One of my favorite parts of my job as an academic librarian is when I get the chance to sit in on classes and learn a little. (If I could go to classes all day every day, I probably would.) Today, I got to listen in on a lecture focused around an assignment the professor had developed called a “Poker Chip Investment Analysis.”
The basics are straightforward. Take a character from a narrative (book, movie, TV show, etc), and imagine that they have 100 poker chips that represent their psychological investment in different “objects”: other people, a particular value, a goal, an activity, etc. Then, describe how you believe they’ve distributed those poker chips. While the example used in class focused on Batman (45 chips into the criminals of Gotham, 25 chips into Justice, 15 chips into people he cares about, and 15 chips into his identity as Batman), I immediately wanted to take the same concept and apply it to my life. How have I invested my chips, so to speak?
To try and get a handle around this, I did a quick time study breakdown of my average week, trying to figure out generally how I’m spending the 168 hours in my life each week. While figuring this out precisely is obviously difficult, here’s the general breakdown I came up with:
- Sleeping: 55 hours (I get around 7-8 hours per night, though I’m not always actually asleep in bed. Insomnia takes up some of those hours, but we’ll clump it all together as part of the overall effort).
- Work: 40 hours (This is harder to get a handle on, because a lot of my spare time inevitably gets taken up by thoughts about work. Dealing with different challenges in the library and the state, trying to work out in my head how I want to handle them, etc, but I’m physically at work 40 hours a week, so we’ll go with that.)
- Family: 23 hours (For this, I calculated time spent together watching movies, playing games, talking on Zoom, etc. It works out to about 7 hours just with Denisa, 5 hours with Michaela, 2 hours with Tomas, and just 1 with Daniela right now, then another 8 or so that Michaela, Denisa, and I are spending together. As I look at it again, I’d say those hours with Denisa are getting undercounted, but it’s an imprecise metric.)
- Church/Bishopric: 9 hours. (2 at church each week, and then around 7 each week in my calling in the Bishopric. Some weeks this is much more, like if we have a youth temple trip that takes 12 hours, but as a baseline, this is probably close to accurate.)
- Reading: 7 hours (Reading a book a week takes time, and the books I choose are often quite long. If I switched to audiobooks, this is likely an area where I could save some time if I ever really need to, but I like the forced, focused downtime of reading, where all I can do is focus on one thing and ignore everything else. This is important to me.)
- Writing: 6 hours (Generally an hour a day each day but Sunday. Again, this doesn’t count the time I spend thinking about writing, which is considerable.)
- Playing Magic: 6 hours (Whether it’s playing digitally on Arena (where I try to get 4 wins every day) or helping run MTG Club drafts each week.)
- Eating: 3.5 hours (Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Often I’m doing something else while I’m eating, but a half hour a day actually just eating makes sense)
- Personal Hygiene: 3.5 hours (A half hour a day getting ready for the day or getting ready for bed)
- Exercise: 3 hours (Generally a half hour each day other than Sunday. This includes parking as far away on campus as I can so I have to walk to my office, and then doing some exercise during my lunch break each day)
- Crosswords: 2.5 hours (I do the NYT crossword every day. Thanks to the app, I know this takes me 2.5 hours on average for the week)
- Commute: 2.5 hours (About a half hour each day, give or take. I realize I’m very lucky in this department)
- Chores: 2 hours (This is a catch all, doing different things that need doing around the house and in my life. I might be under counting this.)
- Video Games: 2 hours (No real idea how much time I’m doing this by myself. I play games with Michaela or Tomas some of the time as well, but that (for me) falls under “family” time.)
- Friends: 2 hours (More some weeks, zero hours others. On average, probably about right.)
- DuoLingo and Mondly: 1 hour (Language learning. Part of the long term plan to be able to live and function in Slovakia or the Czech Republic.)
But I don’t think this time study necessarily equates to how I’d spend my poker chips. While you can certainly argue that how you spend your time shows what you value most in life, I think you can spend a lot of time doing things that don’t matter as much to you, just due to the nature of life and our society. For one thing, I don’t think “sleep” is part of the nature of the poker chip assignment.
In order to try and get an impartial view of how I really break down my time, I decided to turn to ChatGPT, which I use quite extensively for advice and input across the spectrum of my life these days. (It’s been Claude before. It’s Chat for now. It might change to something else later on.) I uploaded the assignment and my time study and then asked it to look over all of my conversations with it and tell me how it would answer the poker chip assignment for me. I’ll present it’s analysis here, unfiltered, as I think it’s pretty illuminating. And honestly, I don’t think it’s that far off.
Before I leave you in the hands of Chat, however, I’d just like to end my part by saying how valuable I found this whole exercise, and how much I’d recommend it for everyone. It helped me to refocus myself on what I really value and how I might want to shift things around in the long term to make things line up with how I spend my time and what those values are. If any of you would like to share your results of the exercise, I’d really be interested to see them. Thanks for reading.
THE REST OF THIS IS FROM CHATGPT
Looking across your conversations—and excluding the teaching/linguistics material that belongs to your wife—I’d allocate your psychological 100 chips something like this. This is based less on raw message counts than on what repeatedly carries identity, concern, planning, ambition, or emotional weight for you.
| Object / investment | Chips | Nature of the investment |
|---|---|---|
| Family / being a husband and father | 24 | Love, responsibility, protection, involvement, desire to provide opportunities and remain connected |
| Writing / author identity | 20 | Identification, ambition, creative expression, mastery, desire for recognition and continued publication |
| Professional life / libraries / leadership | 17 | Competence, responsibility, service, institutional influence, professional identity |
| Faith / Church / service | 11 | Belief, duty, belonging, service, family continuity, desire to do things correctly |
| Future security & life design | 10 | Protection, optionality, anticipation, some anxiety about loss; retirement, money, where to live, what comes next |
| Play / hobbies / fandom | 7 | Enjoyment, mastery, competition, connection with family and friends; Magic, WoW, football, games, music |
| Intellectual curiosity / learning | 5 | Curiosity, analysis, enjoyment of understanding how things work, history, technology, culture |
| Independent projects / making things | 4 | Creativity, experimentation, entrepreneurship; Maine Cat Lab, videos, websites, side ideas |
| Health / physical maintenance | 2 | Maintenance and preservation more than identity |
| TOTAL | 100 |
What jumps out to me is that your chips aren’t spread among dozens of unrelated things. There are really four major psychological objects taking nearly three quarters of them: family, writing, professional contribution, and faith.
Family — 24
This looks like the largest investment. And it’s broader than simply “I love my family.” A lot of your decision-making seems to run through the question:
What does this mean for us?
Jobs, international moves, retirement, money, Church responsibilities, your children’s activities, gaming with your kids, travel, schooling, maintaining relationships with older children—family repeatedly becomes the reference point against which other decisions are evaluated.
The relationship here looks like love + responsibility + protection, with a strong desire to remain actively involved rather than merely provide materially.
Writing — 20
I would put this considerably higher than your time study would.
Writing seems to be one of your strongest identity investments. You don’t merely spend six hours a week doing it. You think about manuscripts, plots, markets, editors, contracts, foreign rights, sales, future concepts, commercial viability, titles, structure, and what you should write next.
There is also a noticeable long-term thread: Can I keep doing this? Can I do more of it? Could this eventually occupy a larger part of my life?
So the relationship is something like identity + ambition + mastery + hope. Success or disappointment here probably carries considerably more psychological weight than the six weekly hours suggest.
Professional life — 17
Your library/university career is another genuine identity object, although I don’t think it consumes you psychologically in proportion to its 40 hours of actual time.
You repeatedly care about doing the job well and having an effect: library leadership, statewide library organizations, AI policy, institutional governance, communication, budgets, systems, professional standards, and helping UMF navigate change.
The recurring relationship seems to be competence + duty + contribution.
One subtle distinction from writing: professional success seems important to you, but it’s more from a maintenance point of view. With writing, you tend to think about how to continue or expand it. That’s why I’d give writing more psychological chips despite work taking vastly more hours.
Faith — 11
Religion appears less frequently than work or writing in raw conversation, but when it does appear, it isn’t casual.
You care about theology, Church practice, handbook rules, Church service, family religious responsibilities, missionary possibilities, and doing things in accordance with how the Church is actually supposed to operate. Your weekly schedule also includes a substantial Bishopric commitment.
I’d characterize this as belief + belonging + duty + identification.
Future security / life design — 10
This is one of the more interesting objects because it isn’t really a hobby or activity. You devote considerable thought to keeping the future open.
Retirement balances, healthcare, international moves, Europe, how long you need to work, what happens to savings, whether a move would improve your life, and what your 50s and 60s should look like all recur.
The psychological relationship seems to be desire for freedom combined with fear of closing doors.
You don’t strike me as primarily motivated by accumulating money for its own sake. Money is repeatedly treated as a way of buying security, choice, and eventually time.
Play — 7
Magic, WoW, BYU/college football, fantasy sports, games, reading for pleasure, and similar things are meaningful, but they don’t seem to carry the same existential weight.
There is often a social component, too. WoW isn’t simply WoW when you’re playing it with your son or daughter. Magic can be both hobby and social life.
The investment looks like pleasure + mastery + connection + competition.
Curiosity — 5
There’s also a recurring investment in simply figuring things out. You ask about history, technology, economics, religion, obscure cultural details, media, AI, and a huge range of practical subjects.
I’d separate this from work because you seem intrinsically analytical. Even when nothing depends on the answer, you often want to know how the thing actually works.
That’s curiosity + mastery.
Projects — 4
Maine Cat Lab is the clearest recent example, but there are others. You seem to like having something you can build, especially when it combines creativity, technical problem-solving, communication, and an audience.
That’s slightly different from writing. Writing is deeply tied to identity; projects seem more connected to experimentation and making.
Health — 2
You certainly attend to health, exercise, injuries, medications, etc., but based on our conversations it doesn’t seem to occupy a huge part of your identity. It is mostly something you want to keep functioning properly so that you can do the other things.
That’s why I’d give it relatively few psychological chips despite exercise being a consistent part of your life.
The most interesting comparison with your time study is this:
| Time chips | Psychological chips | |
|---|---|---|
| Work | ~35 | 17 |
| Family/relationships | ~20 | 24 |
| Writing | ~5 | 20 |
| Faith | ~8 | 11 |
| Hobbies/play | ~12–13 | 7 |
That’s where the exercise becomes revealing.
Work is consuming roughly twice as much of your waking life as the psychological investment I’d infer from our conversations. Writing is almost exactly the reverse: it gets relatively little of your clock but a very large share of your identity and mental investment.
And perhaps the strongest underlying theme across all of it is agency. A surprising number of your chips ultimately seem invested in having the ability to choose what happens next: financially secure enough to eventually retire, established enough to keep writing, connected enough to move without losing relationships, healthy enough to keep doing things, and flexible enough to pursue a different life if you decide you want one.
So if I had to describe your 100 chips in one sentence: you’ve invested most heavily in people you feel responsible for, things you create, institutions you can contribute to, and preserving the freedom to determine what the next stage of your life looks like.