Time is Mana

A conversation I had last night, and the thoughts and feelings I had afterward, reminded me that time is a finite resource. Fortunately, I'm rather fond of a game whose core mechanic is resource management, so I was able to come up with the following analogy pretty quickly.

In Magic: the Gathering, casting spells (which means playing any card that isn't a Land) requires Mana. Mana comes from Lands, and while Lands don't cost any Mana to play, you can only play one Land on each of your turns. Since each Land only produces one Mana, each player only has a limited amount of Mana available to them each turn.

How a player spends their turn's supply of Mana is up to them, but they should consider their Mana decisions carefully. Since a player has only a limitted amount of Mana, and each spell they could cast costs a certain amount of Mana, the player can usually cast only a few spells per turn. Sometimes, they only have enough Mana to cast one spell. So each turn, they have to choose carefully which spell(s) they want to cast.

The amount of Mana a players has each turn is similar to the number of hours a person has each day. A person only has so many hours, and they can spend each hour only once. They can spend their hours on basically whatever they want (within limits), but once their day's allotment of hours is spent, they won't get any more hours until the next day.

Since a person only has so many hours available to them each day, they have to choose carefully what they want to do with those hours. They have to decide what tasks they most want to accomplish that day, determine how many hours each task would take, and decide which tasks are most worthy of their time. If they're not careful, they could end up spending hours on tasks that aren't really all that important.

That's a mistake that I make frequently, especially during the Summer. During the school year, most of my time is spent at school or at home, doing homework, and much of the rest of my time is spent doing chores, with only a few hours each day going to recreation. Now that I don't have an obligation to go to school, managing my time has become more difficult. In Magic terms, I have more Mana in my Mana pool, and more spells in my hand, which is usually a good thing. But now that I have to make decisions regarding what to do with my Mana/time, I frequently find myself making the wrong decisions.

Today, I hope to do better. I've had a few blogworthy thoughts lately, so I'll try to type them up and hold them in reserve. I have something of a research project to do, assuming I can find any reliable information on the subject I intend to study out. I also have a small errand to run, but that won't take long. Besides that, I think the rest of my time will be taken up by chores. If not, I'll try to come up with other ways to use my time effectively. In Magic, the game can hinge on how well or poorly a player uses their Mana each turn. In life, it's even more important to make good use of our time.