Weekly schedule

I've been thinking a lot about how to balance everything I have going on in my life. There are only so many hours in a week and it's hard to make everything fit. Also, unless we consciously manage things, certain aspects of our life (like work, church, etc) have a way of taking over and crowding out other things we may want and need to get done in other aspects of our life. Therefore, this past week, I did a personal exercise where I said "if I really could control my schedule, how would I ideally manage my time in a given week?" That caused me to put together a list of competing demands on my time along with a list of things I'd like to be doing more of. It also caused me to quantify the amount of time that was required and/or appropriate for each of those activities and also think about what additional constraints I needed to take into account (i.e., train schedules, kids' bedtimes and nighttime routines, what activities were appropriate on the Sabbath, etc).

I ended up optimizing for the following:

• 8 hours per night of sleep. I typically short-change this (as do others) but I think it's a mistake and I think my body needs about 7-8 hours of sleep to function optimally.
• 50 hours per week of work. I went back and forth a bit on this one. You could certainly argue for a 40 hour work week but that's just not the reality of the career choice that I've made at the moment. At the same time, my job could easily suck up 60 or 70 hours per week if I let it so there needs to be a balance. 50 hours seemed like a reasonable compromise for now but it's something to revisit over time - especially given the length of my commute at the moment (which isn't factored into the 50 hour figure).
• Being home for dinner each night with the kids. This may not always be possible given business trips, business dinners, special events, etc but I think the going-in-assumption should be that I'm home each night for dinner and bedtime.
• Spending time with my kids. In addition to being home for dinner each night, I'd like to spend some quality time with them on the weekend.
• Spending time with my wife. I'd like a dedicated block with just her each week and ideally some shorter dedicated blocks during the rest of the week.
• Honoring God and Church commitments / guidelines. This includes keeping the Sabbath day holy, attending my weekly ward missionary meeting, having daily scripture study, and doing a weekly family home evening.
• Exercising three times a week. Ideally I'd exercise more often than that but it's all a balance. I'm not exercising at all at the moment (which isn't right) but I can't exercise everyday either and still make everything else fit.
• Relaxation and personal projects. Somewhere in there, I need at least a little down time. I also need time for personal projects like family history, blogging, reading, etc. Being social occasionally wouldn't be bad either.

Against those constraints, I put together a generic weekly schedule (see PDF). I would be interested in people's opinions regarding how to optimize the time better and/or a different set of priorities/constraints. You'll notice that I played some tricks here like assuming that I can spend an hour of my commute time on the train getting work done. But I also tried to stay practical and realistic about how long things take and that you can't transition from one thing to another instantaneously. For example, you can't go from playing basketball to going to sleep right away after you get home.

Anyway, I'll be interested in what people have to say (if anything) and in how closely I'm able to adhere to this schedule. It's certainly a work in progress.