Time

27 JAN 06

How do you balance your time? Time to me is precious. I have many things that pull on my time, and I have always found a way to get everything done. I remember begging my dad for a few more hours of sleep when I was a teenager. If I could have been allowed to sleep for 9 or 10 hours a night, I would have been thrilled. In medical school, and, more specifically my internship, I learned to get by on 3 to 4 hours a night. I sustained that for a year. Now I’ve bumped that up to 5 hours a night. In fact, I really don’t like sleeping longer than that. If I get more than 6 hours, my back starts to hurt and I get all cranky. Even on the weekends, I often get up long before the rest of the family. It’s a great time of day – alone time. I surf the internet, play chess, and maybe watch a little TV. I stopped playing internet poker in the early morning because at 6 am here on the west coast, the only competition comes from Sweden, and those players are just too good.

As I mentioned in my last post, there is this little thing I'm going to start doing that promises to make me some good money. It may pull me away from poker, and I don’t know how to feel about it. I’m a little concerned that it may pull me away from family, but it’s something I can do before the kids come home from school and after they go to bed, so that’s not a big issue. My wife is a CPA, and I really don’t see her much this time of year anyway, so that shouldn’t be too bad.

I guess the real question is, how much are my hobbies worth? Can I put a dollar value on the time spent away from a sure (financial) thing?

How about you? Let say you have an expected return of 1 BB per hour at poker and you usually play 10/20. So, you expect to make 20 bucks an hour. If you could make $40 per hour at work during the time you were playing poker, would you still hit the casino? How about for $100 per hour? $300? More?