A Slow Leak

Last year, I was super busy.

At least, that's what I thought.

Until the thought occurred to me that my present practice schedule and the way I lived my day to day life while in university last year are pretty incompatible.

Well, I sure as heck don't want to give up my practice time, now that I see how much it helps. And I want to flunk out of university even less. So, I decided to do a "time audit".

Basically, this meant taking an honest look at my typical university schedule from last year, and trying to figure out what exactly made me feel so busy all the time.

By my estimation, I spent, on average, 3.5 hours a day in class, 1.5 hours a day hanging out with friends, 1.5 hours commuting, 7 hours sleeping,, 3 hours doing other essentials (eating, hygeine, etc) and 2.5 hours a day on reading and doing homework.

Those keeping track will already know that that's 19 hours. If I could figure out where the extra 5 hours of my day was dissapearing to, I might just be able to carve out some time to practice. I decided that I'd have to get a bit more into detail in order to acheive this, so I converted that 5 hours a day to 25 a work week.

First, I listed all the TV shows I would watch in a week. It came to 9 hours. Clearly, I was going to have to cut back on this. I narrowed the list down to my 3 favorite programs, which, together, would take a total of two hours a week to watch. The rest, I decided, could be watched on the internet at my leisure, if at all.

I'd lose another hour or so each week on my guitar lesson, but of course that was not going to be cut. That's ten hours. So where were the other 15?

The only thing that remained was the internet. I couldn't believe at first that I spend that much time online. Then I gave it a bit of thought. I spent a fair amount of time following other people's blogs, and quite a bit more maintaining my own. Then I'd read comedy articles fairly frequently.

And on top of all that was facebook. At the time, I was fairly addicted to a couple of the stupid games that were on there, which I've since quit playing. Then there were always people to read about, quizzes to take, and who knows what else...there was no way around it, I'd have to cut back on internet time as well. I decided that an hour a day would suffice from now on.

Satisfied, I did the math. 25 hours a week, minus the 7 of TV and internet that I planned to keep left me with 18 hours a week of unclaimed time. Since I  practiced so rarely last year that it was negligable to include in my initial assessment of where my time is spent, I would have to carve my practice time entirely out of those 18 hours. I practice over an hour a day now, and I hope to get up to two by Christmas, so I set aside 10 hours. That left 8 hours for incidentals (traffic, working on big assignments, studying for midterms, etc).

Which brings me to the bad news. While I don't intend to delete or abandon my blog just yet, since I still enjoy having somewhere to write about stuff, there's no way I'm going to be able keep up with my usual 2-3 posts a week pace from now on. I'll try for weekly, but there's no guarentee...anyway, just a heads up.