming weeks. With the new tomestones out on Tuesday and me wanting to atleast attempt to do some Savage content next to leveling up my jobs I will probably have enough to write about for a decent amount of posts. Most will probably be just a quick insight of where I’m standing at the moment progress wise but I may write about a questline or encounter here and there that I feel needs some spotlight.

WoW/GW2 posts. Now that I’m wanting to dedicate less time to FFXIV I can dedicate a bit more time to the other two MMO’s that I have installed on my PC. In WoW I’m mostly planning to explore the 8.2 content and earn flying aswell as catch up to the raid content that I’ve missed so far. In GW2 I want to continue leveling my Elementalist and hopefully push past the level 25-30 barrier that most of my characters seem to end up stuck on and hopefully be able to turn the adventures there into some entertaining posts about how much I suck at this game.

FFVIII and Spiderman posts. As I mentioned before I intend to play through FFVIII. I’ve never finished a mainstream Final Fantasy game and so I figured it was time to pick one at random and just work my way through it. Apparently I picked the one with the most convoluted battle mechanics out there but I’ll make it work. I’ll be taking notes and screenshots as I play through the game so I can make more indepth posts about the story, how far I am and what my opinions of the game are so far. I intend to do the same for Spiderman on the PS4, although that is a much shorter game so I’m probably not going to post about that one a lot.

General topics. I have a few gaming and non gaming related topics that I want to talk about aswell. I’ve taken the habit of writing my ideas down and then sitting down at a later moment to turn them into proper posts.

Next to topics I’m also working on a “posting schedule” so that I can sit down and write a blog post around the same time every day. I’ve also taken note of days where I won’t be able to post on my scheduled time or at all so I need to make sure I have a few extra posts lined up to post during that time. The big problem that I’m facing with here is that I’m horrible at sticking to schedules. Something I’ve been struggling with for a big part of my life and something that I’ve been meaning to change forever. So I’m using the Blaugust opportunity to do so and create some new, healthier, habits for myself so my days will maybe go a bit smoother and more enjoyable than they are going now.

All in all I feel like I’m more prepped this year to participate and succeed in posting every day than I have been in previous years, so let’s aim to make it work!

Step by Step: Leveling in FFXIV

Posted on by
Reply

Lights in FFXIV

I’ve been updating you all with my progress in FFXIV leveling and how I feel like I’m still fairly on track to meeting my end of year goal, which is getting all battle jobs to level 70. Today however I want to take the time to talk about how I’m going about this whole leveling process, how much time it’s costing me and how I’m preventing myself to get the dreaded MMO burnout from playing the same MMO for an extended amount of time.

Main goal and sub goals 
I like to come into an MMO with a general idea of what I want to achieve in a longer amount of time. When the WoW expansion launched it was level to level cap on both Horde and Alliance and experience all the lore before starting the endgame gear grind. In FFXIV I’ve made my goal pretty clear: level all battle jobs to 70 before the end of year. This is my main goal and it’s a goal that takes up a sufficient amount of time and is something I’d like to see as a “bigger picture” to work towards.
The reasons for having this goal are fairly simple, I like to get rid of the clutter of gear in my bags that I have lying around for various levels and classes. I’m a rather tidy person so I’d like my ingame inventories to be as clean as my room. This will help me achieve that. On top of that I’m a completionist. I’ve always been a collector and achievement hunter on WoW. I like to 100% my games when I can and don’t really like it when stuff is “unfinished”. Getting all my battle jobs to 70 scratches this itch enormously, enough so that I’m realistically willing and able to commit to this endeavour.

Obviously this goal is rather big. At the time I committed to this goal I had 7 jobs to level to max level still. To break things up FFXIV actually made it easy for me: level one job at a time. On my own initiative I’ve made a planning on how to tackle the jobs and in what order and how long it would take me to level each job to 70. This made my sub goals more realistic to tackle. On average the journey from 60-70 takes about a week and 50-70 takes twice as long, unless you spend hours grinding which I don’t do, making it so that I’m never more than two weeks focused on the same job to level. Because there is a decent amount of variety in playstyles this keeps me engaged and curious as to how every new job plays and it breaks the mold of doing the same activities every day to level up to begin with.

Planning and preventing burnout
After establishing my main goal and my sub goals I just started to level with no real plan on how to tackle all of this. Because of that I spent a lot of time in FFXIV focused on leveling and grinding and I noticed the MMO burn creeping on me when I was about halfway with leveling my Paladin. Once I realised this I also realised that I needed to tackle this endeavour a bit differently than I was doing. I didn’t want to spend all my free time on FFXIV, especially during weekdays, so I needed to figure out what the most optimal leveling route was for weekdays and weekends where I’d have a bit more time.
Eventually I settled on the following schedule:
Mon/Fri evening I will do Level, Trial and Alliance roulette. These three roulettes should on average be enough to get a level in from 50-60 and almost a level from 60-70.
If my character is in the 60-70 range I will tack on the beast tribe dailies from the Ananta and the Turtle people because they are definitely worth doing and only take about 10 mins each.
Sat/Sun I have more time to spend and thus next to the weekday routine I also tackle the Main Scenario and 50-60 roulette. I try to also do the hunt bills that are level appropriate for a little extra boost to my levels and to save up Centurio Seals which I can in turn use to gear up my characters when they hit max level where necessary.
When I have a little extra time, and motivation to do so, I throw an odd PotD/HoH in the mix. Often I do this to get that last bit of experience in I need to level up, sometimes just because I feel like grinding it for a longer time.

Sticking to this schedule has done wonders for my free time. During weekdays I’m never online for more than 1.5hours on weekdays and still make progress without feeling burnt out. It has freed up time for me to play other games, like Pokémon LetsGO, and to get back to reading. Due to it’s constant nature it has become a source of relaxation for me, except when I get Susano for trial roulette because seriously fuck that, and a gaming session I look forward to every day I can play.
Having discovered this approach for my MMO’s I’m much more relaxed when it comes to my single player games. There I just want to enjoy the story and not really set goals for myself, so if I play for 30 mins it’s fine but if I lose myself in the game and play for two hours it’s fine aswell. Having this structure has brought an overwhelming amount of rest in my head on my days off and has hightened my enjoyment of all the things I undertake because I’m more relaxed and focused in general.

I really hope I can use this strategy to tackle more areas in my life but for now I’m happy to just use it for my MMO’s and other hobbies. Who knows… I may actually grow up to be a functional adult after all.

Settling

Posted on by
Reply

It’s odd how much peace of mind you can get from finishing something that has been looming over you for literally 3 years now. I feel like I can think again and function again like a normal human being. This allows me to set goals for other stuff easier and plan my days better now that I have no more obligations to anything than work. And ofcourse I leave that behind at 17.00 when I start clearing out my desk to go home.

Right now I feel like the two major MMO’s I’m playing are in maintenance mode for me. In FFXIV we’ve basically stopped raiding except for the weekly savage clear. As group we’re not attempting unending coil simply because we are not going to make it anyway. Part of that is on me because I’m nothing more than an average ninja who, for some reason, fails to perform in raids yet again. It’s probably due to me not playing as much as I should but well, there’s not that much to do in game anyway. When it comes to WoW I’ve ceased raiding after we killed Gul’dan almost a year ago. Right now I don’t feel the need to get back into raiding either so I’ve decided to set some different goals instead and just take things casually. I can see myself focusing on leveling one character of each class over the coming months and go through all the class related lore because that’s what I really enjoy.

This mindset has caused me to start breaking up my week into planned days for certain games. I want to shove FFXIV to Tuesday evenings because it’s reset day there and play WoW on Wednesday because also, reset day. I am probably reserving my Friday nights for Heroes of the Storm and I’ve decided that Mondays are now used for reading and watching series. Obviously if there are raids happening in FFXIV they get precedence. If I can stick to this planning it’s nice to not really have to think about what I want to do each given evening. I tend to get overwhelmed with all the stuff I want to be doing and then just crawl into bed and do nothing… Which isn’t helpful at all. The December goal thing has already given me some guidance, breaking it up into certain evenings only adds to that.

So with my four working days settled I have the weekends and Thursdays to branch into other things. I don’t really want to assign anything to those days either simply because I never know what mood I’m in when I have time off. For instance yesterday I was feeling rather unwell and spent my time in bed for most of the day, thus not really getting anything done. Today has been mostly filled with chores. I find that I have a better start on Mondays when on Sundays I clean out my room. The lack of clutter makes me happy and helps me be more productive overall. Although I did manage to squeeze in som FFXIV time in the morning, finishing off my beast tribe dailies on my Astrologian and making the final push for Miner to hit 60 (yes I can actually already score that goal off!). Other than that I settled down and made a good start in reading The Name of the Wind.

It does feel odd to set goals for stuff like games that should be used for relaxation. But with so many games coming out these days and MMO’s taking up a lot of time it’s nice to just have something to aim towards and enjoy the process in doing so.

What I’m going to do for the rest of the day is unsure. I could throw in a load of laundry and I should probably put some stuff back on the attic but I’m feeling a bit lazy and unwilling to do to much in the way of chores. With vacuuming, dusting and putting away all the junk in my room I’ve done enough for today. All I know is that whatever it is I pick to do will be a nice relaxing experience and something that’s not riddled with “but I should be doing something else”.

Mapping the Future

Posted on by
Reply

Afbeeldingsresultaat voor planner

Yesterday a plan started to slowly take shape in my head. I’m really bad when it comes to planning things and when it comes to MMO’s I’m usually very overwhelmed with all the things I can do that in the end I mostly end up doing very little or unsubscribing.
I really don’t want this to happen with Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve found an amazing free company and some of my oldest friends are still playing the game. I want to make this my permanent new main MMO and I want to be a bit more serious about the way I play it. To make sure this happens I have come up with a “Roadmap for Stormblood.”

Now I’m not really sure how this roadmap will develop over time, but I had to start somewhere. Right now I made a two stage spreadsheet mostly involving leveling and gearing my battle and profession classes. As I’ve mentioned only my Ninja is currently level 70. I have a few other battle classes level 60+ (Dragoon, Astrologian, Bard, Machinist) and the rest is sitting somewhere between level 50 and level 60. On the gatherer and crafter side of the spectrum only my Weaver made it to level 60, the rest is below.

My first goals in Stormblood, and the first phase of my roadmap, centers around leveling all these various classes to maximum level. Initially my goals is to get everything to 60 but if I enjoy a class or if it’s already 60 I can take them to 70 aswell. For now the goals is to get atleast one battle class and one gathering/crafting class to 60 per month. I know that leveling sometimes goes faster than you know, hence the “atleast”. I’m not going to be so strict to myself that I have to attain this goal every month. I know that sometimes RL will get in the way or that I will have less time due to Savage and Ex-Primals raiding on my Ninja.
Seeing the queues as they are for mostly DPS classes I will probably abuse PotD for those that aren’t level 60 yet to get there. As far as Healers/Tanks go… There are enough roulettes to do that have quite low queue times and it will be a break away from the monotony that is PotD.
For gathering/crafting I mean to make full use of the leves, collectables and GC hand-in system, next to the beast tribe dailies that are available. I will probably focus on my gatherers first, mostly miner and botanist, before I take my crafting back up again.

The second phase of my roadmap will revolve around gearing all my classes. In a way with gearing Ninja I’m automatically also gearing Bard and Machinist up to a point. I want to have decent/BiS gear for as many classes as possible and the fact that a lot of gear is shared will probably help me a lot there. This gearing will most likely happen simultaneously to leveling any class. I will have more tomestones than I can use on my Ninja anyway (I’m already rocking BiS tomestone gear on her) so I will automatically pick up other things as I progress through endgame content.
Crafting and gathering gear are a different beast. I’ve always found crafting in this game to be very complicated, but I want to really make an effort this expansion. Again I will probably focus on gearing my gatherers first, they will be the first that reach 70 and work on scrips so my crafters won’t really be gearing untill I get one or two to max level to begin with.

I know that there are meriad other things to do in FFXIV besides leveling and gearing my various classes. I will probably expand on my roadmap as the expansion goes on and the focus on leveling is less. There are a ton of mounts and minions that I still want to get. I’m also eyeing the possibility to slowly work my way through all the relic weapons from Heavensward and get the last three I need from A Realm Reborn. These are all minor things that I still need to shape into a proper mold for planning and they’re all projects that I can pick up at a later time when I feel like it.

For now my plan is to focus on doing small weekly tasks, and incorporate these into bigger monthly goals. Taking things one step at a time and making sure I don’t burn out and feel accomplished is my major goal here. Due to the shift in focus from monthly to weekly I will try to make a post every Sunday evening with what I have planned for the week as whole (inlcuding IRL things, work things and game things) and then at the end of the month I can see how far I’ve gotten. It’s a bit of a different format than what I’ve been trying to do earlier on the blog and I’m quite excited to try it out. I hope you guys enjoy going on this journey with me and I hope it will make me blog more regularly.

Now seeing as I’m already writing anyway, my plans for the week looks as followed:

  • Work on Miner in FFXIV. I’ve started to level it before I left on vacation and got my miner from level 30 to 47 in about 4 days time. I’d like to continue this growth and see how close I can get to 60 over the course of the week.
  • Work on Red Mage in FFXIV. I’ve picked up the class and am quite enjoying it. She’s level 51 at the moment and I will do PotD when I feel like it. I’ve gotten an offer to do roulettes with someone who is leveling a tank so I might just take advantage of that and see how far it gets me.
  • Work on my thesis. I need to test a few more subjects, churn results and hand in my first version. I also need to hand in something else which I need to work on today so I will get little game time in.

For the rest of the week I have 4 days of work planned and two nights of going out to dinner. My father and his partner (I refuse to call her his wife) are celebrating their partnershipday on Wednesday with going out to dinner with me and one of my uncles. Saturday evening I have another dinner with work colleagues to say goodbye to one of them who is starting work at another company. I’m also hoping to make a bit more progress of rearranging our attic over the weekend but I’m not making that a “must do” thing because I’m honestly not sure how my time will be spent. So yeah. I have a busy week ahead of me with proably not as much gaming time as I’d like to have. Nonetheless I want to progress as much as I can in FFXIV and take it from there.

I Fucked Up

Posted on by
1

Sunday evening as I was frantically running around Eorzea trying to get my Yo-Kai medals I realized I had fucked up. And not just a small fuck up. No a big one. Huge one. A fuck up that hasn’t happened to me in a very, very long time.
What am I talking about you mean? Well, I’m talking about the fact that I cannot, for the life of me, manage my time correctly.

I was super excited about the Yo-Kai event. Even though I’ve not played the games themselves (I tried, but felt too much like a Pokémon ripoff), I think the pets and the weapons that you could get were very cute. Being the collector that I am I set my mind to get all the pets, weapons and both the mounts on not one but two characters.
Boy did that turn out wrong.
I made a decent start with farming. I had gotten my first three weapons on Sandrian really fast. I was working on my second weapon on Sarella and everything seemed to be going fine. But then Legion launched and I completely lost track of anything else I was doing. In the back of my mind I knew the Yo-Kai event needed to be done at some point, but Legion has been all-consuming for the past month so I kept postponing it, like I do with almost everything in my life. Untill last weekend panic struck. I only had three days left to farm 9 weapons on Sandrian. I had given up on the notion of getting more than the two weapons I had obtained on Sarella.
In truth I was slowly getting back into FFXIV earlier. I had farmed a bit here and there and played with the idea to log a few nights, farm medals and breeze through the event in the last week. It should have been easily doable, were it not for the fact that I chose to sleep or play WoW instead.

I fucked up and I have no one to blame but myself. I finished the Yo-Kai event with 11 weapons on Sandrian and 2/3rds of the way to number 12. If only I had gotten started sooner, if only I could have sat down to farm. If only my head wasn’t this chaotic mess that completely lacks any commitment to plans I make.
It sucks but it’s a learning experience. With all the ingame events going in WoW, FFXIV and others I will really need to learn to plan, prioritize, schedule and stick to it. I may let some things go because I’m not that invested into a game but FFXIV is special to me and I’m heartbroken that I let WoW take over my life completely.
It’s hard to manage so many things next to having a fulltime job. It’s hard being an adult. But I guess I’ll have to suck up and learn. The days where I could carelessly do what I want because I had seas of time are over. I work with way less hours than I’m used to and I’m letting everything slip because of it. Even my blog has been completely unused for the past month. I’ve just not had the time or inclination to sit down and write up untill now. I guess I’ll have to make some sort of schedule for that aswell seeing as raiding has started up on WoW again which leaves me unable to do anything but play that on certain nights after I get home from work. I have been trying to schedule more things in my agenda and installed the Wunderlist app to make sure I get certain tasks done on certain days. It has been a bit helpful, but for me the problem isn’t really scheduling my time, it’s actually sticking to that schedule…

The Good News
I haven’t been idle over this past month. As I said Legion has sucked me in completely. I think this is probably the best expansion Launch WoW has had in a while. We are now over 6 weeks in and there is still plenty to do. I’m finally able to start considering leveling an alt to max level (I picked my Hunter who is comfortably sitting at level 105 right now) next to keeping up with everything on my Warrior. I’m almost exalted with the Nightfallen, only 2.5k off actually, and then I can turn my attention to the other factions. Seeing however that I’m currently enjoying the first week of a two week holiday and the first weekly event in WoW happens to be increased faction rep I hope I can make quite some strides in getting my rep up with all the factions, but mostly Highmountain and Valarjar. Since they have the rank 3 Blacksmithing recipes I want. Next to that I’m still lacking all the level 3 mining recipes so I’ll be working my way through that aswell as trying to level up my Cooking, First Aid and Fishing AND getting that elusive Fishing artifact. Enough to do for now!

I have also changed my blog a bit. The purple was starting to hurt my eyes so I reversed it to plain black. I’ve also adjusted my sidebar to give an accurate view of what I’m playing right now. As you can see it’s only three games. WoW is sucking up the biggest chunk of my time, but I’m also planning to reserve atleast one evening a week to play some FFXIV. I really miss that game and I haven’t seen any of the 3.4 content yet so I feel like I should make some time for that.
As for other games.. I want to focus on completing one game at a time next to my MMO’s. I have so many games that I’ve started and never finished because I started another game halfway through. The only game I finished in one go lately has been Kirby: Planet Robobot and that’s probably because I actually didn’t let myself play anything else on my 3DS while I was playing that. It paid off though since I completed the main story + all the cubes in about 20 hours. I still think the final bossfight in that game was epic and I do plan to 100% it at some point… But not now. Seeing as Pokemon Sun/Moon are coming out somewhere in November I feel like I have to finish up the previous gen games atleast. I’m about 6 badges into Alpha Sapphire and 5 badges into X. I really didn’t care which one of the two I wanted to tackle first, but considering I know the story of ORAS, I own all the original GBA games from that gen, I decided to go with X and complete that story instead. After that I will probably pick up AS where I left off and finish that, including the Delta episode. From there I’m not sure what I want to play, but I’ll tackle that when the day arrives.

As you can see I’m full of plans again. I’m just hoping that I can stick to them this time.

Sun, Games and Planning

Posted on by
Reply

IMG_1261

It’s always a sad moment when you find yourself sitting in your room, typing up a blog post when only two days ago you were still enjoying the amazing sun in Lisbon, Portugal. I really wanted to go down to southern Europe for a vacation or citytrip this year. Here in the Netherlands the sun is scarce and temperatures are often cold. We don’t really have a summer to speak of, not in the way southern Europe has so I never really get a chance to tan or enjoy the weather here. So way back in March I decided I wanted to go on a citytrip to Lisbon, dragged a friend along, and there we were.
I have to say it’s a seriously amazing city. The weather was great, even though we had clouds on our second day, the food was good and cheap and the people were nice and all spoke English very well, something a few other countries can learn from *stares at France*. The climate alone has me wanting to go back to Portugal for atleast a proper vacation. It’s a beautiful country and I really want to explore more of it, but that will be something for in the future. Now real life has started back up again and I’m only 4 days off going back to work.

Super Mario Time
I took my 3DS with me to Portugal and managed to get a lot of time to play New Super Mario Bros. 2. As you all may remember, or maybe not, one of my goals for this year was to finish that game since it’s one of the first games I bought with my original 3DS and I never really finished it. So 3 hours back and forth on an airplane would be an ideal time to atleast work through some of the levels… And I have! When I started out a few days ago I was still sitting at the first level of world two, now I’m halfway through world four! Which means I only have two worlds left to complete after this.
I’m not running a perfect game, when the big coins you get in every level are too hard to reach I just skip them, but I do try to obtain them wherever I can. Then there’s the issue of seeing hidden levels and not really knowing how to get there, not even to mention the two complete worlds that you need to access via a special way. I will look up how to get there eventually, but for now I just want to aim to defeat the last boss… And then go back to unlock additional stuff.
Next to Super Mario I’ve also spent a lot of time playing FFXIV. I have unlocked all the patch 3.3 content there is on my Moogle character next to being on time to finish the Golden Saucer event on both my characters. I also dinged my MCH level 50, so I’m quite a way in when it comes to my gaming goals for this month! I even switched over to Monk now and she is sitting at level 42. I hope I can push that to 50 aswell before the end of the month.
All in all my gaming comes along really nicely. Which brings me to my next topic…

Planning my life
I am hopeless when it comes to starting and completing things. A lot of my time is spent either staring into the abyss or lying on my bed feeling tired when I’m home from work. I have real issues deciding what I want to do on any given day, and when I have decided it takes me forever to get my butt into gear and go. I think the foundation of this lies in the fact that I’m a very chaotic person who on top of that is quite unmotivated to do a lot of things. So I decided to set things straight and start using Google Calendar to plan my days and sync said calendar to both my iPhone and my tablet. Although I don’t really plan every minuscule detail for every minute there is a bit more structure to my days now, which allows me to actually get stuff done. As example I “reserved” an hour to blog today (from 10-11am). I probably won’t use the entire hour this time, but sometimes when I have a bit of a writer’s block I do need an entire hour to blog, so that gives me some space to work with. It also helps me settle down and actually write instead of thinking “I should blog sometime today” and then just not do it.
The same goes for planning my gametime. I realise that sitting on my butt and gaming all day on my days off is just as bad as sitting on my butt in the office all day… So I’ve been hacking my gametime into 1 or 2 hour periods inbetween doing other stuff like chores, working out or appointments. I’ve also decided to already fill in those chunks of gametime because I know myself too well. If I don’t plan in advance what game I want to turn my attention to I will never play anything but FFXIV, and that’s seriously a shame. Obviously 1-2 hours isn’t enough to really get into the big RPG’s and thus I’m saving those for the weekends when I have more time to play and I can fill more blocks with one single game. Instead I’m choosing mostly platformers that I want to play and can play for an hour or so and then just shut down without feeling like I should be playing more or that I forget where I was.
This whole system is still more or less in a testing phase, but I do hope that I can start using my time better and actually feel like I’ve accomplished something, instead of now where I wish I had done a lot of things in hindsight.