On Saturday I set the alarm for six. No kids, no noise, an hour and a half all to myself.
At seven I was still on the library screen.
I had gone in and out of Guardians of the Galaxy twice. I had read the entire store description for Death Stranding, which I bought two years ago. I had sorted my library by purchase date, which is what a man does when he already knows he is not going to play.
At seven twenty the little one woke up.
Up at six for nothing. Fucking idiot.
And it happened again. Another Saturday. And another.
I am not the sharpest, but every so often two neurons collide by accident and something clicks.
I was running my library like the naive team lead I used to be.
Because at work the tasks do not queue up politely. They come at you like a horde of zombies, and for every one you put down, three more show up. For years I tried to finish them: calendars, planning, head down, do, do, do. The donkey running after a carrot he is carrying himself.
Four years ago I stopped running. I still never finish the list, and I do not care any more, because I am sure I picked the right things. I kill exactly the zombies I need to get through, not one more.
What I had not noticed is that on the sofa I was still running.
And I did not come up with it on my own, I got it from a book from 2001 that you might know. Getting Things Done, by David Allen. The good idea in it is that you do not sort tasks by how overdue they are, but by the context where you can actually do them: at your computer, with your phone in your hand, out running errands.
That is where it breaks when you bring it to the controller.
At work the context sits outside you: where you are and what tool you have got. On a Saturday at seven in the morning, or a Tuesday at eleven thirty at night, the context is you. What head you turn up with, how long they will leave you alone, who is sitting next to you.
So I stopped asking myself what I wanted to play, which is a question you cannot answer with your brain in airplane mode, and started asking a different one: when is each game for.
My backlog is not a to do list any more. And it is not an investment portfolio either, which is the metaphor going round these days and is the same shit with a fancier collar: it swaps the debt for shares and leaves you exactly the same, strangled.
My backlog is a menu. It does not ask me what I still have not played. It asks how I am turning up, and shows me only what fits.
I call it the Situation List.
And no, this is not about squeezing the hour or playing faster. It is about not spending the only hour you had standing outside the restaurant, reading the menu.
Given the choice, I would rather spend it eating than choosing.
The best part is that I did not really invent it. People already do this on their own, only backwards.
There is a guy on a Spanish gaming forum who posted a screenshot of his library with a Steam category called "For the distant future". That is this exact same thing, kicked in the wrong direction: labelling games for a moment that is never going to come.
And on a subreddit full of dads, another one said he had cut everything competitive out of his life and kept only the games he could drop at a moment's notice. He did not call it a system. He called it what I play now.
The following Saturday it took me a minute to choose.
One minute. One.
I did not play better and I did not play more. I played what I needed, which turned out to be the thing I had not managed in two years.
I do not pick a game any more. I pick a when.
For when…
…you have got an hour ahead of you and you know anyone could cut it short: Dorfromantik. You place hexagonal landscape tiles on a board, matching rivers to rivers and wheat to wheat, and a little tune plays. No enemies, no timer, nobody waiting on you.
It saves every time you place a tile, so you can drop the controller mid move and come back the next day right where you were. A run goes thirty to sixty minutes. The small print: the autosave uses a single slot, and starting another run takes the one you had. One click on the save icon pins it and then it stays.
It is not for you if you need something to go wrong to want another go: there is no losing here, just a run that ends, and that calm is exactly what bores some people. It is on Steam, and if some night you want the same thing without a screen, there is a board game version.
Hit reply and tell me how long it took you to choose last time. I read every one.