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DeathJester's Dojo
The SECRET to Dueling Success
Time Management
by Bryan Camareno a.k.a. DeathJester
August 28, 2006 

Welcome to DeathJester’s Dojo! This week’s topic is another personal favorite: Time Management. At first thought, this topic is both intimidating and hard to wrap your brain around. It’s all-encompassing; you can’t escape it. What I will do here today is teach you how to become a master of your own time.

Time Management for the YGO Player

Why should YGO players have to worry about using their time wisely? What difference does it make whether or not I play for 4 hours versus 6 hours of Yugioh? It makes a huge difference to the Yugioh player who wants to succeed by maximizing the amount of time he spends on the game. No one wants to spend more time they don’t have to spend on anything, because they won’t be able to make time for anything else to need or want to do during their day/week/month/year.

Each person has many roles they have to play in their lives. Each role requires a certain amount of time allocated to it to maintain any kind of sanity. I have to do this and so do you. Proper Management of your time is an important resource to all TCG players, especially Yugioh players.

Let’s consider the facts…

Yugioh is a game that requires a bit of time. The amount of time you have for an official tournament match is 40 minutes. You have to finish 3 games within 40 minutes which means you’ve only got a little over 13 minutes per game. Sometimes, a match will go on longer than 40 minutes. Not that it needs to in the first place, which is why we have our useful end-of-match procedures. It really shouldn’t take more than 40 minutes to finish a match in the first place. Some players honestly believe that spending more than a minute and a half thinking about a move will make a significant impact. Half the time it doesn’t. Call me impatient. I don’t care. I’m not convinced that it takes that long to make a game-play decision in a game that requires you to think on your feet.

You can add this “time gun” to your testing regimens. If it takes about 13 minutes or so to finish a game then you should set this as your time limit per-game in testing. If you’ve taken a look at my previous article (How-to: Test-Play Like a Champion Part 2) then my personal testing regimen of 10 games per session should last 2 hours & 10 minutes maximum. As a rule of thumb: 1 session = 2 hours. This is assuming that your games don’t go on for more than 13 minutes a piece. This game is relatively quick, especially considering the next format.

What does this mean to you?

You want to be the time-conscious Yugioh player right? You want to be able to achieve maximum results in the shortest amount of time possible. You have things to do like everyone else. You can’t really afford to spend 6 hours a day on YGO. Doing so would be ludicrous. Managing how your time is spent with your life will determine how successful you are with anything.

Every task requires a bit of time. YOU are responsible for allocating the sufficient amount of time to every task you wish to accomplish on any given day. You can’t make any excuses about time management. I certainly don’t. Look at what I do on a weekly basis:

• I work 40 hours a week.
• I write a 3-4 page article for Pojo.com every week. That’s about 2000+ words.
• I write Card of the Day articles everyday.
• I go to college full-time at ITT Tech.
• I have a girlfriend and it’s serious too (geez…)
• I’m a Level 2 Judge. Thus I make it my business to use these skills and make money with them by Judging Regional Events and Pre-Releases all over Florida.
• I play Yugioh competitively
• I test on a regular basis
• I can even find time to do homework AND read 1-2 books a week for leisure.

How do I do it? Some people don’t even know where to find the time to do anything with the 24 hours a day they are given. 24 hours is LONG time. That’s 1440 minutes a day! Do you know what productive people can do with just 2 hours?

This is your goal. You want to be the super productive, master of his time, highly successful YGO Player. You can’t do it by being lazy. You’ve got to get out there and “do what you gotta do” as they say.

Then again, how do you tackle an enormous task like managing your time? Well, like anything you need to plan ahead. You need a system that you can use to manage your time wisely. A simple tip is to dedicate your energies to productive activity and minimize the overwhelming amount of time spent not doing anything. There’s nothing wrong with unwinding and having a little fun. We all need it to stay reasonably sane and stress-free. Too much non-productivity is infectious. Honestly, what’s more fun than doing what you are supposed to do? Not doing it all.

Time Mastering Techniques

Time Management is actually quite simple. The techniques are extremely easy to apply. The only thing you have to remember is that time management requires self-discipline. This is something most people don’t have. These are techniques that I have learned to use as a result of many failures and disappointments along the road. They are practical, sound, and something you should implement into your life. You will be staggered by the results you get. Once I start listing these techniques you’ll easily discover why these require quite a bit of self-discipline to be effective:

NOTE: Email me at deathjester86@gmail.com with any questions, comments, or testimonials. Next week, I will start a ‘Mail Bag’ of sorts and answer your questions right here on Pojo.com! 

• Block your time – This one is a real killer. If you’re around my age (19) it’s hard enough to even just get out of bed in morning. Let me tell you something though; this WORKS. This technique requires you to use your calendar or day planner religiously. When you have multiple tasks to accomplish and no idea where to start, this is where a day planner comes in handy. Most of the time these day planners give you a page where you can schedule your time by the half-hour or the hour. I personally love blocking my time. I have developed the skill to accurately judge how much time something I NEED to do will take to complete. This helps me tremendously with scheduling my time to accomplish multiple projects at once.

Blocking your time is basically making appointments with yourself. These appointments must be carefully planned and made inviolate (meaning these appointments are uninterruptible by anyone). The lazy player likes to waste time. He can sit there and play the game for 7 hours for no productive reason when he has to test for a competition. Block your time, it makes large projects seem a lot smaller and easier to manage. For example, if you are going to block your time, make sure you accurately gauge how much time a task will take to complete. For example, my testing method takes 2 hours or less to complete. In this case, you should block 2 hours of your time to this task and do not allow anyone to interrupt that.

• Minimize your excuses – A lot of people like to use the excuse “Life happens” when they manage to be late for an appointment or even late for work. “My (insert family member here) needed me for such and such activity” “Traffic was really horrible this morning.” “I’m not a morning person.” All of these excuses are B.S. Of course, “Life happens” and you can control how you respond to it. If traffic is bad in the morning, which it ALWAYS is. Wake-up earlier so you won’t hit traffic. Please, don’t make excuses for yourself.

Here’s an exercise, try to write down the number of excuses you make per day. When you catch yourself making an excuse, write it down. You’ll be stunned as to how many excuses the average person will make a day. The “raw data” you get from this exercise will completely change the way you live your life. It can be applied to anything, even YGO. Catch yourself when you make an excuse about your deck or your skills. The one thing to remember is that only YOU can and will do something about it. No excuses.

They are interrupted by every little thing that comes their way. If your friend John decides he wants to call you up and ask you if you want to go out while you’re in the middle of something that you feel is important; he says “c’mon let’s go out it’ll be fun, you can always do that later on or tomorrow” and the average person would drop what they’re doing and go out with John.

I understand you don’t want to be rude to your friend John and tell him that he is interrupting you in the middle of something important, but in reality John is showing you that he does not value your time and is telling you that you are NOT the master of your own time, he is. The #1 reason why people don’t get more things done is because of interruptions. People let themselves be interrupted at any possible moment in their lives. How can you finish an important project or test for that Regional you have nest weekend if your bozo friends keep interrupting you.

• Minimize interruptions – This one is big for people my age. If you’re anything like a normal kid in this generation, you grew up using the Internet, E-Mail, and IM Chat. All very useful tools and they are all tools that can kill your time. I know some people near my age like to multi-task and keep multiple IM chat windows up and talk to 5 different people while writing a paper, that’s great. However, you’re not really getting anything done. Quality work comes from absolute concentration. How will you be able to come up with the most creative ideas for deck building or writing articles if you hear a damn IM “jingle” every 10 seconds? From six different people!? Bad news, you can’t

Technology is supposed to allow us to be more productive. It’s seductive in that sense where it gives the illusion that you are more productive. We’ll use IM Chatting as an example here. I’ll break down why this is so detrimental to your time.

Let’s imagine that you are using YVD to test for a tournament online. You have your IM window open and you have about 900 or so friends on there (everybody does). Let’s say you are trying to concentrate on making your creative deck better against the “deck to beat”. Suddenly one of your friends instant messages you. You have to stop what you are doing and see what he/she wanted. Your friends are important right?

After you finish messaging your friend you continue with the game. Three minutes later you hear the little IM “jingle” and you HAVE to answer it. I mean, if they’re IMing you it MUST be more important than what you’re doing right now. Now you have to IM them back. Think about how much time it takes to IM someone, probably about 10 seconds or more just to think about what to say. Why? Because you were trying to concentrate and you were interrupted. Thus, you lost your concentration on the game and had to answer their stupid IM. At this point you are probably somewhat perturbed and you REALLY trying to concentrate, it takes you a little bit longer to come up with what to say to friends A and B.

Each interruption may take 1 minute away from your task at-hand. The average internet-based teenager or young adult probably receives about 20-30 IMs in one hour. And I’m being modest here. Imagine you get 5 IMs from 6 different people consecutively in 2 minutes in any particular order. That’s 30 messages you have to come up with something to say in response. After you are done responding (which will take you 10 minutes or more), you get even MORE IMs from 6 other people. There’s another 5-10 minutes down the drain. Do you see where I’m going with this?

IM Chat can and will destroy your productivity. “Instant Communication” is actually one of the best ways to sabotage your concentration and the effective use of your time. I don’t care how many IM windows you can have at once and still play a game or write a paper. Good for you, I’d rather not get interrupted, write my paper or play my game 3 times faster than you can and talk to my friends uninterrupted for as much time as I allow afterwards. Thus, I will have the better paper or will have played the better game and while you’re still taking a beating from your IM buddies. Do yourself a favor, if you’re going to be doing something on the Internet that is important or productive, please turn off the IM Chat. Your friends can wait. They don’t respect your time. How can expect them to if you don’t train them how to?

• Try to link everything to your goals – Linking your activities to your goals helps build the self-discipline you need to maintain your time management strategies. You need strong self-discipline to be a highly productive individual. Remember my article about Goal Setting? Stop right now. Go read that article. Once you have your goals written down, continue reading.

Take a look at your goals and ask yourself: Is what I’m doing at this moment moving me closer towards my goals? If you can say “yes” to this question more than half the time you are good to go. You’ve got to be perfectly honest with yourself. You can’t say “yes” for the sake of saying “yes”. You won’t get anywhere that way. This is a mental exercise that will build self-discipline and strong goal-setting/striving skills that you need to achieve peak success by changing the way your subconscious mind thinks.

• Learn to be punctual – Being on time to places you have to go to is a tremendously underutilized skill. Yes, it’s a skill. People just don’t do it anymore. Being punctual provides personal power. How so? Let’s say you scheduled a testing session with you and your friends from 4:00PM – 6:00PM a week in advance for Tuesday. You created this meeting at this time because you have homework or something important you have to do afterwards that doesn’t involve them.

So, your friends show up on Tuesday at 5:00PM instead of 4. You just lost an hour of testing because your friends were late. You told them to be there at 4 so the lot of you could get some quality testing for 2 hours. What does their tardiness communicate to you? They were late because they have no respect for the value of your time.

Not only were they extremely rude by showing up an hour late, but they just slapped you in the face and placed a low value on your time (which you place a very high value on I hope). They had a week to prepare for this session. What’s going to happen now is that the group will only have 1 hour to test and it will be on the poorest quality imaginable. On top of that, it will probably take 15 minutes to get fully prepared to test. Now, you only have 45 minutes to test. That’s not even enough for 5 well-played and documented games! This is not acceptable.

Learn this lesson well. This is the type of message you communicate when you apply for a job, make new friends, do business, etc. You want to be there a bit early or on-time every time. No exceptions, no excuses. If you don’t have enough control over your own life to be on time to something that is scheduled in advance, then I have little hope for you my friend.

Let’s come to conclusions here…

            I just gave you 5 time-management techniques that I personally use to do what I do. You will see these pay off at future events and I will be here to report the results to you. These techniques will only work if you actually apply them. If you read them and don’t try them, how are you going to profit from them?

            These are 5 of my personal techniques and you are more than welcome to add more to them. Just make sure that you take action. If you have questions, I’ve got answers. Email me at deathjester86@gmail.com. I’m starting a new ‘Mail Bag’ (next week) series of sorts featuring your questions, comments, and testimonials right here on Pojo.com. You’re not the only one who has questions. This material is a lot to take in. There is no such thing as a “stupid” question. Don’t be obnoxious and you’ll get published on this ‘Mail Bag’.

            Until next time, remember to play hard, think about your moves, and most importantly…have fun!