I think it’s all about priorities and as another guy said here at least a rough schedule/routine.
My hobby is being active (drumming multiple hours per day), then you can save the gym (I do some climbing now and then though). Commuting with bicycle to work also helps, work less (I do 25h/week which is max for me, I rather spend less money and live in a community than having to work more to finance myself, life does have too much interesting to offer than to spend all your time with working).
I also like to eat stuff like Huel (the savory stuff) which saves me time of cooking/buying groceries (and I have a rather high protein intake which is good for drumming, as fast/strong muscles/tendons are quite important (and it noticebly helps with growing muscles, I didn’t want to believe until then how important high-protein intake is when being active)).
I basically don’t play any video games (ironically I’m quickly bored), do some open source programming instead (so side-projects?), try to avoid “wasting” time on e.g. social media.
the trick, i’d imagine, is to be rich enough that you don’t have to deal with doing your own chores or errands (let the servants get groceries and cook and clean and drive you places).
So, I knew people who do all those things. Work long days, go to the gym, have their hobbies… What they also did is:
- have aspouse who does all their chores
- Never do anything with said spouse
- Wonder why their second marriage is failing
Although a lot of them also claimed to only need 5 hours of sleep.
That grindset “I only need x hours” is horseshit, everyone who does this thinks they’re some kind of rare genetic anomaly when in reality they’ve simply gotten used to being sleep-deprived all the time
My ex is one who claimed she only needed a five hour sleep and yet she still slept on eight to nine hour nights all the time. She always laughed when I said I have sleep problems and I need seven hours of sleep. She is ex for reason.
As someone who is used to sleep-deprivation, I can second that.
I do seasonal jobs when I’m not working on my artwork, but yes.
The trick to it is to make everything you do a routine. Get up at the same time, eat a fatty/oily breakfast, shower, work, eat, work out, shower, make your personal time count, go to sleep at the same time every single day. You should plan an hour to get up and ready for work, you should plan an hour to get home and an hour to get to sleep, so assuming 8 hours work and sleep that leaves 5 hours for workout, dinner, and hobbies.
Only downside is that external forces’ disruption of the schedule can cause feelings of rage.
of course, the rich
Those people don’t have the 8 hours in the office
You’re right. They “work” 24hrs a day.
or the chores
Also, as a society, we spend far too much time working to live and it’s bullshit.
It’s so messed up how normalised that got.
“So wait we work for half our waking day?”
“Yes, but you also get two whole days off per week”
“Woah that sounds almost too good to be true.”
We had to fight tooth and nail for even that.
But fr I think the biggest error was that we didn’t demand working hours be cut in half during women’s liberation. The idea that one person can spend half their time working for pay to provide for themselves and a kid or two, so two people can provide for a full family together and have time to split the domestic labor is key.
168 hours in a week
Minus 56 for sleep is 112
Minus 40 hour work week is 72
Minus half hour commute 5 days a week is 67
67
Minus 65 hours doomscrolling in bed is 2
How tf am I supposed to have hobbies and health with only 2 hours of free time every week?
You actually don’t have those 2 hours left. It’s a half hour commute 1 way. Meaning an hour a day for 5 days not 30 mins for 5 days. Looks like you may need to cutt out 30 mins of doomscrolling.Nm. You did the math right, I just read it wrong without checking your working.
So, no laundry, eating, bathing, shitting, anything like that? What’s your secret?
(In fairness shitting can be combined with either the 40hrs/work if you’re smart, or with the 56hr/sleep if you’re not, but then the no bathing or laundry becomes a bigger issue…)
He works at a water park so both are combined with the 40hrs/work
Winter must be ROUGH.
Not if he lives near the equator. They got water parks year round.
Source: Used to live by one…
I do multitask by doomscrolling on the toilet, at work, or even on the toilet at work sometimes. It does buy a few more hours for doomscrolling in bed
Come on ! People act like laudry hasn’t evolved since the 19th century. It takes 1h a week max. Bathing : 2h a week Eating/cooking at home : 15h a week Cleaning the house : 2h a week You are still left with 47h a week left for gym, side projects and socializing. If you don’t have kids, life is really not that hard !
spend less on candles
“no”
wait until you try to start a business on top
the easiest part would then be to cut everything off, maybe everyone off too
I run my own company. Do hobbies on the side. Started a side hustle doing woodworking, spend time with my kids and girl, go on trips, relax, and get plenty of sleep. I just don’t do everything in one day.
wow, that’s inspiring.
I agree that it is a balancing act that one must master. But when one doesn’t yet have their footing in something, it feels like that initial workload is greater then the balance that comes in upholding the hustle in the future.
Just some thoughts from experience, maybe my weakness is thinking this way. Excuses are a coping mechanism that I’m trying to cut out of my life rn.
No I definitely agree that when you’re first starting it’s much more difficult to balance things I know 6 years ago when I first started I definitely didn’t have the work-life balance I do now but that’s the goal and that’s the reason we run a business is to get that work-life balance and be able to master it. At this point in time unless I have clients that are demanding my time I usually tell them what my schedule is what I have available and build in my time for everything else with my family with my vacations with my hobbies. Like for example I’m starting to take Fridays off now so I can work on my woodworking business that I’d like to start so that way I have more time at home and time with my family because they actually do that with me.
I DMd you
Yes, if part of your job involves physical activity and there’s never overtime and it’s not high stress and you have a short commute.
So, not my life right now, but that has been the case in the past.
I still think the 40-hour work week is inherently tied to the idea of the american nuclear family. The answer is that there simply isn’t the time to do any of these things unless one person is doing the 40-hours a week office job and the other is doing the 40-hours a week “taking care of shit with the house/kids” job.
Before children and during the pandemic I did, but with one simple change, home office instead of 3 hours commuting in heavy traffic.
Same.
I have no kids. My employer just told us we had to be in the office 5 days a week now and I don’t have time to do anything anymore. I lost a big chunk of my spare time and freedom and I just feel like burning the office down now.
Employer here. Look for an alternative offer to leverage. Tell both parties that home office guarantees in writing will have a lot of weight in your final decision.
Yeah that’s what I’ve been trying to do. But nobody’s hiring right now. Or they don’t want to pay a decent salary.
Besides, they’re already forcing us to wear a suit and tie. To be in a cubicle office as IT consultants. To communicate with each other via MS Teams…
But how else will your superior feel powerful?
This sounds like hell. I’m sorry to hear this.
Ahhh the before time
Right?? What kind of 90’s office hell is this?
And this is coming from the founder who gave his company to his children but still hangs around to terrorize the employees with the threat of getting fired if they don’t do as he says.
Sounds bad. What skills are you looking to employ in which rough area?
Employee here. If you need an alternative offer to get reasonable considerations from your employer, just take the alternative offer. The employer clearly doesn’t respect you and your current leverage is just a short term tool until they start taking advantage of you again.
Yeah I was assuming their employer wants to keep them. This is how you negotiate change. My employees are all 100% home office if they want and come in regularly by choice.
Did they take your stapler?
Most of the people I know who do this consistently / longer-term are young adults and/or on drugs. Not like street drugs, but some combo of legally prescribed stimulant/anti-depressant/performance enhancing/hormone/weight-loss stuff. Modern medicine has the answers (for some).
A common scenario I’m seeing is that folks in their 30s, 40s, and 50s are being diagnosed with things like ADHD for the first time, and suddenly once they’re on the proper stimulants, they can full throttle, always be doing something. I’m also seeing this a lot with folks who go on GLP-1 drugs. They lose a bunch of weight in a short amount of time and suddenly feel a lot better, mentally and physically. The other thing I see going on is people getting on hormone replacement or starting performance enhancing drugs a bit later in life, seems to be a real motivating factor for them since they’re suddenly feeling 20 years younger.
So, maybe the answer is be young and if you can’t be young, do drugs?
guess that’s where many go wrong… be young and do drugs
The adults are gonna be alright
People that do these things generally have a ton of energy, are incredibly disciplined, do things quickly, and to a pretty large amount, box-checkers and/or future-borrowers.
If you’re a 45-60 minute showerer, you’re going to have trade-offs
If you have threesomes during the week, you’re going to have trade-offs
If you are the type of person who needs to actually feel peaceful the majority of the time, trade-offs
The ADHD person needs more hours in the day. For everyone else, there’s half-assing it.
Priorities are everything. There isn’t enough time to get everything in life. A lot of us have fallen con to the box-checker’s quantity and compare ourselves to that. It may take some self work, but figuring out what actually makes you happy and what makes that sustainable is a pretty big, but worthwhile challenge. I’m in my 30s and still working on it, for what it’s worth. Different people figure this stuff out at different rates, and my hypothesis is that your availability of resources and birth privileges are big factors in the time it takes to figure that out.
In other words, stop worrying about what makes other people happy, and focus on what makes you happy. There may be overlap, but there also may not be. We’re all different and that’s okay.
As someone who needs to actually feel peaceful while I have 45-60 minute threesomes in the shower during the week, I’m all set.
Preach! :)
If you bike to work, you feed two birds with one scone.
It snowed 10 inches here today. Not really an option everywhere
That’s a great opportunity to go by ski, if the distance is reasonable.
Then you’re getting that upper body & core shovel workout.

Literally my dad these days.
Gotta put those snow tires on.
lol have you tried biking in half a foot of snow, even with a fat bike? that shit is hard as hell and slow as fuck
I bike in the winter to get groceries and stuff, but it’s on mostly plowed surfaces
I was just kidding, I grew up in snowy winters.
An offroad motorcycle though…
An offroad motorcycle though…
There more pleasant ways for a suicide, no?
Biking through unplowed snow sucks, but it’s hardly impossible. The worst part about it is having to deal with traffic at the same time
TIL it doesn’t snow in Netherlands and Denmark /s
Both of those countries have very mild winters, and the snow storms that are common on the US east coast are completely absent from that part of Europe.
Oulu, Finland on the other hand has a 12% bicycle mode share in winter with plenty of snowfall. Only around half the people cycling stop doing so in Winter.
Commendable toughness! I definitely wouldn’t want to do that.
Snows very little in the Netherlands these days.
Yeah, just starting to bike to work one day is often impossible, just like starting to commute by car would be for someone who lives car-free.
It’s a lifestyle you have to make possible. For me it was always a high priority in life, cause it turns wasted time in traffic into exercise, fun, and, depending on weather, a bit of adventure every day. I’ve never even considered a home or work place that didn’t allow for a bike commute. Which means I didn’t take the highest-paying job I was offered, and didn’t rent the cheapest place per square meter. But I also don’t have a car payment or gas expenses and I arrive awake and relaxed both at work and at home.I’m planning on doing some winter cycling today since the plows are catching up now!
But I get it, winter cycling requires more gear and more pre-planning that winter driving, you need to invest in better gear that isn’t just whatever hat and gloves are the cheapest at the store, and it makes paved roads more like biking on gravel/sand so you have to put more work in, plus you show up at your destination just as sweaty as summer biking except now you have a bunch of snow gear to wash because it’s all sweaty and gross too and is that melted snow or sweat or snot from my runny nose that I feel on this wet scarf I just covered my face in?!
Edit to add: OH AND THE WIND! Those fall/winter winds are hell on accoustic bicycles. I’ve needed to pedal down a steep hill with a trailer filled with 100lbs of kids and kids school stuff behind me because the wind was so strong that gravity alone wouldn’t propel me down the hill!
if you’re in a city, then it’s still possible, your local government just says ‘fuck you’ to non-drivers
but yeah not much you can do if you’re rural in that situation
of course, half of drivers can’t drive in more than 2 in of snow anyways
come on. do it!
its not really 10 inches :-)
Seriously this must be what it’s like to sleep with men, I was promised 10 inches but only got about 6! At least that’s better than when we’re promised 6-8" and only get about 4"
Break out the xc skis!
angry sentiment. the people having nothing better to do than shouting “biking! is the best thing in the world. everybody should do it” for one misses that not everybody wants to do it (and being pressured to do sth causes an understandable and hefty backlash) and that more important, it’s ableist because it assumes everybody is physically healthy enough to even bike in any weather.
for example, my throat reliably hurts every time i bike in temperatures of below 5°C. that’s not because i’m really disabled, but because cold, icy wind + sensitive throat = sore throat. that sucks.
and that’s besides the point that my coworkers wouldn’t really appreciate to smell my sweat for 6 hours (we have no shower in office). and i also don’t want to be in sweat-sticky clothes all day long.
Your reply is ableist because it’s hard for dyslexics to read.
If you can’t ride a bicycle, then find some other synergistic way to save time.
You’ll for sure have to roll up those categories a bit. You will not have time for Fitness, work, side projects, life, fun, and hobbies - if considered as separate, non-overlapping things that you have to have each day. But how about each week I: Work out a total of 4 hours, have at least two evenings spending time with friends doing something I enjoy, and commit a total of 4 hours on a hobby, side-project, or other solo recreational or artistic activity I enjoy. Work, rest, and family will naturally take up the rest of the time. This doesn’t sound so unrealistic to me, or like some crazy hustler grind-set that only the most driven could accomplish.














