My Second Life - Work, Life and Passions
Couple people asked me how to organize my time on my day job responsibility and my hobby projects like self-development, lifehack.org and Listible etc at night. It is pretty similar to what Chris calls a second life. Same as Chris, I use my second life to pursue my passions - but things are not always go well because of other elements - work and life. Frankly Chris handles it much better than me - but in here I want share my issues and my ways to help the situation.
Issues:
- Sometimes my concentration is not there at night, after I have worked whole day in the office.
- Unexpected things, like phone calls from my love one.
- Fall asleep, because of tiredness.
- Deal with day-job work, because things have to be done in different timezones.
On-going solutions:
- Move on and Relax: When I lack of concentration to do my projects, I will take some time off at night to get some rest - perform some relax activities and share your time with others, such as chatting or watching TV with my family. Is it a time inefficient for my project? Yes. On the other hand, this is a great family time - utilize it - as I do not require great deals of concentration for catching up with friends/family or relaxation. It is much better than forcing myself to work on the projects and being unproductive.
- Ideal schedule: I keep my ideal schedule in my calendar and execute it. This is important even if I know the issues may affect my execution of the schedule. It still gives me a target to aim for, and I could base on this schedule to review my performance.
- Communicate: Tell my family and love one that you have a time-slot that you want to work with the projects. Schedule some other time to talk to them.
- Day-job work in a time-slot: I do not see a problem if it has to be done. I focus those tasks in a block of time - don’t spread out, otherwise it will take whole night.
- Review hit and miss: Every week or month, review my progress - Was it going well with my ideal schedule? Did I push myself too hard? Do I need to adjust more of my second life to be more relaxing?
Do you pursue your passions at night? How do you balance your life, work and passions?
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Comments
Alvin says on August 12th, 2006 at 1:14 am
I keep a day job and run my blog in my second life too, and I can totally relate to what you’re saying: the lack of energy, the crunch on time and (sometimes) unreasonable calls from clients in the late hours.
My way of dealing with it has been to let go of the idea that everything has to go according to schedule…it’s much better to be flexible, and to give yourself some credit: what you’re doing isn’t easy after all but you’re dedicated to contributing more than just living a wage job existence, you want to create.
Not only is flexibility and grace key, so is focus. And one way I deal with the necessary shifting of having so many roles in my life (day job, blogger, boyfriend, son, friend) is to have ‘burst times’, especially on my blog. There are times when I won’t just write one article, if there’s time I’ll burst out days worth, just in case in the week ahead I won’t have the luxury of my second life.
Anthony says on August 21st, 2006 at 7:35 am
I too have a busy life outside of my day job (studying). I struggled with this for some time, and my solution was to do some of my study BEFORE I went to work.
I’m not really a morning person, but I’ve got into the habit of dedicating an hour every morning to my study. My mind is clear and I’m surprised how much more productive I am at this time. I haven’t had to wake up much earlier either, cause I’m keen to get into it as soon as I’ve had by breakfast!
I can then spend less time at night on it if I’m tired, and take the odd night off.