A problem that I've faced for the majority of my NLHE full ring career has been balancing the quality of my play with the quantity. I know after months of study that my optimal number of tables to play to maximize my hourly win-rate at any given level is between 14 and 18 non-fast tables, and as such I tend to play 16 non-fast by default. This is a useful number for my purposes since it is the balance I mentioned earlier held for an hour's period of time.

Along the same lines, I've taken pains to figure out what the best length is for my sessions, and I've come to discover that I should probably be playing sessions that are between 120 and 150 minutes long. For similar reasons as above, this allows me to make the most efficient use of my time when planning out my sessions for the day.

There are other factors that go into planning out my day in terms of when I'll play poker and for how long. For one, I want to be in bed by 1 am to be awake by 7 am, so I won't start any poker sessions after 11 pm. Also, I like to have at least an hour break between sessions to clear my mind and do things that are more constructive than sitting in front of a computer all day.

The way all of this ties into not being lazy is that when approached incorrectly, these things can become excuses to ourselves not to put in more hours of study and play in each day. Instead, they should be used as guidelines as to how and when we should structure our play to get the maximum out of the time we're at the tables. When we put in a lot of time inside of a structure like this, we end up with close to the maximum possible results by combining efficiency with effort.