Life Balance, not as bad as at first thought

Managing your schedule at work can be difficult enough, but adding managing your personal time at home into the mix and things get even trickier.

Recently, I’ve been feeling the strain of long work hours and thinking that my life balance must be quite bad. So for a couple of weeks, I’ve been calculating the time spent on different aspects of my life and decided to chart it up on excel. Here’s my typical weekday life balance chart:

Not particularly exciting, is it?

If we analyse it, we see the following important facts:

• I spend more than half of my waking day at work.
• I spend as much time on the train as I do with my wife and child put together.
• The “Self” time of course includes eating, showering and so on, so is not actually available for any other purpose.
• There is no time for personal projects or other endeavours.

Now, taking into account that I don’t work weekends, nor do I bring my work home, things are put into perspective and the balance is not as bad as it first looks when taking weekends into consideration:

To be frank, I was surprised by the results, I was expecting far less family time and self time as a percentage, but actually, it turns out not to be the case.

• Job and the daily commute still takes about 54% of my time.

The remaining 45% or so is split thus:

• About 30% our own and our family time.
• I’m squeezing roughly 10% self and social time out my schedule
• This gives me a good couple of hours a day over the weekend to do the things I want to do, such as program, study, work on projects besides work and so on.
• About 5% for housework and general chores.

Not too shabby. Time to stop complaining!

Wires: The bane of my hi-tech life!

During the refurbishing, I changed the plans for the lounge and ordered a duct put in behind the all the skirting boards to hide all the wires for my HiFi. Originally, the duct was made for only a few wires, but I’ve managed to squeeze the following wires in:

• D-tanshi component cable
• S-video cable
• Audio cable for subwoofer
• 2 x Denon 5sq speaker cables (fronts)
• 1 x Denon 5sq speaker cable (center)
• 2 x Denon 3sq speaker cables (rears)

My sizeable rack HiFi is stored in the main closet in the lounge, which is great because when the doors are closed, the whole thing is completely hidden from view.

The carpenter drilled a hole through from the inside of the cabinet to the duct on the other side of the wall. However, although the duct itself is quite spacious and would accomodate a fair number of extra wires, the hole was much more restricted.

I had to do a fair bit of drilling to widen the hole from the inside of the cabinet to the duct. But once that was done, everything proceded smoothly.

Now, the only exposed wires are those which run from small, strategically located holes in the skirting board to the components.