Life of a Dancing Engineer

All in all, my current schedule accounts for about 22 hours per week of dance, with about 2 hours of that spent warming-up, 2.25 hours spent in 3 private lessons, 3 hours spent in 4 group classes, 2.5 hours spent in am-am practice, 7.5 hours spent social dancing, and the remainder, about 5.25 hours spent practicing.

I have scheduled two days off from dance each week (though I sometimes do dance on Thursdays), leaving (transportation time slots not included) about 13 hours of time per week completely open and unplanned for (time to spend relaxing, thinking, shopping, cleaning, with friends, or doing *whatever I feel like*).

I have scheduled 40 hours per week in the office.

I have scheduled 64 hours of sleep per week, plus 2 hours of nap per week, totaling about 66 hours per week. In practice, I am almost never able to achieve this (to get to bed on time, or to sleep through the whole night). I’m very sleep sensitive, so if I got any less sleep than I do, I’d end up walking around like a total zombie.

I have scheduled 6 hours per week of wake-up/shower time. I’m slow to get ready in the morning. I even get 45 minutes for breakfast on Saturday! It would be nice to have this every day (I should find a way). That’s about 7 hours per week.

I have scheduled about 5 hours of set dinner time per week, and 4 hours of play time at home (hamsters, reading, hulu, facebook, phone, etc.).

22 + 13 + 40 + 66 + 7 + 5 + 4 = 157

That’s about 157 hours of time that is scheduled (even if it is scheduled as free time). That leaves about 11 hours of time that is unscheduled, but also can’t practically be used for much besides transportation between all the different places I spend most of my time (Home, Work, SuperShag, MIT, Ryles, and Burlington), overtime at work (ugh), snacking before dance, and maybe running the occasional errand.

All in all, dance gets a minority of my time each week. Sleep and work get the vast majority. But, dance is still #3 on the list, and of course, I can skip out on dance time if I’m ever not feeling it (though in practice, I crave more time on the dance floor, not less!).