How to make time for a hobby

In your quest for a balanced life, have you neglected your hobbies? Yes, we know you are busy, but hear us out. There is time for a hobby.

Think in weeks, not days

Laura Vanderkam, a writer and speaker on work-life balance, recommends thinking of time in weeks rather than days to learn where some extra time might be hiding in your schedule. A week “is really the cycle of life as people actually live it,” she said. Each week is made up of 168 hours. If you work 40 hours and sleep eight hours each night, that still leaves 72 hours.

To do that, Ms. Vanderkam recommends tracking a week of your life. You can write down everything you do in half-hour blocks or use apps like TickTick.

Are you mindful of your downtime?

One of the reasons our calculations of free time don’t match our reality is that we can lose time doing mindless things like checking email and social media, and clicking around the internet. And sometimes, we just do nothing.

In the book “What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast,” Ms. Vanderkam says one problem is that people often are not mindful about how they are spending free time. Sometimes we come home and “crash” and do nothing after a busy day or week, but Ms. Vanderkam says that’s a mistake. But we shouldn’t spend all of our “free time” catching up on work either.

“Other kinds of work — be it exercise, a creative hobby, hands-on parenting or volunteering — will do more to preserve your zest for Monday’s challenges than complete vegetation or working through the weekend,” she writes.

Schedule your free time (But don’t overschedule it) 

In her book on successful people, Ms. Vanderkam found that the people she profiled all planned their weekends in advance. They didn’t schedule every minute, but they did schedule “anchor events.” One key to making time for a hobby is to schedule time for it, the same way you would schedule work appointments or social engagements.

Now a caveat: While it’s important to make time for your hobbies, you don’t want to be too rigid in how you schedule them. Research suggests that too much scheduling of leisure time makes it feel more like work and less like fun.

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