Every month I post how many hours I played. Not roughly. Not "a fair bit." A number, down to the minutes. May came in at 7 hours and 30 minutes. June was 5 hours and 5 minutes. I've only been doing this for about two and a half years, which surprises people who assume a guy who blogs his playtime has been at it since Wrath. I hadn't. I'd wanted to for ages and never had a decent way to do it. What changed is that my friend Kevin Brill built an app called TempusGameIt, and the moment it existed the whole problem went away. That's the honest origin story. Not discipline, not some resolution I made. A friend made a good tool, I started using it, and about a month later I realized I finally had the thing I'd been vaguely wanting for a decade. It does exactly one job and does it well, which is my favorite kind of software. People ask why I bother. The answer has three parts and only one of them is flattering. The first part is that I'm an accountant. Thirty-five years of it. I have spent my entire adult life around people who say things like "we're spending a lot on that" and I have spent my entire adult life answering "how much, exactly?" That's not discipline so much as damage. If a thing can be counted, some part of my brain has already started counting it, and once counting it got easy I was never not going to. The second part is that I did not want the number to be a secret from myself. There's a specific lie available to anyone with a hobby and a family, and it goes like this. Oh, I barely play anymore. You say it out loud, everybody nods, and nobody checks. I noticed at some point that I didn't actually know whether it was true. I had a feeling about it, and a feeling is not a number. I mostly wasn't lying, as it turns out. What I found instead was more interesting than a gotcha. My hours don't drift, they cliff. There's no gentle decline. There's forty or fifty hours in a good month and then something happens in real life and the number falls off a table. Which brings me to the third part, and the one I didn't see coming. The hours aren't really about the game. Look at this year. A normal month for me is somewhere in the 40 to 60 hour range. Then we put the house on the market and started moving across the country, and May was 7 and a half hours. June was 5. The last few months, in the thick of it, have been running 3 to 5 hours a month total. That's a life statistic wearing a gaming costume. You could hand somebody two years of my playtime log with no other context and they could point at the exact month my life came apart at the seams and got put back together in a different state. That's what I actually got out of tracking, and it's why I kept going long after the original question was answered. The number measures how much room there was, far more than it measures the hobby. There's a version of this habit that would be miserable, and I want to be clear I'm not doing that one. I'm not tracking hours to cut them down. No target, no budget, no monthly limit I'm holding myself to, and no guilt attached to a high number. When the number is 60 I don't feel bad about it. That's not what the ledger is for. I've spent enough of my career watching people weaponize a metric against the thing it was supposed to describe, and I'm not doing it to myself over a video game. It also gave me a post format that writes itself. Here's the number, here's what it went into, here's what was going on in my life that month. Two years of those and I already find them stranger to reread than I expected, which makes me wish I'd had the tool ten years sooner. There's a whole stretch of expansions I have no numbers for at all, and I'd love to know what Legion actually cost me. Number's low again this month. There's a reason, and it's a good one. Cheers, Joar