M2M Day 266: A day without a crossword
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For July, my goal is to solve a Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle in one sitting without any aid.
Yesterday, I successfully solved a Saturday NYT crossword puzzle, officially completing this month’s challenge.
I had expected to grind this challenge out until the very last day, so I was certainly surprised at how quickly things came together in the past few days.
While I’m excited about the victory, its early arrival disrupted this month’s narrative arc a bit. I still have much I want to say about my training methods and insights — especially because half of this month’s goal was to discover and codify a reproducible training approach — so, I can use this remaining week to do just that.
Today, I took a break from crosswords, which was a bit of a jolting change: For the past three weeks, I’ve been cramming 2–3 hours of puzzles into 20-minute increments throughout my day, so I forgot what it was like to have all that free time.
In place of crosswords, I was able to crank through the audiobook rendition of The Big Short today (I’d recommend it. This was my second listen, and it was still just as good). I’ve had less time this month for “reading”, so I was happy to enjoy a good, entertaining story (especially when it’s Michael Lewis).
Anyway, tomorrow I’ll return to the regularly scheduled program, and discuss my approach for mastering crossword puzzles.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
