Explanations, not excuses

So after talking a good game on how gamification seems to really be working last week, I’m on track to be missing my weekly pool session.

Normally, this is where I’d spiral in a fit of shame fuelled anger. The usual recriminations: I’m weak, pathetic, how hard is it to do 1 thing, etc. But this year it’s catching me a little different because of phrase I’ve had bouncing around my skull.

Explanations, not excuses.

I often find that as a society we tend to label reasons why we, or others, either don’t do something or don’t meet the mark in someway as an excuse. Excuses are inherently negative; even when we tell ourselves or whoever is the excuse giver that it’s a good excuse, we’re still often implying they’re trying to worm their way out of their commitment and into forgiveness.

We can sometimes do the same for other people, like a parent trying to excuse their child’s behaviour. Always it’s the same; excuse the negative, hope for the positive.

This creates a pretty heavy burden on me when it comes to my own shortcomings. My perfectionism has set a pretty high bar for expected behaviours and outcomes, so excuses come loudly and often to an unforgiving mind. Follow that up with the self-awareness to know what I’m doing on all sides of the debate and I usually just end up doing nothing as a result to avoid the shame.

Until I started reframing it.

If excuses are emotionally charged attempts to avoid consequences and achieve forgiveness, explanations are cold logical attempts to gain understanding, which helps you gain a measure of peace. An explanation for something helps you see the why behind a thing without their being an expectation of judgement. You’re just stating facts after all.

Explanations aren’t consistently perfect; there are bad, or more accurately, lazy, explanations just as there are bad excuses. A lazy explanation is hand waving, surface level thinking. A good explanation then has logic at it’s core and in ‘if this then that’ premise. ‘This happened because that happened causing this.’ Since I’ve started having that phrase beat against the edges of my skull, dealing with incidents and failures have been significantly easier.

So what’s my issue and explanation this week? It’s looking increasingly likely that I’m going to miss my pool/snooker obligations this week. It’s due by Tuesday but various reasons have kept me away from the table.

First, I’m sick. I have a heavy cold that started being symptomatic Monday, progressed to the peak on Wednesday/Thursday, and am now feeling a bit more alive whilst also expelling all of the hard gunk. Not ideal playing fitness.

Second, I had a 3 hour neurodiversity assessment on Friday, something I’ve been dreading for a while, largely because it was a 3 hour appointment talking about my entire life to a new psychiatrist (unsurprisingly, the results were yes, you’re on the spectrum). This also meant I could risk sneaking off the to the local cafe and their terrible table to play pool in case I was late for the appointment.

And yet I’m still gonna try. Now I’m over the worst, and fuelled by a ginger powered concoction, I’m seeing a friend later who needs some support. I’m meeting him down the pub, which I hope has a pool table, but if not I know there’s a table nearby. I’m sure I’ll find my way to it somehow.

But if not, I’m fairly safe in the knowledge that I’ve had some fairly solid reasons this week, and I can go on regardless.

Turns out gamification works

I’ve had a really long week. Between work taking it out of me, deadlines for various appointments and meetings creeping up on me (and in once, dumping 8 forms that needs completing immediately in my lap), and dealing with the aftermath of a very highly stimulating and intense saturday, I’ve not had a lot of energy spare for anything else.

Plus the attempts I did have at playing pool were scuppered. My lunch break game on Tuesday had to be called off to help with stuff at home, and on Friday the second worst pool table I’ve ever played on was actually occupied by someone else that day, which is the last time I go there on a ‘normal’ lunch time.

So late on Friday night, I was considering the possibility of skipping this weeks post and practice session. A week wouldn’t hurt, certainly not on blog posts where I’ve built up a small buffer, although granted not as big as reading double the target. Plus it’s not like I don’t have legitimate reasons to skip a week. Then I checked Beeminder and changed my plans.

Sure, with blogging I had a 1 week grace period, but if I didn’t play snooker or pool by Tuesday, I’d be penalised. Now, the penalty would be $5, so around £4, and no matter how I looked at it it would cost me more to play for an hour that it would to skip.

That thought lasted about 30 seconds, and I booked an hour and a half to happen after my gym session. I even cut my session short despite trying to make my health a priority right now to ensure I got the most of my session. II was not skipping it, not this week, not while I had a hard deadline.

This isn’t my first dalliance with gamification. I’ve done the whole ‘Don’t skip days’ thing with a calendar and pen to cross out each day I’ve done a thing. I’ve tried literal gamification, using the app Habitica. I’ve tried various habit trackers, including using the ones in my mood tracking app Daylio until that got too much. All of them didn’t last longer than a few weeks, and ended up making me resent the activities in question.

Especially Habitica. No matter how hard I tried, I just could not get on board with that.

Each of them failed because it felt too much to track a daily or weekly activity that way, but they also failed because there was zero penalty for failure outside of feeling bad, and I can handle feeling bad.

I purposely set the penalty low at $5 initially because I didn’t want to fall into the trap of failing, paying a stupidly price, and then scrapping it all in a tantrum. But the idea of being hit by $5 still stings. That’s a day’s commute to the office, or the extra treats for my wife I buy. Now I’m back into, that’s half my monthly sub to WoW Classic, and if I keep the failure going it doubles. It’s affordable, but it’s enough of a sting that I paid nearly triple to get a decent session today.

So turns out gamification works on me after all, I just needed the right incentive at the right dose. And I can play catch up at the gym tomorrow, safely in the knowledge that I’ve hit my goal for the week.

An Actual Opponent

Practicing snooker alone has revealed significant flaws in my game when competing against an actual opponent, but despite losing, I remain optimistic and encouraged by the experience.

Easily the second worst pool table I’ve played on (the first worst was also placed next to a pillar…) and the cues provided are for 10 year olds, yet I can play some of my best pool on it.

Pool/Snooker

Out of the three, however, this is probably the one that hits closer to home. It’s the one that connects me most with my wife.

We don’t have a lot of shared interests; or rather we do, but we have different tastes. We both read, but fairly different books at different speeds. We both love music, only hers makes me think of bratty teenagers on the bus, and mine makes her think of weirdos or headbangers.

But then along came snooker.

She’d been vaguely interested in it around about the time of the snooker World Championships, having friends at work who were really into it. Myself, I watched it a lot as a kid, but couldn’t really afford to get into playing it too much (especially as I wasn’t great at it), so when she suggested watching the finals I was only too happy to oblige.

And she was hooked, but actually playing it was intimidating to her. The size of the table, the precision needed to play red-colour-red, no handy referee to keep score, it all got a bit too much. Pool though? Much smaller table, still have to be precise but it’s by and large more forgiving, and much less to think about as a beginner.

It turned out the local pub did free pool on Tuesdays, so we started going on our lunch break, and once she started getting the hang of it we started going to our local pool hall. That was when I noticed the snooker tables tucked away upstairs in a more private room and started paying for that separately.

Neither of us are great, but it’s an activity we can add to the short list of Things We Enjoy Together. Plus, independently, playing snooker has become a bit of a sanctuary of its own for me. A place where I can chill for a few hours and focus on what’s in front of me, rather than everything else around me.

It would just be nice to be better at it; to not spend two or three hours inconsistently making good and terrible shots. We’re getting there, but inconsistently, and that’s why it takes up slot number 3.