10/4/2010--Results for week of 9/26-10/2

HOURS
Administrative 2.50
Study 2.25
Playing 27.50
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TOTAL HOURS 32.25

Once again I wind up at around 35 hours per week. Whether I play long or short sessions, whether I take a day off or work all 7 days, I always seem to wind up somewhere around that number. I've decided to start posting to my Poker Hours spreadsheet more often, so that I will be keeping closer track of my hours and know when I'm goofing off.

I thought about just trying to block out an 8-hour work day, so that I would be doing something poker related from, say 0600-1430, with a half-hour break for lunch. But that's not really practical, as an MTT can last 6 hours or longer.

Obviously, if I'm in the money deep into a tournament, I'm going to finish, however long it takes. Likewise, if I bust out of a tournament (or tournaments, if I'm playing more than one) when my wife is about to come home from work, it makes sense to stop, let her do what she needs to do on the computer, and start another session later if nothing else is going on that day.

There is one situation where setting aside a block of time might make sense. I have a few big study projects out there that I want to tackle. For example, Harrington on Hold 'em: Expert Strategy for No-Limit Tournaments, Volume III: The Workbook, is a 187-question test covering the material in Volumes 1 and 2 of the Harrington on Hold 'em series.

I have read and studied the first two volumes, and I started to go through Volume 3. The answers are at the back of the book, and they consist of short essays on how to evaluate and play the different poker hands. I wanted to answer each question with a paragraph or two, so that I could not only check my answer, but compare my reasoning with Harrington's. The problem was that I worked at it little by little, 15 minutes here and 30 minutes there. By the time I was about 1/3 of the way through, my thought process and playing style had changed so much that my early answers didn't mean anything.

So, I need to restart Volume 3 at the beginning. With a long study project like this, it might make more sense to just block out several hours, or even a whole day, so that I could get the test done in a reasonably short time.