La Bene Vita

How I Procrastinate

I was that college kid who spent four hours every finals season calculating exactly what grades I needed on each exam to pass all my classes instead of, you know, using that time to study. True to form, I spent the bulk of my morning today calculating the percentages of time spent on each of my life facets to create "Balance". Here's what I found. My 2012 "Balance" New Year's Resolution involved balancing three areas of my life: Family, Work, Body. Incidentally, these are also the keywords that (are supposed to) drive my everyday choices.

FAMILY
38 hours per week.

BODY
61 hours per week

WORK
69 hours per week

You might think these should be 33% (56 hours per week) apiece, and I certainly started my analysis that way. But I had to make some concessions, and ultimately, this target balance is much better than my 2011 performance. The hours are broken thus:

1. FAMILY, 38 hours
30 hours shared time (stretch goal)
8 hours chores (stretch goal)

I can't share more than 30 hours at this time because of our conflicting work schedules, but I do commit to "being there" during the 30 hours we do have together. Next year, maybe I'll shoot for more shared hours. And 8 hours of chores is more than plenty, thankyouverymuch.

2. BODY, 61 hours
52.5 hours sleeping.
3.5 hours grooming.
3.5 hours exercising (a stretch goal!)
1.5 hours meal planning and recording (somewhat arbitrary)

3. WORK, 69 hours

MTMS, 40 hours
         Breakdown TBD

Church, 7 hours
         1 hour worship planning
         1 hour music preparation
         3 hours rehearsing
         2 hours worship

Performance, 7 hours
         2 hours Senor Patron
         2 hours other gigs or events (this doesn't happen every week, but I would like to shoot for this)
         2.5 hours practicing
         0.5 hours administrative (organizing music, landing gigs?)

Writing, 15 hours
         Breakdown TBD

So... I determined my weekly writing hours by what was left. Some of that has to go to things like to-do lists and "daily" blogging at WDC, but there's still a pretty good chunk there for freelance articles, editing and new fiction. I'm happy with it. I still need to figure out exactly how to break down both my writing and my MTMS hours, but that's a task for another day, when the procrastination bug bites me again.