I’m a visiting a friend for the weekend, and then flying back to San Francisco on Sunday night.I had planned this trip three months ago, with little regard for its implications on the M2M project, which was a bit risky: If I hadn’t finished this month’s challenge up until this point, these four days would be particularly valuable.Nevertheless, I successfully completed a Saturday NYT puzzle I actually think that my early success can almost be fully attributed to this trip: In my mind, I operated as if I only had from July 1 until July 26 to complete this month’s challenge, and as a result, I boosted the intensity of each day’s training accordingly (in order to properly amortize the necessary practice across the allotted days).In fact, the entire M2M project is an exercise in Parkinson’s Law: By strictly limiting myself to one month of practice, I’m forcing myself to fit the necessary work in this accelerated timeframe.Ultimately, with this project in general, I hope to demonstrate that we don’t need unlimited time to achieve our goals.
I was wrong, but still — I surprised myself once again with this week’s performance.Something about being on camera pushes me to perform at my highest level, so I plan to film all puzzles moving forward.And here’s the full video, if you’re interested in watching me To be fair, Rex Parker does exclaim that this particular puzzle “Anyway, I will continue training a little bit over the next week, but it seems like I’m at the point where I just need to run through the remaining 2017 puzzles and see if I can perfectly crack one of them.
).Anyway, I’m excited to head to LA.
They’re things you can also buy at AUTO PARTS STORES.55A: There are other little connections in this puzzle; today we have CRED, for credibility, and REPUTATIONS.11D: This is a tricky train of thought — I came up with it after the fact, having solved this entry on crosses. There was a time when I would see a crossword puzzle and think, “Oh, fun, a crossword puzzle!” All too often now, when beginning a crossword, my mental … In 17 minutes, I finished the Friday (with one mistake), which is probably my best performance all month.Out of habit, I typed “rex” into my browser, rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com autofilled, and I clickedAs soon as the page loaded, I realized my mistake, but it was too late: The answers to today’s Saturday puzzle were rendered right in front of me.I quickly looked away, but my brain had already registered some of the answers.As a result, I couldn’t fairly solve today’s puzzle on video, which is particularly frustrating given that the puzzle is apparently “suuuuper-easy”.Nevertheless, I had to opt for Plan B: The 2017 Saturday puzzles.So far this month, I haven’t solved a single 2017 Saturday puzzle, saving them for this last week of this month’s challenge.Today, I decided to start at the beginning with the January 14 puzzle.
Usually, as consolation for temporarily squashed confidence, the outcome is better and the process is ultimately more rewarding.In any case, after this month is finished, I’d like to circle back and figure out how to solve Thursday puzzles.However, until then, I will continue to strive to crack a Saturday puzzle this month, even if it means temporarily sacrificing my Thursday-solving abilities.A few days ago, I started adding non-Saturday crosswords (i.e. Hopefully, I’ll get a good night sleep tonight and my brain will have a more normal day tomorrow.So far this month, my training has been almost exclusively focused on two things: 1. Here’s what the puzzle looked like after I checked for the first time…So, while I can almost finish a Friday puzzle, I can barely make a dent in a Thursday puzzle. It took me a good few minutes to find my rhythm, but once I did, I built some solid momentum.If you watch the entire hour-long video, with commentary, you’ll see me struggle for the first few minutes, and then, all of a sudden, something clicks in my brain and I start performing at the upper boundary of my training.Today’s solve was a major confidence boost, and I’m looking to ride this high for as long as I can.More likely though, I will need to continue aggressively training, forcing myself to once again confront the limits of my own intelligence, which is always But, this kind of training is how effective learning happens, so I’m prepared for the temporary (sometimes, oddly pleasurable) pain that’s yet to come.Reviewing the video, it’s fascinating to see how my momentumIn the past week, these standstills have been my biggest mental vulnerability: It’s easy to give up on the puzzle in these moments.Therefore, it’s important that I specifically focus my training on overcoming these points of low momentum, and maintaining the necessary In the past week, I was having noticeable trouble getting past #1. But, in fact, this progression most likely isn’t ideal — Instead, if the goal is to speak the language, then the best path forward is to jump right to that step.Of course, it’s hard to follow a self-guided path (and not the normal process): If you create your own progression and don’t succeed in the way you hope, it’s easy to blame yourself.
asked Apr 27 in New York Times by Mr.G | 28 views. An ART TEACHER “might grade on the curve,” i.e., rate your artistic ability, as exhibited in swoops, doodles, arcs, loops, twists, spirals and other bendy lines.
I memorized at a rate of 400 words every 54 minutes, so I spent a total of I mostly used the Letter Trainer as a twice-daily 15-minute warm-up activity during my last week of training.
Every other answer was clued in a completely different, unrecognizable manner.This is much less promising, and clearly very far from the elusive Thus, it begs the question… Should I even continue training with the “Crossword Trainer”?Despite this less-than-optimal analysis, I still think that I should continue — at least for another week.For the next few days, I’ll proceed with this training method, but I’ll need to figure out a better way to quantify my progress moving forward.When my alarm went off this morning, I was already awake. In total, I spent During the month, I completed 62 NYT crossword puzzles.