M2M Day 28: I only spent 22 hours becoming a (pseudo) grandmaster
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For November, my goal is to memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards in less than 2 minutes.
The month of November is nearly done, and I’m curious how much time I actually spent becoming a pseudo memory grandmaster.
Going through my practice logs, here’s what I found:
Weekdays
On a normal Monday-Friday, I spent 1.5 hours practicing, divided into three 30 minute chunks over my morning commute, my evening commute, and my in-apartment nighttime session.
Two of the Fridays, I worked from home (i.e. no commute) and practiced around 45 minutes on those days.
Weekends
On Saturdays and Sundays, I would practice for about 45 minutes each day.
Special days
Once I was in New York for Thanksgiving, I was only practicing around 30 minutes per day.
During the month, I also took four days off (with two of those being in New York).
Doing the math
(11 normal weekdays * 1.5 hours) + (2 WFH Fridays * 0.75 hours) + (3 normal weekend days * 0.75 hours) + (4 days in New York * 0.5 hours) = 22.25 total hours
This is less than I expected.
Sure, 22.25 hours is still a significant amount of time, but it really isn’t that crazy of a commitment. It’s the same amount of time necessary to listen to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as an audiobook. Or, the same amount of time necessary to binge watch two seasons of Game of Thrones. Or, the same amount of time necessary to fly roundtrip from San Francisco to New York twice.
Evenly distributed over the month, it’s like I spent 45 minutes every day practicing. My guess is that everyone reading this post has at least 45 minutes of relaxing time every day (for the next 30 days) that they can instead use to pursuit mastery.
Just something to think about…
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
