time management

If you are aware of my history at all, you might know that I've had a somewhat challenging time management problem for years. I would never have purposely chosen a game wherein everything you do is time management. Everything in the game is about hundreds of individual countdown timers, which players can coordinate to synch up into production rhythms. Put very simply, this is like eleventh dimension sudoku. Scott followed an ad into it while he was playing solitaire one evening after work, and I followed him in. We're both really enjoying it.

For years I kept a calendar in every room and a pocket planner in my purse, constantly cross referencing. I tried keeping dates in my phone and that was a big fail. I often wrote times wrong, or would be in the wrong week and go to appointments days before I should have. I also couldn't keep a bank ledger without majorly screwing it up every little bit. I was very smart in school and college, but after a viral illness hit my brain, I became a bit dyslexic and kinda stupid with numbers, letters, and following any series of details on TV or in a book or in phone convos. I was a bit lost in time and space for a few years, feeling 'unstuck' from moment to moment processes.

Minecraft helped with quite a lot of brain healing, especially orientation, goals and assessment, and basic coordination, but my memory could be abysmal on some days. All the same, over about 3 years I regained enough cognitive stability that I was able to enjoy watching TV and reading again. I still couldn't keep a bank ledger for beans or fill out simple forms without supervision. Imagine being a speed reader all your life and suddenly one year it all gets super tangled up and you basically have to relearn sentence construction all over again. I practiced on blogs for years.

So lately we're trying a new game where every move you make is a constant calculation involving balancing time, money, supplies, and population, with plenty of incentives and prizes to jaunt off into new learning and adapting to bigger-better every few days. It's taken about 6 weeks so far, but I'm getting pretty good at strategically balancing my life around several hundred countdown timers while I do real life stuff on the side. It's a pleasant way to get through winter and the world being weird. I feel like I'm thinking better again, too. It's getting easier to use numbers. Minecraft had basic output and grid coords, but this game literally helps me watch the clock and stay focused on planning my day out while I plan out the next moves in my cities.

Total subject change, found a cool channel. I never really bring it up, but I bet a few of you would remember way back some of the real life things I talked about from the past, so this would make sense. I used to dream of living like this, way off the grid, self sufficient, simple. All the stuff I've lived through, that would have been impossible, but in my head, this is how it would have been. Humans can be really good at this kind of stuff when worse comes to worst. Takes practice and planning, just like a game.