How to Find Time for a Hobby
No matter how hard we try, there are just 24 hours in a day. And no matter how much harder we try, our to-do lists never get shorter.
Fortunately, there is a unexpected hack to making more leisure time.
Singletasking
Society values the ability to do several things at once. Whether you call it multitasking or not, the truth is that you brain is not designed to do more than one things at a time. If multitasking is a workout for your brain, it’s a workout that creates stress hormones and damages memory.
The key to singletasking is to focus deeply on the one task at hand. Silence your phone, turn off email, and do just one thing. I find that giving full attention to a project increases accuracy, innovation and speed.
Sandra Bond Chapman also recommends giving your brain some down time. You will be more productive if you step away from mentally challenging tasks for a few minutes. Taking a break will make room for your next inspired idea. Breaks in constant thinking slows the mind’s rhythms to allow more innovative moments.
After a two week of singletasking, I felt less stressed and more engaged.
Prioritize
In his ground-breaking book The Time Bind, Arlie Hochschild found that the roles of home and work had reversed. Work has become more attractive, while home had grown more stressful. People may say that “family comes first,” but not in practice.
The one exception is that Americans generally sustain their religious involvements despite other commitments. In Time Bind and God’s Time, researchers from Berkley found that religion is central to families’ values, self-definition, and child-rearing. In other words, families prioritize.
How can you find time for a hobby without abandoning your family?
Have Leisure Goals
Your schedule is your schedule. If you want to exercise or go to the grocery store, schedule it. If you’re like me, we schedule lots of activities we don’t care about.
But just like any other activity you do value, you should schedule evening and weekend activities that recharge you.
Lifehack has an interesting article designed to uncover places where we’re leaking time.
What do you think? How do you find ways to unwind?
