The ideal Evening and the hobby limit

As a busy student I often find myself being frustrated when I end up doom scrolling on social media wasting away my precious time. However, I think I have cracked the code of the maximizing the evening.

So we all know doing everything takes energy, like studying or excersize, but unfortunately even hobbies have focus limits. We like to think we can always hyperfixate for hours and hours on end but for most people most of the time it's just not the case.

I came to this enlightenment when I was sewing with my friends at her flat after a full day at work. I started off with a lot of creative and mending energy, and with each project I completed, my patience and my satisfaction started to drop. I first fixed my first bag, energy starting off at 10, ending with a solid 9.5, then I fixed my other bag this, going from 9.5 to 9. Hemming my trousers I started with 9 , in the middle about a 6 and while I was hemming the first leg still a 6, but by the second leg i had dropped to a 2.5, I produced a sloppy hem and wasn't finding it fun anymore. Important to note this had just hit the 90 minute mark. This wasn't enjoyable and I was a bit irritated by this point I finished for the sake of finishing it. Then I realized an important pattern.

The 90 minute rule.

90 minutes is usually what takes me from enjoying my hobby to getting irritated maybe even full blown destructive. I've noticed it in the gym, climbing, scrapbooking, gardening, cleaning/ cooking, running, writing and more. I call this the recreational hobby limit.

After this I find it necessary to shift cognitive load, if it was a social/ creative one to do a more physical task or a more brainy task (in this case I'm writing). If i have had a physical social task (like a jog with friends) to a creative lone one (like baking). This leads me to my ideal evening. After work some sort of cognitive load is usually quite high depending on what you have done, the key is to oppose it, as I have been coding during the day I wanted to something more social and hands on so the sewing with my friends was perfect. Other options which would have been good could have been crochet/ knitting, scrapbooking or any of the hobbies I mentioned above.

Importantly, this means you can allocate 2-3 hobbies/ tasks in an evening. So the ideal evening would be a combination of a creative, a physical and a focused task/ hobby with 1 of them being social. This not only makes it easy to plan your evening ensuring things get done but it allows you to work on self improvement physically, socially and mentally.

Then the most essential part to this all is to have enough sleep so you have enough energy to think deeply and do 2/3 activities in the evening feeling great.