November 2005 - Where’s the “Time”?

When I was a little tacker my favourite subjects at school were maths and science. So much so that I wanted to grow up to be a scientist… then I discovered rock music and girls and decided to be a rock muso instead! So after I left school I played in bands and did odd jobs so I could eat on my way to rock superstardom. One of those odd jobs was as a casual in the Brisbane CBD Games Workshop store in December of 1997. I’ve been with GW ever since, I still play music as a second hobby, and now I finally get to go back to my roots and do some good hard science!

Experiment:

• Determine where I “find the time” to do my hobby (as well as work a full time job, keep a happy girlfriend, make an attempt at keeping fit, play my guitar and occasionally get some sleep)

Method:

• Write down start and finish time of any hobby activity. (Must remember, must remember…)

Rules:

• The time period being studied is from Tue 1 st – Wed 30 th November.
• No painting at work (just a note, a lot of people think that GW staff get plenty of time at work to paint their armies, but that’s kind of like a car mechanic having plenty of time to hot up his own car at work, doesn’t really happen that much!)
• Hobby activity includes modelling, painting and gaming, and includes set-up time, cleaning of palette and paint water and short toilet breaks.

Data:

• Exel spreadsheet of start / finish times and other bits and bobs, available for viewing right here baby!

Results:

• For the 30 days of November I did hobby for 34hours, 42minutes. This breaks down to:
• 6hours, 36minutes of gaming
• 28hours, 6minutes of modelling/ painting
• I did hobby on 21days out of 30, which works out to an average of:
• 1hour, 39minutes of hobby per day I actually did hobby
• 1hour, 9minutes of hobby per day over the entire month
• I had 12 days off work during the month (6 days holidays!) and I did hobby on 9 of them. The amount of hobby done on these days equals a whopping 62% of my total hobby time for the month.
• I also have a habit of having a quick paint in the morning with a cuppa before heading off to work. I did this for 9 days this month and it equalled 13.5% of my total hobby time for the month.
• 17.5% of my total hobby time was spent in bursts of painting for under half an hour (Angela says I have ADHD!).
• By the way, I painted a “test” Kroot and Kroot Hound and then 7 more Kroot Hounds, as well as 2 Shield Drones and my Broadside. It equals 168 points worth. So, if my entire army was made up of Kroot Hounds, Broadsides and Shield Drones, and I kept up the same amount of hobby, it would take me roughly 11months and 27days, now that’s science!

Kroot Hounds	Unpainted MIniatures	1st stage of painting	Finished Miniatures

• The two games I played were against Alex Murray and his Blood Angels. The first one we didn’t finish as I’ve just started playing indoor soccer on Wednesday nights (he would’ve won) and the second was a Seek & Destroy at Alpha level, which Alex won 3 units to 2 (I had to kill 4 Marines in the last turn and could only manage 1), close one.

Tau and Blood Angels set for battle	Tau take a fortified position	Tau swamped by Blood Angels

So there you go, an in-depth look into my November. It’s starting to get a bit like reality TV in here…

One thing that I did do this month was read through the previous articles and right at the start I said I was doing a Water Caste theme blah, blah, blah… hasn’t really turned out like that. So how has it turned out? Where has the theme gone?

Next Month: The second month in a row with a question as the title.