zushi's place

Chatting with some friends recently and reflecting on my past year's experience, there's some general agreement that “outside of a full time job, there's time for two active hobbies at most”.

By active hobbies, what we mean here are hobbies that you are either growing or trying to incorporate into your life. For example, taking skate lessons twice a week or studying one chapter of Japanese a week. I think anything that fits into the sentence “right now I'm working a lot on _____” can be considered an active hobby.

Having two active hobbies outside of work might already be a stretch for a lot of people – I think pulling this off for many requires some sort of social sacrifice for many, unless the hobbies are already social in nature. A reality you notice when talking to people in a full-time job is that they tend to tire out after work as is.
Generalizing a bit more, I think a reasonable approximation here is that a full-time job might account for the time of two active hobbies. So if you are not employed, then you get four active slots.
This heuristic works pretty well, and I think is a good way to keep optimism about how much you can do in check. Reflecting on the past year, I definitely overloaded myself by taking on way too much (1 meeting new people, 1 improv, 0.5 art, 1 Japanese on top of work), and I do believe the quality of everything suffered as a result.
Having that heuristic acts as a good reality check. I now pick up new things much more carefully. I do think the quality of what I do improved as a result, though.
The heuristic of four units of active hobbies (or at most two outside of work) is very counter-intuitive in part because we seem to see other people who can do a lot more. In practice I think there are a few addendums to the heuristic:

• You can downgrade an active hobby to a passive hobby if it's something you can set up a routine for. For example, learning about how to work out correctly is an active hobby. But once the routines are set up, it becomes fairly passive and might only take 1/5 to 1/3 of a normal hobby slot. I don't believe all hobbies are amenable to this, though.
• If one of the hobbies are what you do to recharge anyways, I don't count it within the four. For example, a lot of people play video games to recharge, and I don't consider video games as taking up an active slot. It happens that most of what people do in order to recharge are not considered “productive hobbies” in the traditional sense (case in point, video games). However, some people gets recharged by strenuous and stereotypically “productive” hobbies – say running or tennis. If that's what they need in order to recharge, then it might seem that they actually have three productive hobbies going on outside of work.
• (Hypothetical, I have never seen anyone do this.) With very careful time management and possibly a lot of caffeine, I surmise it may be possible to handle three “productive” active hobbies outside of work. I don't think this is much achievable without some direct introspection on productivity, and possibly a lot of prep/planning work.
  When you drill into the details of each individual's life, I'm sure there will be lots of counterexamples and room to optimize. However, I think thinking in terms of four units (or two on top of work) makes for an excellent reality check against taking on too much.
  As a tiny bonus, I quite like how reality seems a lot more like a video game or board game this way.

— Categorized under: #productivity