It's tempting to fill your day with farm chores, but the fact is that farming (and rural living in general) is filled with projects that have to get done, projects that happen once in a while but not every day. If you fill up your time with daily chores, you won't be able to get anything done!

This is doubly true if you have a day job, as I do (in the WAN acceleration group at Citrix Systems). There's been a big deadline crunch that's kept me from getting my newsletter out on time or even respond to email properly. But I get my daily chores done because (a) I've purposely kept a lid on how many I accept, and (b) There are limits to how much I'm willing to let things slide in a crisis.

I figure that 2-3 hours of daily chores are about all a full-time farmer can afford. For a part-time farmer, it's much less. Too many things come up that require large blocks of time -- some planned, some not. The chicken houses have to get built, escaped livestock have to be coralled, failed machinery has to be repaired -- it all takes time, and lots of it.

So keep that chore load low!