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Ask HN: How do you maintain balance between all the things you want to do?

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21–30 of 141 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain balance between all the things you want to do?

#21
I just do some things. These are my priorities:

Maintain a healthy relationship

Socialize and enjoy life

Maintain a healthy body

Experiment and try new things.

I spend a disproportionate number hours working, I don’t see a reason to prioritize it beyond that it naturally is prioritized (regular baseline hours and obvious objectives).

We all have our baseline for how much we can accomplish and it is important to not force yourself into a mode of life that you cannot sustain or which makes you miserable.

Sleep in, go for walks, don’t fret about leaving things unfinished if they’re not sparking anything in you.

I guess this is to say, don’t do things for their sake, do them for your own sake. Enough things will fall off that your time will allocate itself naturally.

Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain balance between all the things you want to do?

#22
Most things suck or are not directly relevant to your immediate situation. Thus you can eliminate and prioritize.

A lot of those goals seem generally good but won't necessarily benefit you like they benefit others. So you shouldn't feel obligated to have them, and let them go. Journals/meditation/exercise/reading material etc all solve specific problems, they shouldn't be treated like they're absolute must-haves without context.

If you truly are ambitious and not afflicted by mimyesis (most of those goals are vague and high-level/generic/conventional, likely not informed by what your real opportunities are, or if they are you aren't describing them, which suggests that they're not coming from you), then the most important thing is to have the capacity of achieving those goals over your lifetime.

This mainly implies good health -- bite the bullet and prioritize exercise first, buy a gym subscription and trainer to push you to accomplishment and give you the presence of mind and body to feel more energetic and willful towards your goals through life.

"Socializing" would be a good second priority because problems and interests rarely occur in a vaccuum, they occur relative to other people and their traditions of practice. If you don't have a sense of your interests or don't feel like you have any real problems, get some by treating that as your first problem and start exploring your interests based off of your own hunches until the larger picture forms. This also constrains the vaguer goals like "Read" (lol) and even "Study" (when you link up to other developers).

IMO the way to more productivity is by starting with small amounts of productivity and do the most natural least effort way of doing it first, then improve. Starting habits is hard, and sustaining them is hard, but doing them tends to be easy, which means that you want to figure out the least intimidating way to do them first so that you'll actually start it, then build up to sustain it.

I can't reiterate enough: if it isn't critical, put it off until later, and just do the most useful thing until it stops being useful. You're under no obligation to accomplish these tasks and there isn't anyone watching over you to accomplish them. Just do these things for you and because you want them or need to now, and you'll be OK.

Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain balance between all the things you want to do?

#23
Little by little things get done. When you wake up in the morning you don’t start “remodeling a house” you install door knobs. You don’t “build a new web app” you work on a feature. It doesn’t matter how much work you get done, just that you’re making progress. Chip away at your goals and forgive yourself when you don’t complete everything you wanted and try again tomorrow.

Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain balance between all the things you want to do?

#24
From being in a similar situation here is what I learned recently. You have Finite time and you have finite energy, usually people want to do more things than they have available resources for. You have to internalize and accept this. You cannot accomplish all the tasks you want to do sustainably.

Fully internalizing this allows you to find what it is you really care about. For example you want to write a personal journal not for journaling sake but there is a goal you are trying to achieve that you think journaling is the way to reach it, same with meditation, work and everything on your list. They are tasks that lead to a goal. Accepting you have limited time allows you to prioritize your goals. When you do this you will be able to focus on what is truly important to you. Not everything on your list will move the needle to your real goals, slash them. Working hard and pushing yourself does not gaurantee success... remeber to live the life you want not the one you think you have to live to get the life you want.

Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain balance between all the things you want to do?

#25
My biggest suggestion here is to a) write down all the things you want to change about your life, b) pick one, c) spend at least 30 days establishing new habits around that, while d) definitely not working on anything else on that list.

If you try to change everything at once, nothing will stick. But if you get in the habit of working on one thing a month, you can devote your full brainpower to really figuring out how to do that in a way that is sustainable for yourself.

P.S. "1. Write a personal journal / meditate / exercise" is definitely not 1 thing. That's three things. That suggests strongly to me that your desire to cram things in is part of the problem. To make lasting change, you have to be patient, compassionate, and honest with yourself. Here that means accepting that adopting even 1 of those 3 things is hard work that requires practice. Indeed, you may have to split them further. "Exercise" is a huge area. Try starting with something smaller, like "do a couch-to-5k program" or "do 10 minutes of stretching daily".

Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain balance between all the things you want to do?

#26
post #25

My biggest suggestion here is to a) write down all the things you want to change about your life, b) pick one, c) spend at least 30 days establishing new habits around that, while d) definitely not working on anything else on that list. If you try to change everything at once, nothing will stick. But if you get in the habit of working on one thing a month, you can devote your full brainpower to really figuring out ho…

Funny that you posted. I made the decision today to focus on music this month and defer some visual related hobbies next month.

As you said, I was just getting nowhere when my focus was divided. Whenever I want to dive something deep into something new that I learned, I get distracted away by some new thing in the other hobby that I was doing.

Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain balance between all the things you want to do?

#27
post #11

In the words of Eric Cartman's Karate instructor, "You rak dishiprin!" What you have to realise (not just understand conceptually) is that anything worth doing -- anything significant in your life -- requires hard work. Now, before anyone here drops to the floor in a fit of cliche-driven convulsion, let me explain 'hard work'. Hard work is about being consistent and doing the same thing every day. Learning to speak a…

Well said. I'll just add this quote from the running baboon in Bojack Horseman: "It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day — that’s the hard part. But it does get easier"

“It never gets easier, you just get faster” -Greg LeMond

Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain balance between all the things you want to do?

#29
I just pick one thing outside of work I want to achieve at a time. I don't actually care about the results - everything that's in my brain is ash in 60 years time anyway - but I enjoy the feeling of self improvement. But I don't need to do that much to get that feeling.
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