A typical day during progress

To give you guys an idea what my life has been like for most of the time after Cataclysm launch, let me show you how a typical weekday during the progress used to be for me. This isn't really any single given day, but rather a composite of how the days went on average - on some days the raids started earlier or later and I didn't always wake up at the same time, but this should give a reasonable idea what it was like.

 

08:10

Alarm goes off, I generally fail to get up on the first try and just hit snooze...

 

08:20

Alarm goes off for the second time, now I really have to get up if I want to get to work in time so off to shower I go.

 

08:35

Done with shower, so it's time to wake up the laptop from standby and check the news. The first sites I check are our forums and mmo-champion and some local news sites. Getting some breakfast would be nice at this point, but usually there's nothing left in the fridge.

 

08:50

At this point my long-ish hair is usually dry enough, so it's time to get dressed and shave and get ready to leave for work.

 

09:00

Off to work. First a roughly 10min (at my walking pace, which most people consider to be a bit on the fast side) walk to the station, then a few minutes of waiting for the train (unless it's late as usual) followed by a 15-20min ride to the railway station where I switch to the metro for another 5min ride to where I work. Somewhere along the way I usually pick up "lunch", meaning a muffin or two...

 

09:50

At the office, working hard on fixing one SEPTJBY or other (that's Someone Else's Problem That Just Became Yours, for those who don't work in the consulting business) and occasionally refreshing forums and checking IRC.

 

16:50

Notice it's time to leave if I want to make it to the raid, curse for a moment about the day being left short again meaning I have to do extra hours later on. The trip home is pretty much just a reverse version of the trip to work in the morning, except for a quick visit to buy some groceries on the way if I have time (which more often than not I don't, because it's rare for the trains to be on time during the winter).

 

17:45

At home. Usually there's only time left for a quick snack before the raid starts, often even that has to happen during the first trash pulls of the raid.

 

18:00

Raid starts.

 

02:00

Raid ends. Now it's time to do some daily quests, maybe a random heroic if necessary to reach the Valor Point cap on either of the raiding characters and restock consumables for next raid.

 

03:00

Done with all the "mandatory" stuff ingame, so it's time to get some food in real life. Depending on how lazy I am, that means either cooking something or just tossing a frozen pizza in the oven or nuking something in the microwave. Most of the time, it turns out to be pizza. Check the forums and news while eating. Try to fix some addons, do some parses on combatlogs to figure out boss ability timers and such.

 

04:00

Finally ready for bed.

 

 

As you can see this is pretty hardcore schedule to sustain for multiple weeks and in fact I could not have done it for much longer had the last bosses not died. Another thing that helps immensely in finding the motivation to do something like this is seeing the results - had we been unable to get any world firsts during the progress I suspect I might've ran out of motivation to keep to this kind of schedule much earlier, but seeing the bosses die, knowing there's an end to it in sight makes it much easier to tolerate hardship.

A lot of people would wonder "Why does anyone do something like this?", for which I have no better answer than vanity, wanting to be one of the best. That's the desire that dominates most aspects of my life, both in gaming and at work.