Okay, so folks ask me sometimes how I got into doing the New York Times crossword basically every day. It wasn’t some grand plan, really. It started a few years back, just picking up the paper someone left behind, you know? I tried the Monday puzzle, figured it out mostly. Felt kinda good.
So I started doing it more often. Got the app on my phone eventually, made it easier than hunting down the paper. At first, it was just Mondays, maybe Tuesdays. Those felt manageable. Wednesdays started getting tricky, and Thursdays… well, Thursdays felt like hitting a brick wall sometimes. Fridays and Saturdays? Didn’t even bother much back then.
Getting Serious-ish
Then, about a year ago, I thought, “What if I actually tried to stick with this?” Not like, speed-running it or anything fancy. Just… doing it. Consistently. See if I could actually finish the harder ones eventually. So I decided to keep a little record for the year. Nothing complicated. I just got a plain old desk calendar. Each day I finished the puzzle, I put a big checkmark. If I started but gave up, I put a little ‘x’. If I didn’t even try, I left it blank.
My little system went something like this:
- Grab coffee in the morning.
- Open the NYT Crossword app.
- Give it a shot. Some days, 10 minutes on a Monday. Easy checkmark.
- Other days, especially later in the week, could be an hour, chipping away, putting it down, coming back.
- Make the mark on the calendar. Check or ‘x’.
The Ups and Downs
Man, keeping that simple record really showed me the patterns. Early in the year, lots of blanks and ‘x’s on Fridays and Saturdays. Mondays and Tuesdays were mostly checks. Wednesdays were hit or miss. I remember staring at clues, feeling totally clueless. You know that feeling? Like the words are in English but might as well be Martian.
But I kept at it. Didn’t beat myself up over the ‘x’s. The goal was just to try, to engage with it. Slowly, things started changing. I started noticing recurring clues, little tricks the constructors use. Names I didn’t know became familiar. Those obscure three-letter words started sticking.
There was this one Thursday puzzle, maybe six months in. Totally stumped me the night before. Woke up, looked at it again with fresh eyes, and boom! Things just started clicking. Finished it. Put a big, fat checkmark on the calendar that day. Felt like a million bucks. Silly, maybe, but it was progress.
Saturdays were the final boss. For the longest time, they were just a sea of ‘x’s or blank squares on my calendar. Then one Saturday, I actually finished one. Took me ages, probably looked up a few things towards the end if I’m being honest, but I filled all the squares correctly. That checkmark felt earned.
Looking Back at the Year
So, the year ended. I looked back at that calendar. Still had some ‘x’s, still had a few blank spots when life got crazy busy. But the number of checkmarks, especially towards the end of the week, had definitely gone up. Significantly. It wasn’t a perfect record, not by a long shot. But it was my record of just showing up and trying.
It wasn’t really about becoming a crossword genius. It was more about the routine, the little mental workout. Proving to myself I could stick with something, even if it was just a word puzzle. Seeing the improvement wasn’t about speed, it was just about… understanding more, guessing smarter, and finishing more often. It’s a simple thing, filling in those squares, but doing it consistently for a year? Yeah, I’m kinda proud of that little calendar full of checkmarks.
