Say you’re at work for 12 hours most days. During that time, you’d like to play a game of Go online. There will be times when you can make many moves in a row, but also times when you might be in a meeting for an hour or more.
In short, you will be able to play off and on throughout the day.
What are the best time parameters for creating such a game?
If finishing the game in one day is a requirement, your might be hard pressed to find an opponent who will play to such a schedule.
To answer this question, I’d say almost any correspondence parameters are fine. Or even any live ones, hit pause and play while the game is paused.
The main issue, as Uber says, is that your opponent might not be able to practically play with the requirements of finishing in one day (if that’s necessary) with random breaks.
So the thing to do would be to find an opponent first and agree what you’ll do in advance and then do that.
Main time and Time per period are set at a maximum here.
There can be more periods though.
Don’t claim this is the ideal setting, but it is a possibility.
Just set a challenge and see if there is an opponent willing to play with you.
If you don’t try you will never find out.
Maybe slightly off topic but if the aim is to always or often have moves to make in a game then the solution that people often come up with is to play many simultaneous correspondence games at once. It’s not really the same as focusing on one game for a day but you can get a Go fix.
Try
For people who will usually make more than one move/day
or ultra-blitz, less than 10 seconds / move
game will be finished fast
if you timeout, no one will be surprised
Good lord, that was quick. Thank you very much for the suggestions.
I shall try out the various ideas presented here (while also accepting my desired format may be somewhat unrealistic).
Yes indeed, I usually play between 30 and 50 games at once, but find my poor brain gets confused, thus my wanting to focus on one game throughout the day.
Thanks again.
That doesn’t ensure the game will be finished in a day (or two) though.
You could try slow live games and to click pause when you can’t play for a while. I think each player can pause the game 5 times.
Then there are a lot of possible options for the time settings. Fischer and Canadian might work better for you than normal byo-yomi. 4 hours absolute time per player might be an option, to guarantee the game finishes in one day, even if it has a lot of moves.
If you play live games, be aware that OGS will end the game, if a player is disconnected for 5 minutes without anyone pressing pause.
And make it clear to your opponents, how you want to play. You could name the game “slow live with pauses” or something like that, but it might be better to find opponents via the forum.
Sure. I’m assuming that you will just need agreement on that with your opponent regardless of time settings.
Just play many correspondence games. In that way you will definitely have some moves to play when you get time daily. If you are lucky the opponent may be available too and you will keep exchanging moves.
I had a similar request a while ago
He said he did and want to change to 1 game. I can understand this feeling.
Good reminder on a weird hidden behaviour.
Another good one if you plan multiple pause.
This was working for me for a while with Fischer 2d +8h/move and similar settings, but once I started playing in more correspondence tournaments (and rejoining some ladders since new ladder features were introduced), I’ve got too many games. I just don’t feel I learn as much from each game if I’m playing more than a dozen or so simultaneously.
It had not occurred to me to try slow real-time settings instead of fast correspondence settings, but that will be in my next set of experiments. I just hope there are some players out there who will be able to take up such challenges.
Note that if you use live settings you need to keep the browser tab open and the connection to OGS up.
Of course that’s possible, but might be an unnecessary hassle in a work environment.
That, or negotiate use of the pause button with opponent, right?
Aren’t there a limited number of pauses allowed per game?
Yes, 5 each as Jonko mentioned above (or is it 4?), but you can continue to play while the game is paused so with an agreeable opponent you’d only need one.
Can correspondence games with live time settings be created via the API, bypassing the front end? So that the DC timer doesn’t mess up the game?
If you want breaks (meeting) and can play consistently between them (like live) there is a sealed move system explained.
Anyway the biggest problem seems to get someone to play in the same schedule.
Note that the OP search is still a bit diffferent, more near an ultra short correspondance as a very long live, because of getting away and not so focused (work day) on the board.
But the minima in the range of correspondance time isn’t fitting the request at all.
Trying to figure what could be a fitting correspondance time setting even if it doesn’t exist on OGS.
One would think (theoretically) that the validation of this is on the back end, so surely the answer is no 
In practice, the answer is almost certainly no, although possibly for different reasons 