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 maximising the evening.

So we all know doing everything takes energy, you probably have heard of pomodoro timer for studying but unfortunately even hobbies have focus limits. We like to think we can do something we like for hours and hours on end but for most people 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. I just had 1 more trouser to fix so i brute forced it, this wasn't enjoyable and I was a bit irritated by this point I finished for the sake of finishing it. Then I realised 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. They vary from task to task but the overlying principle is the same as general energy levels also affect it.

After this I find it necessary to shift cognitive load, if it was a social/ creative one mabey to do a physical task or a less hands on, more brainy task (in this case I'm writing). Or 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 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.

I had the illusion that just because It was also social that I could carry on for longer. It's not and I think it's important to know this limit to understand energy levels. After this a bit of stretching of the legs and meditation for about half an hour before starting another opposing hobby. Which now I am writing but cooking also would have worked, reading, a jog or gym NOT a creative making hobby though as it wouldn't have had enough contrast to the previous task to fully recover, hence why i'm not doing my scrapbook or knitting.

Importantly, this means you can allocate 2-3 hobbies/ tasks in an evening more if you have shorter tasks, however there is a risk on non-recovery. 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, for example if I use that focussed tasks for job preparation, learning chess, writing or building electronics etc.

Then the most essential part to this all is to have enough sleep. For me I can survive off 7 hours of sleep and feel fine but definitely not optimal. 8-9 hours feels optimal for me, when I sleep this much I have enough energy to think deeply and well at work/ free time and do 2/3 activities in the evening feeling great. To wind down before bed my ideal way would be to have 30 minutes of book time, to slowly detach from the real world to enable true rest. I will look for alternative for this. I will further this study by doing some actual research and not basing this off my own thoughts.