How to (actually) get around to your hobby
Struggling to get around to your hobby? Follow these steps to start achieving regularity.
Do you ever find yourself thinking that you’re actually going to start working on your hobby again soon and continue to not? And before you know it, several months pass, and you find yourself wondering what you have done with the year.
Missed opportunities can, many times, result in regret. Especially when you know you could have directed your time in a better way. While you can’t go back and start on your hobby sooner, you can start making some adjustments today that will enable you to sustain and enjoy your hobby for years to come. Here are my suggestions to this end.
Audit How You Direct Your Time
For the next week (or month), keep a log of what you are spending time on and for how long. Go about your life just as you usually would; don’t try to make any drastic changes. Your objective is to conduct an analysis that mirrors exactly where you are currently directing your time.
At the end of this time audit, you may be surprised (and much more aware) of where your time is going. Make note of some trends you notice. You will use this information in the next phases.
Eliminate Distractions
One of the largest (if not the largest) ways people direct their time is with distractions or pass times that don’t get them much of anywhere. This may include doom scrolling on social media or the internet, watching videos, or watching movies or TV shows. Now, there is nothing wrong with watching some media here or there to relax. But if you are watching an excessive amount that is inhibiting you from doing much of anything else, I would question how much you are watching and cut back.
So how do you eliminate distractions to actually get around to your hobbies? There are many ways to do this. For one, put your phone on do not disturb mode and leave it in the other room. If there is something that is nagging at you that needs to be taken care of, take care of it so you can fully focus on your hobby. Establish a quiet place and time where you can work on it. You can set the conditions of your hobby space based on your needs and circumstances, but those are a few ideas to help you get started.
Bring Order to Your Life
If there are many “open tickets” in your life that need to be resolved, it can be challenging on getting around to your hobby when those are on your mind and task list. For this reason, my recommendation is to complete as much as you are able to lighten your load, even if it requires more time and effort in the near-term. It is much easier to think about and direct time towards your hobby when there is much less you are concerned with. So, off-board as much as you are able, and your time and mind will be much freer to do with as you please.
Set Time Aside (or Time Block)
With much less clutter in your life, you would then have much better bandwidth to carve out time for your hobby. There are two ways you can go about this. One way is to schedule some time blocked slots on your calendar for when you plan to work on these hobbies. This is a great method for implementing some loose structure that plans what your week will look like and hold yourself accountable.
Another way is to just spontaneously do it. No scheduling is required here, but you will need personal accountability and discipline to choose your hobby over low-grade distractions. My post To Schedule Your Hobbies or Spontaneously Do Them? covers this topic in greater detail. Either way, though, getting around to your hobby requires setting time aside for it, regardless of how you do that.
Be Proactive
The final aspect of sustaining your hobby overtime is taking care of various matters as they come up. Instead of bringing order to your life again at a later date, you are now keeping the order. Being proactive, rather than succumbing to procrastination (which happens to be one of my least favorite words).
There are many approaches that you can take to keep your life in order. My number one recommendation, however, is taking up a task manager. For more information on how I have set my task manager up for managing my life and hobbies, read How to Optimize Your Life for Sustaining Hobbies.
Now Get Around to Your Hobby!
The only way to get around to your hobby is to, well… get around to it. If you have nothing to lose by starting and working on your it, then simply do it. It may take a push or two (or five) to get yourself to work on your hobby. You will find soon enough, though, that once you overcome the initial resistance, that you naturally start to come back to it out of sheer enjoyment and enthusiasm to see where you will get with it.
Happy hobbying!