Scheduling and Team LiveFire

Term three is winding down and I am looking forward to my break.

I may have mentioned that I have never worked this hard in my life. I know, I know—you hear that from people and it's easy to dismiss it, but I can quantify the claim for you by describing my average weekly schedule.

Here goes.

I have between seven and nine classes every week. Each class is scheduled for three hours, with a handful habitually only reaching the 1.5-2 hour mark, providing lab time for the remainder. Let's average that out to 25 hours a week in class.

I have major assignments due in two of those classes most weeks. Major assignments might take anywhere from five to forty hours to complete. Those are extremes at either end, and averaging them out is basically meaningless considering the range.

The time I spend at school is much more telling and useful. For terms one and two, I stayed home for about five days in total. That means I spent 55 days out of 60 at school. On average I probably did around 10 hours of work for each of those days, inside or outside of class. My schedule was a bit different in term 3, and I tried having a day off each week. It didn't go well, and I have spent the last week scrambling to catch back up.

The bottom line? I spend 60-90 hours a week on school projects. That might not seem like a lot to some people—I'm sure there are stock brokers or realtors or career criminals out there who spend 100+ hours a week doing their thing—but to most people, to me, it's a lot. As the end of each term rolls around I start to crave a little downtime for my brain. Well, I have some coming to me, though I have one more massive assignment standing in my way before I can really relax.

There are a couple of contributing factors to my excessive time spent at/with school. I want to do a good job of every assignment I touch, and I also want to maintain my honors average. I'm sitting at 93% atm. The other thing is my specialization. As a project manager I end up not only doing a fair chunk of every group assignment I am on, but I also take on the role of keeping other people rolling, setting deadlines, and organizing the workflow. This adds anywhere from 10-50% to my project workload, but someone has to do it for a project team to turn out good work, and I'm happy to be practicing the skills that I am hoping will get me hired at companies like Irrational Games and BioWare.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to polishing Pistol Reef over the break—I want to get it up on Kongregate or another web portal—and Sacrifice (my board game) is begging for some playtesting so I can get it up for sale online. That's work, too, but it's so far removed from the stressful school stuff that I am really looking forward to it.

Oh, and also? LiveFire Studios is a thing. I will be posting there a lot over the next six months. Check us out.