Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Time Management

Posted this one on the NL Theory forum, but thought I would cross-post it here, as I'm trying to come up with a reasonable plan....

Borrowing a bit from "real life," I'm thinking about putting together a high level plan about how to allocate my poker time. I'm trying to come up with a percentage of time spent on different aspects of poker, rather than a set amount of time, so that whether I have 5 or 25 hours per week, I can distribute roughly the same over time.

Anyone serious about the game who does not play full time probably has more they wish they could do with poker (study as well as play) than they actually have or make time for. And even for full-time pros, there are still some better ways to spend time than others, as far as development.

I'll lay out 3 main areas that have smaller components. I don't know how important it is to break them down, but perhaps some of you have thought about this more deeply for yourselves already and feel that they would require their own buckets of time (like for me study is one big category, but there are various types of study, and maybe they should each have their own dedicated percentage).

Study -- 30%
  • Review your own play (PT, replayers, etc.)
  • Strategy/theory forums and books
  • Watch videos
  • Blogs (writing and reading, but again, strat and theory)
  • Coaching
Play -- 55%

Other -- 15%
  • Administrative (for lack of a better term -- organizing your records and roll, setting up software, anything really that doesn't fit into a nice category
  • Talking/chatting with your buddies, study group, etc. (could be part of study I guess)
  • Sweat sessions, where you rail them
I feel like for this to be helpful or interesting, the time breakdown should probably get somewhat into the components of each area, so like for studying, try to spend x% reviewing your own play, y% on videos, and z% on coaching. So, I'll probably try to work that out for myself, maybe try to just track high level how much time I spend.

Anyway, I'm using up too much of my "Administrative" time ;).

4 comments:

grinder said...

Yet another quality post Marc

This is a problem i have , the knowing how much time i should be spending doing these things

thanks for the help

Velislav Babatchev said...

Great post, I find myself thinking about this sort of stuff all the time. The hard part is really assigning a percentage. Like, I know how many hands I want to get in a day, and that I'd like to watch one video, and that I'd like to do a pt session review, maybe a sweat, and hit up our study group and forums. The hard part is getting this all in on one day :(

RakebackFAQ said...

Good post as always. I bought that Tommy Angelo book and was looking foward to reading it but you killed my hopes for it!!

I like your time managment i think i study more than play i have to change that. Would still be cool to get that PT review vid from you.

All the best

Anonymous said...

It is good that you want to allocate percentages of your time for different aspects of learning the game. However, I think the playing time should be hgher than 55% and the administrative portion should be lower than 15%. In fact, I don't even think there should be an administrative section, I think that is really just a subdivision of study.

Personally, I think it is optimal at the moment to make it 65% playing, 35% studying. There really is no substitute for taking what you have learned and applying it at the tables.

Just my two cents! :-)