In this post, Mick attempts to balance his life

Be warned, what follows is introspective post that tends towards my life out of game.  Sorry to break character, but I thought it would be a good idea to share.  Also, I hope that putting it in writing will help me stick to my plan.

I have a week off leading up to Canadian turkey weekend.  I've been trying some new things to get back into shape and to attempt to balance my life so that each facet gets a fair share of my time.  The following is my plan going forward to try to improve my health, and give my family more of my free time.

Some basic numbers which I will be developing my plan from:
* Numbers are not my area of expertise.  In the interest of saving face, I'm going to claim that any errors in my math are intentional.  I screwed up my math to make you laugh.  So laugh and move on!  :D

- There are 168 hours in a week.
- On average, I work 45 hours a week.
- On average, I sleep 56 hours a week.
- I am left with 67 hours of free time per week.

Now let's look at what I would like achieve in these 67 hours available:

- Spend quality time with my wife.
- Spend quality time with my kids.
- Exercise.
- Accomplish the various chores and tasks typically associated with home ownership.
- Play videogames, primarily Eve.  Because Eve is awesome.

Assuming that those 5 items are in fact the only things that I will ever spend my free time on (who knows, I could be forgetting something), that leaves each item 13.4 hours.  I'm going to round up to 13.5 hours.  That's easier for me to remember.

So it is my aim to follow this time budget going forward.  I have started the exercise routine up again,  which is realistically going to end up being about 10 hours per week once I start playing hockey again as well.  I don't think I do anywhere near 13.5 hours of chores on a week to week basis, so going forward I'm going to get off my ass and do more housework.  This will actually lead into the quality time with my wife, as if I actually do more housework, she might actually want to spend more time with me.  I usually spend most of my waking hours on the weekends with the kids.  Going forward, the aim will be to spend more time with them actively, rather than passively.  I don't want my bad habits rubbing off on them.

The only thing that gets less time than it used to in this plan is videogames.  On average I typically spend about 16 hours gaming.  Apparently the key to establishing a new habit is to do it every day for three months (it must be true, I saw it on the internet once).  My plan is too look at videogame time as a personal reward for meeting my goals.

So, wish me luck in my endeavour.  I have some chores to do.