Having a dartboard in your office can help you improve your work.
Being self employed and working from home I find myself sitting at my desk constantly staring at the laptop for far more hours than what is good for a person. Previous attempts at finding things to do to give my eyes a break from the screen have failed but the other week,inspired by a period of insomnia that left me watching the darts championships til about 2am I bought myself a dartboard to put in my office. Darts isn't a completely new game for me. After leaving university 10 or so years ago and having a bit of time without work and with little money, my mate Rob and I used to spend a few afternoons down the pub nursing a pint and making the most of the free dartboard. We would perhaps have preferred it to have been pool we were playing but at 70p a game (most are now £1!! what a rip off) it was out of our monetary league. Over time we became quite proficient throwing our arrows and ended up buying our own. Then we got jobs and unbelievably the pub got rid of the dartboard! It was probably either down to health and safety or the fact that people weren't paying for it. Probably both I expect.
Fast forward 10 years and I'm now in my office with my brand new board fully installed and already getting quite pockmarked. Now when I need a break from work I just pick up the darts and have a few throws at the board. I'm finding it an excellent way of breaking up long periods of worktime and it acts as quite a good stress buster. It gets me moving going back and forth to the board to pick up the darts which helps get the circulation going and makes you stretch a bit more than what you would do sitting down. The other thing I've noticed is that when I actually play a scoring game from 501 down my mental arithmetic is improving and speeding up. I'm now starting to calculate what I've scored without even thinking about it in some cases. This is after only a week or so and shows how just doing simple things can get the brain working better.
The aim now is to improve the old hand/eye coordination so that 180 is a regular score (140 is my best so far) and finishing on a double doesn't take about 10 goes which always ends up reducing the finish to double 1. I think darts is a game suffers from a bad image of fat men drinking beer and playing in smokey places but it's something that most people can do it and improve at with practice. I'm finding it a great way of busting a bit of stress and if it gets you away from your screen for a few minutes and moving about a bit it can't be a bad thing.
