I read that you should aim for similar totalled hours in each stage for AM6, but in LeoIsTheSun's journal, he said he got 250 hours in Stage 1 and 500 in stage 3, and something like 400 in stage 2. How much of a problem is the difference in hours listened? There's pretty much double the amount of hours in his stage 3 than in stage 1.
I think I read somewhere that ramping hours up is ok but to what extent is questionable.
Best thing you can do is just follow instructions as best as possible
For AM6, I did about 520 hours for stages 1-2-3. I felt I could easily handle it, so I increased to no more than 600 hours for stages 4-5-6. They were close enough to be okay to me, and it helped build a better foundation for my SM3 run. And 600 is getting close to the 672 hour max limit per stage anyway.
Hope that helps you. I'd say a bit of an increase is okay, but try to keep it as balanced as possible as each stage plays on the preceding ones.
If your foundation is 50% as solid as your walls, and they are 50% as solid as your roof, what's going to happen to your house? Enough said.
Even I remember reading somewhere in this forum that it is ok to increase hours in the subsequent stages but should not decrease it, the way you wrote it here Shannon, it seems like if at all, there should be a decrease in the number of hours in subsequent stages.
I know, we need to aim at a balance, I just wanna clarify if it is not ok to increase the hours in the later stages, just for my knowledge, I still am aiming for equal number of hours...
Touching upon shub's post, I'm thinking once I get my part-time job (hopefully within a month), it'll cause my later stages to have less time used. So I'll have more in Stage 1 than the other stages. Is this just as bad as the opposite?
Use the sub equal hours per stage. That will give equal balance to the input stages. That's how it's designed to be used. So pick an amount of time, and then find a way to achieve it for all six stages.