Curley鈥檚 New Year鈥檚 Resolution advice: Fill up your third bucket
Dec 28, 2016, 12:04 PM | Updated: 12:47 pm

Looking for a New Year's Resolution? Try filling up your hobby bucket. (AP)
(AP)
My dad has this thing called the three bucket theory. I don鈥檛 know if he made it up or not, but this is how it goes.
You鈥檝e got three buckets and 24 hours in a day. You should fill the buckets with eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work and then eight hours of something else. That third bucket, that鈥檚 the one you need to fill with hobbies and interests outside of sleeping and working. You know, sailing or woodworking or dog grooming 鈥 my knowledge of this stuff is limited. Think of the theory like the Pennsylvanian’s version of Henry David Thoreau鈥檚 aphorism: 鈥淢ost men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them.鈥
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If you have disproportionately too many hours in the middle tub, you end up having an empty, or near-empty bucket somewhere else. Then, when you 鈥渞etire,鈥 you turn to the third bucket and ask, 鈥榃ell, what am I interested in?鈥 Too often the answer is 鈥渘othing,鈥 because you have filled the middle bucket with nothing but work. That鈥檚 why the 8-8-8 gives you a balanced life and will help you find work more rewarding.
My third bucket? I don鈥檛 have one. In fact, I sold that third bucket and took the extra money I made so I could have a bigger middle bucket. Between the radio stuff and my auctioneering gig, I work 70 or 80 hours a week. This is why my list of hypothetical hobby ideas ends at dog grooming.
My advice: if your job bucket is not satisfying, you鈥檇 better get a nice sturdy third bucket and fill it with something else. That鈥檚 what I鈥檓 trying to work on in 2017.
Then again, I just read about how the Russians invented the idea of retirement as a way to get old people out and new blood in, even though most studies nowadays show that if you retire too early or retire at all, you鈥檒l end up dying.
So, my revised advice: Keep hammering away, nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, all the way through until finally you pass away on the job. And then later retire.
That way, you’ll end up yelling at co-workers for not filling up the copier.