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NEW VIDEO: The EASIEST Way to Stop Gaming

Bye gamer self. It was nice to have met you, but now I must fly.


WorkInProgress

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Summary

Hey fellow game quitters.

I relapsed last days on playing hearthstone. A lot of it. While everyone thinks I am working. Or being busy with my children. After so many years with (almost) no gaming.

It is time to be realistic and take this last two weeks seriously. I blocked myself out of my blizzard account and am ready to start again. This time I will count the days and set my self goals for every month. I guess it will help that I have stopped gaming more than once in the past and know the drill.

Rationalizations

I would rationalize this in the following ways:

  • I don't have a hobby which is as fun
  • I need something to do when I have to walk with the sleeping baby in the wrap (because he won't sleep in his bed)
  • I can't say I stopped gaming as long as I still continue to see myself as an ex-gamer who can't play even a bit because he is "addicted"
  • And the most stupid one: "Only one more. Then I stop."

1 and 2 are true, but gaming proofs again not to be the solution, because it comes with to much other problems. 3 and 4 are just stupid ideas from my mind to rationalize my behavior.

What harm is done?

I lie again to my wife, I look at my phone, while I play with my older kid (and he understands that I am not with him then), I lie at work (let it look like I am very inefficient instead of gaming on their payroll), I lost my chance to have a fantastic start at this new job opportunity and am instead just surviving.

What harm will be done if I don't stop?

I will damage my relationships to my wife and my children. It will most likely lead to another, worse job. It will make me unhappy and destroy the bit of self-confidence I have.

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2021-03-30

I used Blocksite to block me off from YouTube and several porn sites, because they tend to trigger me. I also secured it with a random generated password and gave it to a friend of mine. Afterwards I deleted the password. If I delete the extension/App it sends a mail to him. This way he keeps me accountable.

To be not too harsh to myself I unblocked hacker news. This is for me like a weak social media version. I want to use some work time to learn Linux/programming again and HN kept me interested in that. As an application admin and this counts as education on the job. That's way better than gaming.

I also followed through shaving this morning and spent the evening working. It feels like I am coming back on track. But I am still anxious about time logging. Maybe I do it this tomorrow for the whole month in bulk.

Oh and I need to start drawing this evening 🙂

Hope your doing well. Bye Bye.

 

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2021-03-31

Yesterday I felt better with everything blocked. Cleared my browser history to not get reminded at all these YouTube videos about hearthstone content.
I was semi-productive at work, taking long breaks to listen to a podcast I found @dirac Journal. Still better than gaming, I guess.

And it reminded me about responsibility and how it frees me. It's a strong concept which took me a long time to understand. But lately, I didn't incorporate it into my life. Escaping the hard things instead of embracing them as they come. But that is what I should do embrace the things that are hard, take responsibility for people surrounding me (especially my family) and find meaning in taking care of myself and others.

I know that to marry and have a family at a relatively young age (became father with 27) was the best decision exactly out of this reason. Beforehand I drifted through life. Since then, I quit gaming, found a lateral entry in the IT-Industry which I love and became way more responsible in general. This helped my self-confidence. Lately, I lost all of that confidence and felt burdened by all the things I need to take care of. Overwhelmed and didn't take care for me. That's why shaving every morning is on my habit list. I want to ingrain in myself that I am important too. That it is okay to do more than the necessary for my body and my mind.

In that spirit I will start the day by faking my time bookings for the month in a way that I don't get fired. It is time to get over with this, to have a new start.

Thanks for reading 🙂

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2021-04-01

I am still awake at almost 23:00 and doing some work because it took a freaking long time for me to find the discipline to spent time working in the evening. I had a short day today because I helped my wife with the kids as she was exhausted. But I did not spend enough time this evening on work to be able to book 8 hours.

But I wrote a LinkedIn article about the digital detox I am doing. Because its LinkedIn I dialed the drama down and neither named porn nor gaming at work but just wrote that I want to block feed media and YouTube (which I do). Let's see if anyone is reading it. But I felt like a blogger for a moment there.

Tomorrow I plan on working directly at 8am and have an appointment with a colleague at this time.

I wasn't able today to book my times, because of a technical problem at first and then getting distracted by other tasks. I think I have to work at Easter to get the things done I said I get done. That's annoying, but I guess I had it coming. I hinted so much at my wife already, but I'll try to do the work in the evenings if she has to be with my younger son anyway (because he can't sleep alone and is breastfeeding every half hour in the evening), and the older one is already sleeping.

I think I'll challenge myself to draw a profile picture of my face this month and add this to my LinkedIn Account. That would be a tangible challenge. But right now I am going to sleep.

I hope you have a good 1.April!

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On 3/29/2021 at 5:26 AM, WorkInProgress said:

Summary

Hey fellow game quitters.

I relapsed last days on playing hearthstone.

Oi I can feel ya there, I'd stay up til 2 to 3 am every night playing it on my phone lol.

Best of luck dude.

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Hey! 

Since you're drawing, I recommend to try out ArtProf- its an awesome, totally free community of professional artists making tons and tons of art tutorials every week (YouTube), providing individual critique and assistance on Discord, and even more resources on their website. Look them up!

I'm doing lots of art too at the moment, and ArtProf has helped me tremendously. It is very much one-of-a-kind community of artists that is usually impossible to find for the price of free. 

Po

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05-04-2021

After a full Easter weekend I spent the evening booking time based on my calendar, taking around an hour of time per 2 weeks. I am writing this in a short break (2 weeks to go). I will book another week and then go to sleep because it is to fucking late.

As always there is a lot to do.

I could stick to my commitments to personal hygiene drawing and time logging this week.
 

@Pochatok and @Jason70,

thank you both for checking out my sketches. I will work on copying a picture of myself until it is good enough to be used as a profile picture. It's really hard to get the proportions right. The second face looks at least similar enough to my picture and me that my son (3,5years) could identify that I was trying to draw myself 😄

 

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2021-04-07

I actually had a little video watching relapse yesterday because my elaborate setup didn't block YouTube on Firefox mobile. That in one way good because it  is sometimes a really useful thing to be able to distract my older son if he has to endure long drives or similar stresses, but it is bad that I have it available. I have chosen to live with the hole and talk about it if I should relapse. I watched an Aprils fools video form Kripparian and was bored and moved away.

Work is going well. My deadline and my time booking seems at first glance to only be interesting to me, so nobody noticed how less I managed to achieve. Guess that is a benefit of being a 1man team and good at self-promotion. But the missing punishment for my "bad" behavior is also dangerous. Because if no one corrects me, I have to do it myself. The flexibility is great but also challenging. But so far, everything is going well, and I feel actually supported and validated at work and at home. Now it is my turn not to fuck it up basically. If I manage to get in a controlled workflow at work and at home and everything looks stable/good. Then I will be able to be ambitious again. But right now I need to stop overloading myself and deliver on the things which are on my plate all ready.

Shaving continues and feels good. I also find some holes in the day I can spend on drawing. I started a course to learn how web applications work which is interesting and fills in some knowledge gaps which is great. Not only that, but I can also book it under training on the job which is even better.

I am feeling right now liek I improve 1% instead of declining 1% a day. Now its time to keep course.

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1 hour ago, WorkInProgress said:

Work is going well. My deadline and my time booking seems at first glance to only be interesting to me, so nobody noticed how less I managed to achieve. Guess that is a benefit of being a 1man team and good at self-promotion. But the missing punishment for my "bad" behavior is also dangerous. Because if no one corrects me, I have to do it myself. The flexibility is great but also challenging. But so far, everything is going well, and I feel actually supported and validated at work and at home. Now it is my turn not to fuck it up basically. If I manage to get in a controlled workflow at work and at home and everything looks stable/good. Then I will be able to be ambitious again. But right now I need to stop overloading myself and deliver on the things which are on my plate all ready.

I'm in a similar situation: I'm established in a career that gives me a great deal of latitude in how I use my time and where I direct my efforts, and I have some serious job security. It becomes so easy to drift . . .

Giving up games, downgrading my desktop PC and rearranging my household to create different work spaces - a chair in the living room for reading, a table in the back room for writing, with a view out over the yard - seems to be restoring my ability to focus and rekindling my ambitions.

Maybe that's the key: discovering or rediscovering the internal motivation to make progress toward excellence, rather than waiting for someone to come along wielding a stick.

Edited by Zeno
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@Zeno It is a first world problem but it is a problem. I think it is a good measure of your life quality how good/bad your problems are. I.e. if your problems are existential nature, like how can I feed my family this month your quality of life is most of the time more problematic then if your problem is. Noone is forcing me to work, but it kinda feels bad and isn't good for my mental health, so I should push myself more 😉 I am thankful to be in this position.

 

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2021-04-12

I had a busy weekend and with helping someone move and other tasks and don't feel refreshed. It's hard today to focus on work, and therefore I opted for doing some other tasks today (and not logging time at work). I also prioritized my tasks to get a more ordered way of working. Lately, there are many channels here where work gets generated and this is dangerous because it is easy this way to let things slip.

I felt urges to watch youtube etc. as I got a task which was out of my technical expertise (doing some serverwerk with the risk of loosng productive data) and my colleague who is experienced in this kind of stuff wasn't responsive because he is overburdened with other stuff.. I felt helpless but could keep my feet still and he is doing the necessary steps this night and documenting it for me so that I can learn.

Time to go back to work again 🙂

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2021-04-13

I had a really crappy start in the week. No external factors as far as I can tell but did only do the minimum of work and started watching Hearthstone videos again. Did not log time either. This is not working.

I need to deviate from my Key Results.  I like the drawing and shaving part (because it makes me feel better and is challenging for me). But the time logging part is setting me under pressure. And I seemingly react by avoiding this pressure and just wasting my time even more. That is not helpful. I need a goal more tend towards action and triggering less bad feelings. I know that I won't log time without lying right now. Because if I am that unproductive, I will face more severe consequences than I am willing too for this value. Guess honesty isn't an internal value. Being mostly honest: sure. Eating crap for being honest: No. That kind of sucks because I would like to be that kind of person. But I guess there my moral values aren't that defined. Maybe a rationalization of this behavior would be. I am doing good most of the time to the people I care about (mainly my family and friends) about being honest all the time (to my employer). Sounds shitty but I guess I need to be at least honest to myself.

I'll change it into: I do at least 2hours of planned work (not some external obligations) every workday.

I'll start today and focus on getting to a place where I don't feel the need to lie about my time spending. Fake it till I make it!

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