We’re entering the final stretch of Shameless Gaming Month and things are going better than I expected.

Admittedly, my expectations were amazingly low. Still, I’ve finished three games and there are plenty of people who have managed to have success ranging from reasonable to spectacular. So that’s nice.

It’s pretty clear that my initial goal of finishing five games this month is lying in tatters. Three of the five games I decided to focus on my attention on have been cleared out of my pile of shame but I don’t think that I can finish Darksiders or Dead Space. I’ve yet to start playing Dead Space, so that can’t be particularly good.

Luckily, I came up with a cunning plan to try and get around this slight problem. I’ve been playing Alice: Madness Returns and having fun. In spite of failing to reach my goals, I think that I can count this as a success simply because having fun is more enjoyable than succeeding.

Having fun while succeeding is even better, but having fun while failing works pretty well too.

That and I’ve developed one or two habits that might help me manage my time better to be able to continue taking games out of my pile of shame.

Before Shameless Gaming Month kicked off, I used to be terrible with trying to judge how much time I needed to devote to playing a game. If I thought that I only had half an hour free time before something that had to be done had to be done, then I just wouldn’t bother playing anything. I’d kill time on Reddit or watch something on YouTube.

Now I’ve learned just how much can be done in half an hour.

You can cure a person of demonic heart spiders, discover randomly discarded treasure while shooting bad dudes or even eliminate an alien threat that is poised to conquer the universe. Half an hour is a long time.

This discovery could very well be a crippling blow to my powers of procrastination.

If I can do so much in half an hour, three days is a lifetime. If you’re feeling like you’ve run out of time to take something off of your pile of shame and consider this month a success, just give it a shot anyhow just to see how much you can get done.

At the very least, you’ll probably find a game or two that are worth continuing with once Shameless Gaming Month is over and we return to our regularly scheduled activities.