Balance is difficult

Ur approach is good, forced modified behavior will many times fix the underlying issue. Think of fobia treatment and/or forced smiling that actually made people happier.

damn such a nice freeroll, any freerolling slots vacant for me?

On January 24 2012 23:12 Daut wrote: Its been a struggle to balance playing poker, working out, hanging out with friends, and learning new things all at the same time. I'm the kind of guy who gets real obsessed about things for a little while, then move on to something else, move back to the first thing, etc. I've never been good at keeping my life balanced. Ill spend a week playing skyrim and doing nothing else. Ill go on a bender and go out with my buddies 3-4 nights in a row then stop. Ill play a bunch of poker for 2-3 weeks then ill take a month off.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad way to live. I take on activities almost the same way and I've questioned whether or not I needed to balance my life.
I think the idea of having time structure in our lives is overvalued. We are raised to believe that time structure is a good thing (example: go to school every weekday from morning - early afternoon, eat breakfast in the morning, lunch at noon, dinner in the evening. Typical full time job work from 9 - 5). But is this really the best way to live?

I think spurts of focus are more effective in terms of productivity. Personally, being focused on 1 thing at a time has been the most effective way in which I have learned new things. This may or may not be true depending on personality but I think you can explore what works best for you.

funny what money is when you play poker.

and it's a good thing imo.

Get organized for what though? An addictive personality got you success in poker by being addicted to it long enough to work hard and make it big. To go against this is to go against what you are. Besides, most people who are trying to do what you are speaking about in this blogpost actually DO NEED to get out more, grind more, workout more: I don't think you need any of those b/c it's clear to all of us that you have a healthy social life/girl life/money life/ur not fat

I'm sure you already know that balance is overrated. There is no need to balance when no one is exploiting you. Delete blog and stick to your roots

Meh an every day rigid schedule doesn't seem optimal. Just going to make yourself workout when your body should rest, play poker when you're not in a good state to play, learn mexican when you aren't going to absorb most of it, or hang out with one of them when you don't have anything interesting to do together leading to being bored of the situation or worse each other.

I'd think setting the goals weekly or maybe bi-weekly would be optimal. Days with no obligations to rest or go on an adventure or whatever are good for you imo.

On January 25 2012 00:03 RaiNKhAN wrote: Get organized for what though? An addictive personality got you success in poker by being addicted to it long enough to work hard and make it big. To go against this is to go against what you are. Besides, most people who are trying to do what you are speaking about in this blogpost actually DO NEED to get out more, grind more, workout more: I don't think you need any of those b/c it's clear to all of us that you have a healthy social life/girl life/money life/ur not fat

Also this

On January 25 2012 01:07 Stim_Abuser wrote: Meh an every day rigid schedule doesn't seem optimal. Just going to make yourself workout when your body should rest, play poker when you're not in a good state to play, learn mexican when you aren't going to absorb most of it, or hang out with one of them when you don't have anything interesting to do together leading to being bored of the situation or worse each other. I'd think setting the goals weekly or maybe bi-weekly would be optimal. Days with no obligations to rest or go on an adventure or whatever are good for you imo.

You explained this quite beautifully sir. I agree with all of this

its not like this schedule is all that rigid. im awake about 18 hours a day, i only need to play about 4, work out 1, hang out 1, rosetta stone 30 minutes. that still leaves about 11-12 hours of me time if i want it.

the reason i did this was because i only come up to vancouver a couple weeks a month to play and a lot of times i have trouble finding motivation to play each day when i dont want to. but since im only up here once in a while i need to be playing while im here. really gotta force myself to buckle down and do it.

the working out thing is something i should really be doing every day or at least 6 days a week. in any given year i generally work out about 175 of the days, but i would like to up that to 300-330.

the spanish thing is something thats been in progress for years and ive just gotten nowhere. i need to force myself to do it because i would like to learn more languages after this as well. and i dont think cramming is a good idea for something like that. id rather learn a little at a time and let my brain engulf the language slowly over the course of 6 months

the friends part, yea i probably could have skipped that, but my 4 friends live together and i wanted a freeroll for each of them so someone didnt feel left out

also one of the biggest faults i have as a poker player is complacency. i win 3 buyins and quit, or i get back to even in a good session where im playing wella nd quit.. really end up limiting my profits/potential. for someone who plays lower stakes than he should already, i need to make up for it by upping volume, but i dont. this will help me do that

On January 25 2012 01:07 Stim_Abuser wrote: Meh an every day rigid schedule doesn't seem optimal. Just going to make yourself workout when your body should rest, play poker when you're not in a good state to play, learn mexican when you aren't going to absorb most of it, or hang out with one of them when you don't have anything interesting to do together leading to being bored of the situation or worse each other. I'd think setting the goals weekly or maybe bi-weekly would be optimal. Days with no obligations to rest or go on an adventure or whatever are good for you imo.

+1, balance is to have everything in your life, not forcefully make your every day a boring routine.

Balance is everything. look at Nadal, Tiger Woods, MJ and Kobe, Durrr
lol

Cool Idea, incentives should work, not because you care about the money, but because you get social pressure/support from having the money to talk about with friends

Isn't working out 300 days in the year vastly over training? I thought 2 sessions per week was bordering on overtraining if you hit the same muscles.

This won't work. I've never seen you need something like this to make you motivated to work harder. It's similar to how people make New Years Resolutions about issues or things they want to improve in their life and believe the time to start is on January 1st, instead of right now.



Expectation: Roomates make about $350

On January 25 2012 03:47 RaiNKhAN wrote: This won't work. I've never seen you need something like this to make you motivated to work harder. It's similar to how people make New Years Resolutions about issues or things they want to improve in their life and believe the time to start is on January 1st, instead of right now. Expectation: Roomates make about $350

ive never been a hard worker my entire life. everything has come easy to me so i never had to work for anything. i figure out a way to do something half assed and get the job semi done without having to put any effort in. thats what im trying to change.

300 days a year isnt overtraining if you know how to rest yourself while still being active. my current routine is to do a tough full body workout 2-3 days a week, do a couple cardio sessions on other days, and do activities 3 days a week. activities are jiu jitsu, snowboarding, rock climbing, yoga, etc.

i think you guys also underestimate how much time on a daily basis goes towards me sitting in front of my computer staring at twitter, reading mma websites, loading LP, rinse repeat. i would say on average i can look at 5-8 hours in any given day and not be able to point to a single thing of value done.

and my definition of value is very loose. to me any of the following are valuable uses of time: poker, working out, hanging out with friends, playing a video game, reading a book, marathoning a tv show. all of those are something tangible that i gain from. refreshing a few webpages for hours on end is a total waste of time and its what i end up doing a LOT.

im very certain that something like this that forces me to be slightly more rigid while still leaving plenty of time to relax, go on adventures and do whatever it is i do while im doing nothing will help me in the long run.

On January 25 2012 03:54 Daut wrote: 300 days a year isnt overtraining if you know how to rest yourself while still being active.

not to derail but can you elaborate on this (how to rest yourself while being active)?

speaking of working out, how's bjj?

your aproach is terrible
you are trying to make this propbets / freerolls to motivate your self.. and you are gonna be motivated for the next 2 weeks untill you fall back into old regime
and in reality you have flaws that you need to correct (esp "i win 3 buyins and quit, or i get back to even in a good session where im playing wella nd quit.. "

as ive said before, a big leak imo at midstakes is people worrying way to much about balance

thats my opinion :-)

On January 25 2012 06:38 longple wrote: as ive said before, a big leak imo at midstakes is people worrying way to much about balance thats my opinion :-)

And now Daut is risking 200 dollars to "fix" unbalance issues that is not needed.

Should have told him earlier.

I think Daut's motivation here is more about more effective time management than it is about balance. Like 18 hours a day is a lot of time to do shit and like he said the things he's trying to do still leave him a lot of time left over.

A successful poker player who has the ability to be financially secure with just a few hours of work per day has sooo much time on his hands compared to anyone with a regular job. The kind of time that could be used for him to learn to speak another language, maintain perfect health through nutrition / exercise, compete at a high level of sport of interest, start a business, have a very rich social life, etc etc etc.

The problem is poker players are lazy as fuck and on tilt half the time so even though we have the time and financial freedom to be very effective human beings in the end most of us are just degens.

nice pic, hot piece of dude right there imo

I've faced the same struggle all my life - I function exactly like you do, obsessive about something for a while, get really engrossed in it and go 100%, then move on to something else, and eventually return and repeat. My wife is the epitome of balance, so my unbalanced lifestyle drove her crazy in the beginning. Over time I've become more balanced and she's given more slack for my occasional unbalanced times, so it has worked out, but shit, what a fucking tough thing to change. And I don't think I will ever fully get rid of the desire to behave that way, but I have established new habits and discipline which keep me balanced most of the time.

Good luck pal, it's a tough but worthy quest to undertake.

big balls, if you ever come down to Toronto, holla at me for a beer!

On January 25 2012 04:04 bigredhoss wrote: Show nested quote + On January 25 2012 03:54 Daut wrote: 300 days a year isnt overtraining if you know how to rest yourself while still being active. not to derail but can you elaborate on this (how to rest yourself while being active)?

example schedule:

monday: jiu jitsu
tuesday: tough full body workout
wednesday: yoga + 20-40 minutes of biking
thursday: 2-3 mile run + rock climbing
friday: full body workout
saturday: jiu jitsu
sunday: off or cardio

basically you just stagger everything and have a few simple days thrown in between tough days. if i were doing a more traditional lifting schedule i would say something along the lines of:

monday: chest/triceps/abs
tuesday: back/biceps/abs
wednesday: leg/shoulders/abs
thursday: bike/elliptical, activity, or day off
friday: chest/triceps/abs
...


never produces overtrained muscles cause you only do two a week of any given area.



jiu jitsu is going well but bad. i end up going to about 1 class a month nowadays. ive been going for so long that my strong aspects are very good, but my weak aspects are not improving. so for example if i start in a blue belts guard, theres a pretty good chance ill pass to side/mount/back and maybe sub him. but if he gets to my side control/mount/back there is a 0% chance i will not be subbed. just need to start going a lot more.


and smuft hit the nail on the head. its not so much complete balance of my life every day and produce a rigorous schedule. a better writeup of what i was doing would have been "replace 2-3 of the hours where you do absolutely nothing with doing productive balanced things". its more about getting myself to do these things on a regular basis and spending less time beinga worthless piece of shit. i could be just as knowledgeable about MMA if i waited until midnight, read through all the news at once, and picked 2 times during the day to read through all the days updates on twitter instead of just refreshing each ~50 times in any given day.

i might have been better suited to make a freeroll about not refreshing webpages at certain times, but i thought this would be an alternate solution

I think the money to friends thing is a bad idea in the sense that you will begin to subconsciously change something that is placed in the "moral" part of your mind to the "money" part. Where you can pay them to not hang out with them and then rationalize it in your mind. Kind of like those experiments in Freakanomics where people wouldn't do something for a dollar but they would do it if they felt they had the moral obligation to do it. Or when a daycare tried to stop having parents pick up their kids late so they charged $3 every time the parents were late. Instead of the number going down, a much higher percentage started picking them up late because they no longer attached it to moral obligation to their children. After the fee was removed the number never went back down and parents just always picked up their kids late. Something to think about.

Goals like these aren't very productive because you probably won't sustain them. Better to look at the root of the problem and just make sure you have something to do at multiple times of the week. Like, join something where you have to be somewhere at 'that' time could help.

And fwiw, I think sleeping only 6 hours a night is very unhealthy.

On January 25 2012 17:28 Twisted wrote: Goals like these aren't very productive because you probably won't sustain them. Better to look at the root of the problem and just make sure you have something to do at multiple times of the week. Like, join something where you have to be somewhere at 'that' time could help. And fwiw, I think sleeping only 6 hours a night is very unhealthy.

i disagree. i feel alert and well rested whenever i sleep. i rarely set an alarm and just wake up after ~6-7 hours of sleep. pretty much never sleep more than 7, the majority of the time its right around 6.5 i would say. its hard to know exactly how much sleep you get, but the last time i looked at my phone last night was 243am (saved to do list) and when i picked it up this morning right after waking up it was 917. this means the most i could have slept was 6 hours 34 minutes, but i more likely slept about ~6 hours 15 min.

some sources i found online:
http://health.ucsd.edu/news/2002/02_08_Kripke.html
http://www.michigandaily.com/content/study-finds-6-hours-sleep-sufficient
http://healthyliving.ocregister.com/2...or-is-six-hours-of-sleep-enough/2214/

its not like im trying to deprive myself of sleep, i just wake up feeling good and get up. if i was forcing myself to wake up very early every day and stealing a couple hours of sleep away from myself to try and be more productive i would agree thats not healthy. but thats not whats going on here


perhaps im one of the 3% listed here? http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2009-08-13-sleep-gene_N.htm - one of the only detracting arguments that popped up on the first page of google



as for getting to the root of problems...of course logically breaking things down helps and is very important, probably even more important than just mindlessly forcing yourself to do something, but unless you actually practice performing just theorizing and trying to wing it does nothing. a combination of both is best and its not like i havent done any thinking on ways to improve certain aspects of my life (i just read the mental game of poker)

also its not like im pulling a tooth every day or forcing myself to eat scorpions or dip my balls into steaming water. im doing things that i enjoy but often find myself to lazy or unmotivated to do. ive spent time thinking about why i am unmotivated and other things like why i want to quit sessions and have logically thought out why its the wrong approach, but having motivation to put my theory into action isnt a bad thing imo.

as for the freakonomics thing, thats interesting. ill have to get back to you guys at the end of the 2 weeks about that. we will see, but im guessing i probably wont lose more than $50 in this bet. i did something similar last time i was here with playing+going to the gym and i was successful all 14 days and did pretty well with poker. overall this has been good for me in the past so i suspect it will work again now

kinda surprised the majority of comments have been negative towards this so far. not sure if thats because i did a horrible job of explaining the why and background in the original post of if knowing the whole story, people think this is actually an awful idea. anyway, we'll find out in a couple weeks how it went, but again it went well last time so i suspect this will be good too

On January 25 2012 03:26 whamm! wrote: Balance is everything. look at Nadal, Tiger Woods, MJ and Kobe, Durrr lol

you forgot ivey.

Me personally just keeping a strict routine helps immensely with a steady progress of balancing shit out so you don't end up spacing out and wasting a few hours. Just be creative and think what works for you. Eventually just the ritual of your everyday morning routine will get you into your groove. And above all. Keep it going as strictly as possible.

On January 25 2012 12:22 Daut wrote: Show nested quote + On January 25 2012 04:04 bigredhoss wrote:   On January 25 2012 03:54 Daut wrote: 300 days a year isnt overtraining if you know how to rest yourself while still being active. not to derail but can you elaborate on this (how to rest yourself while being active)? example schedule:

ohh, so basically just doing a sensible workout routine =o i was really hoping you meant something super advanced like going into a zen meditation trance while exercising so you never get cns burnout or using advanced mind techniques to trick your muscles into not fatiguing as quickly. b/c that would be pretty sweet ;o and i was going to ask you to share your tricks with me

this balance thing definitelly isnt the best thing to succeed exclusively in poker, but it sounds like a good thing to succeed in life overall which is far more important.

On January 25 2012 17:46 Daut wrote: Show nested quote + On January 25 2012 17:28 Twisted wrote: Goals like these aren't very productive because you probably won't sustain them. Better to look at the root of the problem and just make sure you have something to do at multiple times of the week. Like, join something where you have to be somewhere at 'that' time could help. And fwiw, I think sleeping only 6 hours a night is very unhealthy. its not like im trying to deprive myself of sleep, i just wake up feeling good and get up. if i was forcing myself to wake up very early every day and stealing a couple hours of sleep away from myself to try and be more productive i would agree thats not healthy. but thats not whats going on here

Ah ok. Thought you were actually putting an alarm to try and sleep less. It is true that some people need less sleep but cutting on sleep is very unhealthy. Thought you were doing that, but apparently you're not .

On January 26 2012 08:33 Twisted wrote: Show nested quote + On January 25 2012 17:46 Daut wrote:   On January 25 2012 17:28 Twisted wrote: Goals like these aren't very productive because you probably won't sustain them. Better to look at the root of the problem and just make sure you have something to do at multiple times of the week. Like, join something where you have to be somewhere at 'that' time could help. And fwiw, I think sleeping only 6 hours a night is very unhealthy. its not like im trying to deprive myself of sleep, i just wake up feeling good and get up. if i was forcing myself to wake up very early every day and stealing a couple hours of sleep away from myself to try and be more productive i would agree thats not healthy. but thats not whats going on here Ah ok. Thought you were actually putting an alarm to try and sleep less. It is true that some people need less sleep but cutting on sleep is very unhealthy. Thought you were doing that, but apparently you're not .

lol nah, there would be no point. i do nothing the majority of the day anyway, no reason to be up earlier to do more nothing