How to make time for puzzles every day
Even the busiest days still have opportunities for a quick crossword, Sudoku or word puzzle. Our expert shares 6 simple tips for making puzzling a habit.
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Even the busiest days still have opportunities for a quick crossword, Sudoku or word puzzle. Our expert shares 6 simple tips for making puzzling a habit.
A good puzzle is a means of escape from the wider world, a means of escape from the mundane and the everyday. But the mundane and the everyday can take up a lot of time, and the wider world can be extremely unpredictable.
So how do you make sure you have a little time each day to step back from the routine and the chaos and give your brain something more playful to tackle, just for a few minutes?
This may seem like a trivial question, but it’s important to remember that taking time to play a puzzle or two is never time wasted.
When you’re engaged with a puzzle, your brain is active. Your imagination and your problem-solving skills are both getting a workout. Crucially, you’re also giving yourself a little mental space from the rest of the things in your life. This means that, when you’re done with your puzzle and the wider world calls again, you’ll be more prepared for everything it contains.
So here are some simple tips for how to find the minutes for a little bit of puzzling fun each day. You may be surprised by how much time you find!
This one comes back to the idea that time spent with a puzzle is actually doing your brain a bit of good. If a puzzle improves your mood or gives your mental abilities a gentle workout, don’t be afraid to block out ten minutes or so each day to make sure you’re free to do the crossword or a Sudoku.
Ten minutes is time that can easily be lost flicking channels or scrolling on your phone. In other words, it’s time you’ll always be able to spare.
You don’t need much of it, either. You just need the desire to prioritise it.
And if you’re booking out time, why not start early? You might be one of those lucky people who wake up every day alert and ready to take things on. Even if you’re not, there’s generally a few spare moments to be found in the morning in between getting up, brushing your teeth, and putting the kettle on for the first time.
If you start off with a puzzle first thing, you may not even notice the time you’ve spent doing it – and you may feel properly woken up and eager to face the morning by the time you’ve had a few satisfying Sudoku successes!
This one can be fun in itself. Look closely and you may discover that even the busiest day and the most packed itinerary is littered with little gaps when you can squeeze in a quick puzzle.
Public transport often involves a lot of waiting on platforms, for example. Why not find a bench and pull out a crossword? Then there’s the ten minutes between the time a meeting was meant to start and the point at which people actually start arriving, or the surprising length of the queue for the tills in the supermarket.
All these gaps in your day can be reclaimed by a puzzle or two. And you may even find yourself looking forward to them.
If you’re hunting for spare moments in your life, it pays to be prepared when they finally arrive. Bookmark puzzle pages on your phone or make sure you always have a book of Sudoku challenges in the seat pocket of a car or in your bag.
After all, there’s nothing worse than having a 30-minute delay at a train station and no puzzles to ponder over while you wait.
Crosswords are particularly well suited for slotting into little gaps of spare time throughout the day. This is because, while a full puzzle may take a quarter of an hour or more to do, you can work your way through a handful of individual clues in a few minutes.
If you hack away at crossword clues over the course of the day like this, you may find that it’s all done by the time you’re ready for dinner. And you’ve spent that day thinking about capital cities, rivers of the world, synonyms, and all sorts of other things that can make your headspace a little more colourful and cheery.
Lastly, remember puzzles don’t have to be a solitary business. There’s nothing better than finding a friend or two who enjoys the same kinds of crosswords as you, for example, and then firing clues back and forth throughout the day as you try to fill the grid.
Friends can share your frustration with a tricky question, but they can also offer clues and provide new ways of looking at things that can help you to the right answer. And they can also put up with a little gentle crowing when you get the answer first and they’re still stumped.
Crosswords and other puzzles feel like private experiences, lurking on your phone or in the pages of a magazine, but they don’t have to be.
The best puzzles help build communities, and the communities are made by the people who love them, get stuck with them, help others with the answers and are all united by the fact that they found the time in the day to dig into them. Happy puzzling!
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