How do you reconcile fandom with your work/studies/private life?
Fandom is a duty. You wake up every morning to:
1) check your e-mail (while eating breakfast and drinking coffee) and reply to all the urgent messages (10-30 minutes)
2) go to your LJ and read through your flist while:
- saving all the art into separate folders devoted to authors
- saving all the new fics for further reading
- saving AND watching all the new vids
- replying to some of your friends' posts
- replying to all comments to your own LJ
- leaving feedback here and there (all of these while petting your cat; approximately 2 hours)
3) talk to your friends on AIM or other communicators (about new art, fics, books and movies with homosexual themes; approximately 30 minutes)
Then you:
- go to work or to the university (varying from 4 to 8 hours), read printed out fics while on the bus (40 minutes)
Then you:
- come back
- check e-mail/reply to e-mail (10-20 minutes)
- start going through your flist and commenting again (from 10 to 30 minutes)
- do something to eat for family and yourself (30 minutes to one hour)
- read something for your studies (about 2-3 hours) OR read fics (it's more like 6 hours and going late into the night if it's of novel length)
My question is: how do you reconcile fandom with your academic life? I'm a Ph.D. student, I teach or assist at teaching 6 hours a week, attend seminaries 6 hours a week, attend meetings at my research unit 2 hours a week. These activities require reading about 7 articles of varying length, which takes at least 20 hours and can reach as much as 60 hours when it's me teaching.
All in all, it's about 4 to 7 hours a day commited to fandom (which leaves us with 28 to 49 hours a week), 14 hours a week committed to classes and 20 to 60 hours of required reading. Let's take the upper numbers: fandom+work+required reading = 123 hours = more than 5 days. Which leaves us with 31 hours for sleep/family life a week, which is 4,5 hours A DAY.
Impossible.
I knew it was impossible, but now I do have a proof. I know I'm being a maximalist here, but. Even if we chose the 4 hours of fandom a day version, it is still 9 hours a day for sleep and family, which AGAIN isn't much.
And it's all based on my experience, which means I don't have to add time committed to writing fics/drawing fan art/updating a website.
So how are you doing this? What are your little tricks? How do you find time for non-obligatory (fandom or academic) reading, watching movies, going out with friends, writing publications? Because my day really should last at least 48 hours.
1) check your e-mail (while eating breakfast and drinking coffee) and reply to all the urgent messages (10-30 minutes)
2) go to your LJ and read through your flist while:
- saving all the art into separate folders devoted to authors
- saving all the new fics for further reading
- saving AND watching all the new vids
- replying to some of your friends' posts
- replying to all comments to your own LJ
- leaving feedback here and there (all of these while petting your cat; approximately 2 hours)
3) talk to your friends on AIM or other communicators (about new art, fics, books and movies with homosexual themes; approximately 30 minutes)
Then you:
- go to work or to the university (varying from 4 to 8 hours), read printed out fics while on the bus (40 minutes)
Then you:
- come back
- check e-mail/reply to e-mail (10-20 minutes)
- start going through your flist and commenting again (from 10 to 30 minutes)
- do something to eat for family and yourself (30 minutes to one hour)
- read something for your studies (about 2-3 hours) OR read fics (it's more like 6 hours and going late into the night if it's of novel length)
My question is: how do you reconcile fandom with your academic life? I'm a Ph.D. student, I teach or assist at teaching 6 hours a week, attend seminaries 6 hours a week, attend meetings at my research unit 2 hours a week. These activities require reading about 7 articles of varying length, which takes at least 20 hours and can reach as much as 60 hours when it's me teaching.
All in all, it's about 4 to 7 hours a day commited to fandom (which leaves us with 28 to 49 hours a week), 14 hours a week committed to classes and 20 to 60 hours of required reading. Let's take the upper numbers: fandom+work+required reading = 123 hours = more than 5 days. Which leaves us with 31 hours for sleep/family life a week, which is 4,5 hours A DAY.
Impossible.
I knew it was impossible, but now I do have a proof. I know I'm being a maximalist here, but. Even if we chose the 4 hours of fandom a day version, it is still 9 hours a day for sleep and family, which AGAIN isn't much.
And it's all based on my experience, which means I don't have to add time committed to writing fics/drawing fan art/updating a website.
So how are you doing this? What are your little tricks? How do you find time for non-obligatory (fandom or academic) reading, watching movies, going out with friends, writing publications? Because my day really should last at least 48 hours.