When's The Best Time To Practice RTS?

How do I do stuff that's important, but not that important?

I’ve done a number of ladder grinds over the years - StarCraft II, Age of Empires II, and most recently, Age of Empires IV. I’m starting up a new one in 2024 (details TBA), and I thought I would write a bit on how I think about scheduling out practice time for competitive RTS. I think this is a legitimately interesting topic on its own, but selfishly I also want to reflect and see where I can do better this time around.

I get that it’s not exactly an urgent problem; there’s a lot of important stuff worth prioritizing first, like sleep, family time, building a career, gatherings with friends, etc etc. A healthy, happy, and full life places a high priority on all of these things, no objection from me.

But I also think kind-of-important stuff is a great and essential part of life, too. Like watching movies, eating great takeout, climbing mountains, and playing video games! I think it’s totally healthy to make time in life for stuff that’s important, but not that important. In fact, I think it enhances life tremendously.

So, if your thing, like my thing, is grinding competitive real-time strategy games, what’s the best way to fit that into your daily schedule? Let me walk through my own experiences, adding some color along the way.

2018: The After-Work Schedule

Back in 2018, I got really into StarCraft II. I put around 750 hours into the game that year - a massive amount for me personally, especially because it doesn’t include time spent watching tournaments. This was my first “big grind” since I played high-level Age of Empires way back when, and I approached it pretty casually. I had free time after work, so I played after work. Or, at least I tried to.

I guess it depends on the stage of life that you’re in, but one thing I learned is that doing anything work-like after work is not a great plan. I just fundamentally lacked the motivation to grind after particularly tiring days at the office. But I think a larger problem was consistency: because “after work” is a common period of free time, it’s also the best place to fit in more important stuff, like dates or family time or catching up with old friends or even your odd appointment and errand here or there. It’s challenging to consistently do important-but-not-that-important stuff during this time because it frequently conflicts with actually-important stuff.

“Oh, am I free for drinks after work to chat about a big upcoming project? I’m sorry. There’s a ninth grader who’s going to cannon rush me several times in a row, and I need to get ready.”

It seemed good in theory, but for me, after-work ladder turned out to be a setup for frustration and disappointment. I got good results out of it (Master’s 1), but it just wasn’t sustainable. By contrast, after work is a really good time slot for social stuff with friends and family, time with your children, and less mentally taxing activities like working out or playing in a sports league.

(By the way, as an aside, I really dislike doing more work after work, i.e. overtime. I never get anything useful done. Nowadays, when I want to do a bit more, I leave work at a normal hour, do my usual evening thing to reset mentally, and then work from home late in the evening before bed. It’s way more productive, at least for me personally.)

2021-2022: The Crack of Dawn Schedule

When I picked up Age of Empires II in 2021, playing after work was no longer a good option, for the reasons cited above. This time around, I learned from my experience with distance running (and the philosophy from Discipline Equals Freedom), and I laddered between 4:00 and 6:00 AM every day.

This was incredible. Setting aside the fact that it’s challenging to get up at 4 AM for the express purpose of playing video games, I’ve never had a more productive or enjoyable ladder experience. I look back on it with such fondness!

The night owl in me always believed that wake time is not very important. Whether you’re going to bed at 1 and waking up at 8, or going to bed 9 and waking up at 4, it all works out to be the same - you get the same number of waking hours and the same number of sleep hours. The math checks out, but it turns out to be more complicated than just numbers.

One thing I noticed was a significant difference in mentality between the end and beginning of the day. I was more focused in the morning compared to the evening, meaning I learned more and absorbed more information. I also felt better rested and more even-keeled, making me less likely to tilt and more likely to approach losses from the right perspective. It helped that I paired my morning ladder with my morning coffee, meaning I could apply that initial jolt of caffeine directly to my practice sessions.

“Ah, you’ve told me my play is shit, and you’ve decided to offensive gg? Fantastic stuff. Thank you for this learning experience. Have a great rest of your day.”

But, you might observe - the morning is filled with tons of important stuff, like gym time, childcare, dog walking, and commuting. There’s nowhere good to slot in RTS. And that’s true enough, so I slid my day back a couple hours to create a new slot.

This leads to the second advantage: there’s nothing else going on at 4AM, nothing to compete for your time and attention. While that’s somewhat also true at 11PM, the truth is that a good number of Americans like to stay up late, and that means there’s a lot of great stuff happening late at night, like good TV and good food. For me personally, when I stayed up late, my wife did too, meaning we would hang out and watch movies a lot of the time. By contrast, there’s nothing going on at 4AM - the only other people who are awake are grinding just like you are.

This was a really successful experience. I hesitate to make a broad recommendation, but in general I think this schedule works well for many working adults - the biggest obstacle (aside from having genuine important commitments after 9PM, which is hopefully rare for most folks) is your discipline about waking up early. Once you get that into place, I’d wager these will become the most productive two hours of your day.

2023: The “Whenever I Have Time” Schedule

I grinded Age of Empires IV after my son was born, meaning I was spending the vast majority of my time either taking care of him or doing errands and housework. The 4 AM schedule only worked occasionally, because he often needed to be fed or changed at that time; in fact, there was no consistent slot where I could dedicate a block of time to playing ladder. This meant I had to play whenever I had a free moment, often leaving games right in the middle if needed.

(We were very fortunate that this phase passed pretty quickly; we started sleep training around the 3-4 month mark, ended his dream feeds around the 6 month mark, and no longer picked him up before 6AM around the 7 month mark. Of course, every kid is different, so YMMV.)

This was a hard schedule to follow. It’s not so much that I had things competing for my time or attention; I only played when I was genuinely free. But it’s hard to context switch back and forth so frequently. I wrote just a couple weeks back on how it’s preferable to play something low-stakes in these small blocks of time. I speak from experience!

I think the results of that grind speak for themselves in the fact that this is doable, and even sustainable so long as you’re sufficiently motivated. But it became challenging as work got busy, because those 15-minute blocks shifted to rapidly sending a few emails, responding to messages, reviewing some code or putting out a couple code reviews. It’s just the reality of important-but-not-that-important stuff - if there’s something actually important that can slot in, that’s what you’ll prioritize. And once you stop playing consistently, you start playing badly, you tilt, you stop learning, and the whole enterprise collapses.

Again, just my experience, but it’s my belief that there’s no such thing as “competitive RTS when I have time”, because if your schedule is already jam-packed, “when I have time” will get filled by something else. At least for me, I’ve got to be more intentional about it.

2024: Back To 4 AM, With Modifications

Now that my son sleeps through the night and I slot distance runs in the evening, I’m back to being able to write and play at 4 AM. And because I’ve been working on this draft for three weeks (apologies), I’ve actually had a chance to give it a go and see how it’s landing.

I’ve managed to play 5 out of the last 19 days, which isn’t great. Finishing up this article gave me a chance to reflect on that, and I think an important component is lack of exercise. Due to my recent international trip, I’ve run only three or four times in the past 5 weeks, and I’ve started to experience all the usual symptoms of not working out - sleepiness in the mid-afternoon, difficulty waking up, general lethargy, etc. This has made it challenging to get up at 4 AM consistently.

As the jet lag wore off I got a bit better about running, and things have started recovering. It’s always been funny to me that burning calories exercising actually improves overall energy levels. I don’t pretend to understand the science, but it makes a big difference.

I’m also reading a book called Unlimited Memory, and one of the concepts it discusses is that re-igniting your motivation on a regular basis is important if you’re going to try to do something hard. It offers the PIC acronym - purpose, interest, and curiosity - as three dimensions of motivation worth establishing and revisiting as you grind.

I’ve been terrible about my PIC. (I’ll talk more about my overall motivation later in the year.) I ought to be reminding myself why I want to wake up early every time I go to sleep, but most nights I just crash, and I thus wake up the next morning absolutely slamming that snooze button. This is the other thing I want to work on to make this grind a success.

Anyway, I mentioned last time that I want to start putting together a meta report, and I think this grind will be my attempt at making a prototype. I have high hopes, but I’ll keep you folks updated.

Final Thoughts

One thing I’ll add before closing is that I get that everyone has their own time table; it’s for this reason that I frame this article as my own personal experiences, with a few soft recommendations here and there. I’ve spoken about the 4AM schedule with enough people to know that it irks some folks, who feel the need to proactively explain why they can’t go to bed early (even if I never suggest to them that they should); over the years I’ve come to realize that there’s a lot of complicated emotions wrapped up in the idea of maximizing personal productivity, and I think some people feel a glow of shame if they can’t reliably get up early to grind.

Far be it from me to make anyone feel that way. This is an article about stuff that’s important-but-not-that-important; the last thing people should feel bad about is the infrequency with which they’re able to play ladder.

I will say one small thing, though. One lesson I’ve learned over the years is that meaningful activities are very easy to de-prioritize in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Whatever it is that brings you joy - be intentional about making time for it. It’s worth it. At least, that’s my experience :-)

Until next time,
brownbear

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