![The Olympics are on from July 26. Shutterstock photo. The Olympics are on from July 26. Shutterstock photo.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/vQaZ3anPUuND9nFzbQxA35/07f211a7-7f5a-45e2-a5dd-eb2a9cb38c47.jpg/r0_0_4406_3172_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Whenever I sit down and think about when to take my annual leave, I look at the calendar.
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Not the Gregorian calendar, the sporting calendar.
However there's a lot of sport at this time of year.
Conundrum one - The T20 Cricket World Cup, European Football Championships, Wimbledon and the Paris Olympics are all on at a similar time, but I only have six weeks of annual leave.
I've got to choose one, but luckily, it's an easy decision.
I'm opting to put my entire focus on the Olympics because I'm always inspired by the stories behind the athletes who represent our country.
Conundrum two - Now that I've chosen what to watch, I need a plan on how to watch it because Paris is eight hours behind us.
The Olympics are on from about 5pm to 7am our time everyday, so I'm going to have to come up with better tactics than the Sydney Swans when they won the 2005 AFL premiership to take it all in.
To make things more difficult, the popular medals will be won from 4am onwards.
So how am I going to watch it all?
The first option is to be nocturnal for a couple of weeks, but I can't do that because I would wake the neighbours in the middle of the night for 17 days in a row with my yells of sheer delight whenever we win gold - I'm feeling very confident about that.
The second option is to carry on as usual and just watch replays on 9Now in the morning. The issue with that is I will receive spoilers of medals on the app, and that would take away from the excitement.
The third option is to record the action, and I will have to, but I want to take in as much of the live action as I can, so here's what I will do.
My masterplan
- Buy a set top box so I can record two free-to-air channels at once (one with my Foxtel box and one with the set top box).
- Continually flick between Nine, 9Gem and 9Now until 3am-ish as that's when there's a little break in medals.
- Record Nine and 9Gem until the end of the day's sport.
- Wake up at about midday to watch the rest of the action I missed overnight, which will lead to the start of the next day's sport.
Burney Wong, ACM journalist