Short-Term Time Management

Devoting 40 or more hours a week to poker is a big adjustment:

     My wife and I have very different work schedules.

     I have to make choices.  I can't follow nearly as many TV shows as used to be the case.

     I always have to adjust for outside factors that demand my time, for example, shoveling after a snowstorm.  That's not something that someone in a cubicle with a boss nearby has to think about--he has to keep working until 5 P.M., it's not optional.  He can deal with the foot of snow in his driveway when he gets home.

I'm making a lot of the adjustments successfully.  One area where I'm getting better is managing small amounts of free time.  For example, I never know when I might get knocked out a tournament. If I'm out after an hour what should I do then?

One thing that took me a while to figure out it to not waste time and always have something else ready to work on.  Now when I finish a tournament, I don't have to find something to do.  One of the first things that I do after I turn on my computer is to set up anything that I might need during the day so that I have things ready to study.  I might open as many as ten windows.

I open the twoplustwo,com poker forums.  I open a poker coaching site so I have a video waiting, ready to be studied.  If I have something administrave to take care of I have Open Office ready to go. All of those things, a quarter-hour at a time, add to my poker hours.. Little time is wasted.  I can sit at my desk for five hours with 4.75 of those hours being productive.

What if I only have a few minutes between events, for example, a tournament ends and I want to play another one that starts in 7 minutes?  For that I have my Daily Task List open.  Some of the things on that list include exercise (push-ups, sit-ups and squat thrusts) and checking E-mail, Facebook and my planner to make sure that my world outside poker is in order.

I know that this level of list-making and detail seems crazy to some of you, but to me it's just the opposite.  It keeps me from being the ADD-addled Clif who was too disorganized to turn in a term paper on time or remember an appointment.  The amount of focus and organization that I need for poker is helping me keep the rest of my life straight as well.

In many ways I'm the best Clif I've ever been.  I'm 61 years old and I think about running my second marathon, or about how much money I'll make playing poker over the next ten years.  Retirement is not on my radar.