Math Is Hard

Tedium follows. I need this to think with; feel free to give it a miss.

Weekly time requirements

Gotta – things I have little choice in:

Prep for Work = 1 hour x 5
Work = 9 hours x 5
Commute = 2 hours x 5
Sleep = (7 hours x 5) + (9 hours x 2)

Wanta – for me to feel like I’m who I need to be:

Write = 10 hours
Exercise = 6 hours
Decompress = 1 hour x 5
Cook = 1 hour x 4.5
Eat (with family, while not multi-tasking) = .5 hour x 7

Should – The things that prey on my mind:

Bathroom = 2
Studs = 2
Garden = 2
Housekeeping = .5 hours x 5 + 2 hours

I feel like I should schedule sex in there, as I go insane without, but I get a sense that scheduling sex is not in anyone’s best interest.

I’m showing 152.5 hours a week spoken for, here, with 15.5 hours leftover for watching a movie, sex, talking, reading a book, email, whatever.

My daily totals show 22.5 hours per day spoken for, leaving me 90 minutes to write, exercise, have sex, talk, read, whatever, every day. This means that, on any given weekday, I will have to choose one of those activities, but that I’ll get one of them every weekday.

What I apparently need to do is, on the weekend, spend the requisite times on each of the ‘should’ tasks, plus my writing and whatever exercise I haven’t gotten, without spending more time than is permitted by the schedule.

So, in theory, this can work, and I can make progress on everything important every week, if not every day.

Except that I only get a few minutes more than an hour unstructured each day. I’m already feeling like every moment of every day has enormous weight, and that every damned thing I do has other things hinging on it. If I structure all but 7.5 hours of my time, I think that would be accentuated.

This isn’t the way to do this. I haven’t scheduled out a life that, fifty years from now, I will be proud and happy to have lived.

More thinking is called for.

5 thoughts on “Math Is Hard”

    1. It’s a useful way to find out what you are expecting from yourself. Unless you are in the military or anal compulsive, I don’t think it is a useful way to live.

      Even if, in reality, I only get to live an hour and ten minutes a day, I want to feel like I get to live 24…however inaccurate that might be.

      On my list of things to do: find a job that doesn’t make me feel that my life has been suspended for 12 hours each day.

      1. Good luck with the last bit. Hey, that’s what your writing is supposed to be!

        I know I have at least as many projects to do as you, but I don’t have to do house work. 🙂 I like to just coast. Splitting firewood is my workout on days off from work, by the way.

        1. And you aren’t trying to write a novel, either.

          It’s a lovely catch-22; write the novel and sell it and write another and sell it and have them sell well enough and perhaps I can work that full time, which will give me enough time to write a novel and sell it, and….

        2. Firewood will be my workout this weekend. Digging ditches was my workout the last couple. It might be nice to do something in between, though.

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