I’m very prone to procrastination. While I wouldn’t say that I have
focus issues, I have noticed that I can easily spend hours on
non-essential sites that don’t bring anything to my life. Social media
has been one of them. I have always had a pretty weird relationship
with social media. I joined Facebook and Instagram a long time ago
because many of my friends and family were already there. While I
never did post stuff actively, I always noticed that I just ended up
mindlessly surfing these, especially on Instagram.
A couple of years back, I became conscious of this and decided to
delete my accounts on these platforms without giving too much thought
to it. While leaving these platforms was pretty easy for me, I noticed
that I had just replaced these with some other platform, YouTube in my
case. After which, I started spending countless hours on that platform
instead. Back then, I didn’t consider this habit as bad as mindlessly
browsing Instagram or Facebook despite it being the same. I think I
just rationalized it to myself as being educational or informative in
a better way than other platforms.
A year or two passes without Instagram or Facebook completely fine,
but I wanted to start using them again for some reason. Maybe I
thought I had already been cured of this disease, so I could have a
healthy relationship with them from now on. I also had professional
reasons behind this since I thought these platforms offer a great way
of marketing your art to others, which is true in some cases.
However, I quickly noticed similar behaviour when I was last on these
platforms. So after a couple of months of trying to get back in, I
just felt repulsed by them and decided to leave them again. When it
comes to marketing, that is not for me. I understand the benefits of
being an artist in social media. Still, since I mainly enjoy that as a
passionate hobby, I don’t see the need for being on social media.
So at the time of writing this, I think it has been about six months
or so of living without these. Still, I’m conscious of my
unnecessarily large usage of YouTube, News etc. While comparing my use
with Instagram, I still wouldn’t consider watching YouTube or
regularly checking news as bad as mindlessly scrolling through your
feeds. I still noticed similar behaviour on those I struggled with,
for example, with Instagram. I became conscious about randomly picking
up my phone and scrolling through the news even though I had just read
them or letting YouTube’s autoplay roll for long periods without
giving it too much thought. So I wanted to tackle these habits.
I have noticed that the most extreme methods work the best when fixing
some bad habit, at least in my case. So I didn’t want to ease when
trying to have a healthy relationship with these applications but
instead went cold turkey immediately.
So how has this worked for me? I think great! In the beginning, I
noticed how much free time I have when I don’t spend on useless
things. Also, initially, I occasionally picked up my phone by
instinct. However, I quickly realized I had no applications to spend
mindlessly surfing, so I quickly grew out of this habit. At first, I
felt boredom slightly when I couldn’t spend time on these apps, but
thankfully I realized that this spare time needed to be used
elsewhere. Before this, I was already reading relatively a lot, about
three to four books per month, but I have almost doubled that number
nowadays. I also wrote about time management between multiple
passions a while ago, where I
pondered how I manage time between, for example, programming and
music. After ditching distractive sites entirely, I have felt that the
time management between these activities and my work life hasn’t been
an issue. Finding time for various pet projects and serious work
outside my life is straightforward since I don’t spend my time on
useless stuff anymore.
Do I see myself using these applications in the future? Well, I want
to read the news and continue to do so, not just constantly. I usually
catch up with recent events in the morning, but I don’t desire to
install any news apps on my telephone. When it comes to these
streaming platforms, YouTube, Netflix, etc., I could live without
them. There are lots of good information on these platforms, so if I
need to watch some videos, I can allow myself to do so. However, I
don’t want them to control my life in a way that I’m uncomfortable
with.
I have always enjoyed reading about other people’s productivity hacks
and workflows, in general, regarding whatever they might be doing.
However, I often stumble upon reading how people maintain an
extravagant lifestyle with dozens of different hobbies, interests, and
passions with ease. So it makes me wonder how they manage their time
to maintain a healthy level of participation in their interests
without burning out.
I don’t have dozens of different passions or interests in my life, but
my passions tend to be quite large on their own, so when combining
those with 40 hour work week, I need to think about my time management
thoroughly. These passions I would consider to be writing, music and
programming. Fortunately, I currently work in the tech industry, so I
can make a good living by doing one of my passions. Writing on its own
isn’t necessarily a huge topic/interest in the sense that it only
consumes time, but the practice itself is pretty straightforward. On
the other hand, music is time-consuming, and it involves many
different activities, in my case. Sure, you could argue that writing
includes other practices, too, like planning what to write, but music
is on another level. I play multiple instruments, which I record for
myself and others in my home studio. I enjoy composing tunes, adding
some mixing and mastering to this, and you need to sacrifice a lot of
time for this. Programming is also something that I enjoy spending my
time on. While I do it for a living, what makes me genuinely like it
is the projects I work on in my free time, whether it’s my pet
projects of various sizes or some open-source projects.
Finding the time and focusing on the task at hand isn’t necessarily an
issue for me, but it’s more about maintaining a healthy balance
between all these passions that I hold dear to me. Although that being
said, I would consider myself a very gifted procrastinator, so
focusing on the task at hand can often be tricky. However, focusing
becomes no more an issue once I’ve gotten into the flow. A more
significant problem here is often finishing projects rather than
starting a new one (which I feel is entirely another issue to
improve).
When I work on my passions, I tend to focus for days or weeks on one
passion, e.g. programming, neglecting my other passions like writing
and music. This on its own isn’t necessarily a bad thing since I don’t
feel that I’m wasting my time when I’m doing something that I enjoy
and can get rewarded in multiple ways. But I would like to maintain an
equal balance between my passions.
A while ago, I started reading about how other people have managed
their time with multiple passions/hobbies, and almost unanimously,
everybody used various schedules for this. So I have already used a
“life management” system for a long time to handle all my to-do lists
and schedules related to my home and work life (insert praising words
about Emacs’ org-mode here).
I’m not going into details about how I manage my life with org-mode,
but if you’re interested in the tool, I would recommend going
through articles found at Org for GTD and other Task management
systems and from Rainer
König’s OrgMode
tutorial
I realise that I have been missing for a long time in my current setup
because I haven’t scheduled when to work on what project. While I’ve
split my free-time projects into sub-tasks and occasionally schedule
and deadline when to work/finish those, the work has always been very
sporadic. The result has often been that I work for an X period on one
project and then move on to another, so I usually just forget what I
was supposed to do on the earlier project. For me, this often leads to
unnecessary postponing or cancelling/removing tasks completely. I also
quickly start saying, “I’ll do it tomorrow”, which everyone knows
won’t happen.
Starting Light
So I started to approach the whole concept of time management between
multiple different interests: to make dedicated timeslots and days for
whatever I might be working on. I maintain numerous ongoing projects
that don’t necessarily have deadlines but are just larger projects
that I want to work on it from time to time. Then these projects have
sub-projects which are usually scheduled with deadlines. These
projects and sub-projects might include something related to work,
home, open-source work, recording, or simply writing something.
I nowadays approach working these by dedicating timeslots for
something on a specific day. My work life and day-to-day home stuff
take a good portion of my days, but I try to use it as efficiently as
possible the rest of the time. So on Monday, I might work on some
programming-related endeavours based on my backlog, Tuesday something
else and so on. The way I still approach tasks haven’t changed in any
way, as in I still manage my tasks and TODOs and keep track of them,
but nowadays, I just dedicate specific days to specific
interest/passion.
Conclusion
This way, I don’t feel that I’m neglecting the stuff I want to work
on. Issues with this kind of approach are the context switching almost
daily. However, this kind of switching isn’t necessarily a bad
thing. I don’t want to think about work-related topics after I’ve
“clocked in the hours”, but I want to do something to relax or move my
thoughts elsewhere. I’ve mainly stumbled with issues that when you
might focus on programming one day, you focus on music. While this
switch on its own hasn’t been too bad in my case, when I get back to,
for example, programming after doing something else for several days,
it always takes a while to get back to the flow. But I do believe that
this is just missing practice in the world of managing multiple
different passions.
I have now split my time between multiple passions for several weeks,
which is an excellent way to go. It has also taught me about the stuff
that I genuinely want to work with since when you write down what you
want to do and when it’s easy to spot the stuff that you don’t want to
work on or just don’t have an interest in it. So this also works in my
case to find the topics that genuinely interest me. Will I continue to
manage my time like this for long? Well hopefully. I feel that this
way, I can contribute to all the stuff that makes my life interesting,
so obviously, I wouldn’t want to miss that.