Getting Back to Watching Live Sports

If you haven't noticed, I'm a bit of a sports fan. My two biggest sports are baseball and hockey. I grew up playing baseball, and have been playing ice hockey for the last 13 years. They're sports I love and follow. The one thing I haven't been all that great with is watching them.

I'm not ignoring what's going on, I follow what's going on with the teams I follow, Phillies (baseball), Flyers (hockey), Eagles (NFL), and 76ers (basketball). I even started following women's hockey and have adopted the Minnesota Frost as my PWHL team. I know my Phillies have been starting out slow since the all star break struggling against the Mets, Dodgers and Yankees. I just haven't watched any of the games. I generally follow what's going on in the leagues for the most part as well.

As an aside, I still can't believe LeBron James signed with the 76ers, and seeing all the reactions around the league has been pretty crazy. I may or may not have already bought a jersey.

I think one of the primary reasons I haven't watched much sports lately is that I generally like my weekday evening routine and have been hesitant to mess with it. Dinner is generally done around 6-6:30. I spend the next 1-2 hours writing, working on a side project, playing video games. Then around 8:30, I put my phone down, take my watch off, and go out to the couch and read for about an hour. Between 9:30 and 9:45 I stop reading and journal. Then I brush my teeth and get myself ready for bed, targeting lights out and in bed between 10 and 10:15.

The routine I feel has generally helped me calm myself down prior to bed to help me fall asleep and get some better sleep in general. Turning sports on can sometimes feel a little weird since I'm likely going to want to turn the game off partway through when I go to start reading. Turning a baseball game off in the 6th inning or a hockey game off after the 2nd period could potentially cause me to miss what could be an exciting comeback or finish. It'd also cut into my reading time to finish the game out. I like my routine.

I probably am coming off as pretty set in my ways, and that's probably not an incorrect thought. I like the routine I have, but I do miss the fun and excitement of live sports. The fun of sports is that you have some of the world's best athletes competing in an exciting game. There's been a saying in the NFL, "any given Sunday" and it's true in just about any sport. In any given game, anything can happen. The underdog can come out and beat the favorite. A team that should by all metrics run away with a game could get smoked by a team favored to lose. It's fun and exciting to watch. I'll admit it can certainly be nerve-wracking when the team you're cheering for comes out and plays like crud or the game is closer than you'd like, but that's sports.

I want to try to work some live sports into my evening routine. I'm not entirely sure what that's going to look like just yet, but it's something I've been wanting to do, so I'm going to find a way to make it work. The Phillies are playing most nights and I've been meaning to try to get into basketball, and the WNBA is up and running as well. I'd be able to watch the games and work on my side projects easily enough. My goal for writing might be a little trickier.

I generally need to stay focused more for writing. I try various tricks to keep my focus such as Raycast's focus sessions, and browser plugins meant to block access to sites like Mastodon & Bluesky that would steal my focus. I also have been trying to keep my phone in a different room to help as well. Having a show or sports on TV is most definitely going to steal my focus. There are no ifs ands or buts about it. I have been trying to spend anywhere from 15 to 60 minutes a day writing. It's something I want to get better at and the only way to really get better is to write more. I want to finish the novel I started and share more of my thoughts here on my blog. I'm going to have to find some good ways to be able to mix that in as well.

I have no doubt this can be done, it's just going to require some experimentation with how I spend my time and how everything pieces together. I have in the past tried to schedule my evenings even down to the 15 minute mark like one would schedule work meetings throughout the day. It was a nice idea in theory, but would more often than not fail miserably in practice. Life is never as simple as you'd like it to be. Maybe it will come down to simply focusing on some writing immediately after dinner to give myself more time after for turning on the game. I'm not sure really. It's something I can certainly try out over the next few weeks.

Maybe the Phillies will even get off their butts and give the Braves a run for the NL East.