A Visit From Our Granddaughters

I am always a long-term thinker and planner, but I do have two weekly goals when I play poker:

1.  Work at least 40 hours.
2.  At least 25% of those hours will be studying.

In late December and early January I missed those goals because I was upgrading my spreadsheet for 2017.  This was going to be the first week this year that I met those goals and it didn't happen.  I worked 37.25 hours and 21% of that time was spent studying.  The main reason (though I don't like excuses) was that I agreed to babysit our three granddaughters on one days's notice and that messed up my playing and study schedule.

I've been thinking about it and there are several ways I could have handled that but I don't like any of the choices:

1. I could have said no, but we often see them less than once a month, and their parents deserve a break once in a while.

2. I could have said yes, playing or studying in the office with the door closed and wearing ear plugs and lettting my wife handle it.  That would not be practical.  First, the office door doesn't completely close. Second, even if the office door was shut and I had earplugs I would probably hear some of the noise from a television plus four people not far from my office.  I have ADD and am easily distracted, so that's a very big deal  Third, they wouldn't want to leave me alone.  They would want to be with both of us.

3. I've said before that I try to frontload my schedule to work more hours in the early part of the week  I should have done that except that on the 14th, the first day of last week, I was still putting the finishing touches on my new spreadsheet system.  A lot of playing and study time got pushed out early in the week so that I could spend some admin time putting the finishing touches on the spreadsheet. I had discovered a few things that needed to be fixed.

So, here I am in the fourth week of January, and I need to get it right this time.  There is one fairly drastic option that I could take.  Leave.  I could sit down and read or look go through flash cards just about anywhere and we live close to a library.  If the weather was good I could even sit in the car.

I'm not thrilled with that idea, but it's better than any of the other options.  I could probably play poker with one girl here if the TV wasn't on.  She could even come in the office from time to time to see what I was up to or ask about what she was seeing on the screen--but having all three of them here for several hours just won't work when I need to work.