Ask HN: Will soon have lots of time and little money – how to spend it?

1. No more zero days - do something towards whatever goal or want. (e.g. make time to study/research/learn/design/develop/create/build/launch)

2. Be grateful to the 3 You's - The Past You, The Present You, and the Future You.

3. Exercise - when you exercise, you are doing your future self a huge favor.

4. Read Daily - almost everything we've ever thought of, or gone through, or wanted, or wanted to know how to do or whatever has been already figured out by someone else. Reading will help you better understand.

5. Have faith and follow through with action.

The most important thing for me is to make sure my health is in check, since that’s the foundation for everything. My mental checklist - things I go through my head every now and then to make sure they are at healthy levels - is food, fitness, sleep, stress and sun. I try very hard not to compromise these in pursuit of doing other things.

Another thing I’m doing now is treating every project as a client, including personal projects. I had been using FreshBooks for keeping track of client work, but I also use it to keep track of the open source projects I work on. Obviously I don’t charge these people, but I find it helpful to see in one place where I’m allocating the time I spend designing UI and writing code. If I notice I hadn’t been putting enough time yesterday, I’ll let go of other pursuits to make the time.

As for saving money, having a budget that you can easily refer to helps. I use You Need A Budget becaus - unlike mint - it forces you to really look at each transaction and “give your money a job”.

What I haven’t solved yet is the social interaction I had while working in an office of people I knew. While I have access to a co-working space, people tend to keep to themselves. Same thing with coffeeshops. I’ve had to just rely on friends and meetups to balance this instead.

EDIT: my contact info is on my profile if you ever want sync up and share further tips and experiences. This goes for anyone else trying out this type of experiment. :)

For a while, do a lot of nothing. Long walks. Relaxed hikes. Meditation. Sitting at cafes, watching the world go by. Dawdling on park benches, tree stumps, beaches.

Why? Well, part of it is that high-stress jobs have a long-term cost. You likely need to heal. But it also sounds like you have both a learned habit of and a natural bias toward keeping busy.

That business has its benefits. But for me at least it was also a symptom of avoidance. I didn't want to think about uncomfortable things in my past, my present self, my likely future. Changing that has made an enormous difference in my life, and I wish I had done it years ago.

So book a lot of time for rest until you feel like you can sit quietly for a half hour without resorting to distraction. You could try an Unschedule [1] for that as a way to get started. Or you could just have some set working hours and let the rest of the time be. And definitely consider picking up a meditation practice. I'd suggest simple insight meditation (aka Vipassana) as an easy way to start.

[1] http://www.lifeclever.com/how-to-unschedule-your-work-and-en...