3 Tips for Making Time for Your Hobbies Alongside Your Career

For the overwhelming majority of us, work takes up a very substantial portion of our time.

While this is all well and good if you are able to balance your work with your hobbies and other personal interests, the unfortunate reality is that many people find themselves chronically struggling to achieve that sort of balance, and are constantly wishing they were better able to find more free time.

While being chronically overworked is a serious problem that needs to be addressed in and of itself, there are various things that the average person, in the average situation, will likely be able to do in order to make time for their hobbies alongside their career.

Here are some suggestions to keep in mind:

• Seek out a job that feels innately fulfilling

Perhaps the most meaningful thing you can do in order to make time for hobbies alongside your career, and to better balance the two, is to seek out a job that feels innately fulfilling – assuming you don’t already have such a job.

There are many avenues you can no doubt go down in order to try and ensure that your job is the right fit for you, ranging from investigating Practice Match services, to doing in-depth research on different companies, and keeping your feelers out constantly.

When you have a job that feels more innately fulfilling, however, the bottom line is that you will have a lot more energy, and a much more positive mindset, and will therefore not struggle as much to work up the motivation to pursue your hobbies.

By contrast, if you’re constantly exhausted from days at a job you don’t like, a higher proportion of your time will likely have to be spent on simple rest and recovery.

• Work to optimize your energy levels wherever possible

Following on from the last point, it’s important to realise that your energy levels are perhaps the most important variable to tweak and manage, when it comes to ensuring that you are better able to juggle your hobbies and professional life.

Often, the reasons for apparent “poor time management” will really have more to do with low energy levels – which will naturally cause you to “waste” more time, through inefficiency, and through sheer fatigue.

Focus on good nutrition, proper sleep, and other things that can help to optimise your energy levels.

• Realize that there is actually quite a lot of time in each day, and that “freeing up” time is generally a matter of managing your priorities

As the writer Laura Vanderkam points out, there are 168 hours in a week. Hypothetically, this should mean that there is quite a wealth of time available for achieving virtually whatever it is you might conceivably want to achieve.

Of course, complications arise in reality. But, it’s worth keeping in mind that in many cases, “freeing up” time is really just a matter of prioritising differently.

Do you really have “no time” to read a book? Or is it just that you’d actually prefer to watch TV in the evenings?