As glorious as it is to find a hobby that becomes a true avocation, nothing comes for free—even passion. Just as we must consistently feed a fire to keep it from dying, we must also regularly give time, energy, space, and money to any project or interest we wish to sustain.
As you are well aware, this is often easier said than done.
Here are six things I have found helpful.
1) Follow the fun.
Joseph Cambell advised us to follow our bliss; I advise you to follow fun. This is a hobby. It is how you are choosing to spend your limited discretionary time.
To hell with “shoulds” or “oughts.” What do you find fun? Do that.
Sure, even the funnest projects will have some parts that are a slog. Sometimes, there’s nothing for it but to push through the grinding bits to get back into the fun.
But if there aren’t any fun parts left, or if the payoff doesn’t outweigh the boring/grinding/needlessly difficult parts you have to get through to get to that payoff, I hereby give you full permission to pack it up (unfinished!) and even chuck it in the bin1.
You don’t need to finish a project or activity you are doing for fun, relaxation, or enjoyment if it isn’t fun, relaxing, or enjoyable. Under these circumstances, quitting shows good judgment, not a lack of moral fiber.
2) If progress or interest stalls, figure out why.
Maybe your interest has run its course. It happens. But often, the interest is still there, but something is stuck and needs to get unstuck before you can progress. Most instances I can think of come under three broad categories: time, equipment, and skill limitations.
Many creative hobbies can be chipped away at here and there as time permits, but most projects come with at least one step that requires your sustained, undivided attention.
That can be a big ask.
If your hobby project gets stuck here, pull out your calendar and figure out when you can realistically fit in a chunk of time to close the door (hopefully literally!) and hack away at it. Do your best to protect that time, and if it gets impinged on, reschedule your date with your project2 as soon as possible.
Sometimes, the next step requires some piece of equipment that you don’t have. The spousal unit couldn’t do his first cyclocross race until he got some knobby tires for his bike, and he couldn’t sign up for tennis classes until he got a racket and some proper shoes3. I just bought a new ultra-fine hand saw for a woodworking project4 and some extra hardwood doweling to test my ideas without using the fancy doweling I special ordered for the project.
Other times, you need more skills or knowledge5 to do what you want to do. If this is where you are stuck, find good instruction, then practice. Good instruction can come from all sorts of places. YouTube is a treasure trove of instructional videos (the best advice tends to get repeated, so watch a few to make sure you didn’t stumble on a bad one). Your public library has a whole section devoted to hobby and craft books you can check out and read. You can ask friends who’ve done it before for advice. People who work at specialty stores also tend to know a lot. Or you can take a class on the subject.
Sometimes, you’ll need several of these to get a toehold on your problem. For instance, I’m learning how to paint landscapes. Years ago, I was reading Mitch Albala’s book on the topic, and my brain melted down when I got to the chapter on simplification and massing. I worked through exercises, watched online videos, and was still lost. Then I stumbled on an online class6 the author was teaching called “Simplification and Massing in Landscape Painting.” Needless to say, I cleared my schedule and pulled out my credit card.
3) Design your time/money budgets to prioritize your interests.
Most of us with time and tech enough to be reading Substack are fortunate enough to have some amount of discretionary time and money. Alas and alack, both of these resources are disappointingly finite. There are two tools I know of for dealing with this unfortunate reality.
Pay yourself first.
For time, this may mean carving out time to engage with your interests before you open yourself to the rest of the world. Every piece of advice that boils down to “set your alarm earlier” rests on this principle. I use this approach to get studio painting in: I set a timer for 20-30 minutes most mornings before work, pick up my tools, and start. I wrap up when I hit the first stopping point after the alarm.
Alternatively, you can schedule it and treat it with the same sense of unwavering duty you would an appointment with your boss or a specialist you had to book six months in advance.
You already shape your life around any number of things. When something is non-negotiable, you (and those around you) learn to work everything else around it. It may not be easy, especially at first, but as you solve the problems it creates—as you already do with countless other activities every day—your schedule will shift to accommodate.
For money, this means setting and funding a budget expressly for your own hobbies and interests. Some hobbies are inexpensive (yay!), but most require some cash input for tools, materials, classes, or even a babysitter or house cleaner to free up time.
My second strategy is to make the trivial compete with the sustaining.
Years ago, the spousal unit and I lived a block away from a coffee shop with a full menu of tasty food. Bit by bit, we spent a staggering amount there. Fancy coffee and pastries are delightful, and having someone else make your lunch and set it down in front of you is the stuff that dreams are made of.
When I reorganized the budget so that our coffee shop spending came out of our individual discretionary money, the same pots of money that pay for paints (me) and bike parts (him), those trips went from commonplace to an indulgence.
If I am merely choosing between making my lunch and having someone make it for me, I prefer someone else do the work. If I am choosing between signing up for an art class I’m dying to take and someone else making lunch for me, I’ll heat some leftovers or fix myself a sandwich.
When choosing how to spend your limited time, the project cage match is my go-to technique. Basically, you list all of the things you want to do, and then assess each project against the others: Many enter. Only one wins.
Is this easy? Nope. Is it frustrating? Yep. Are you going to cry at some point? Maybe!
But here’s the payoff: When you narrow your focus to one thing (the most compelling thing on that whole list!), you can use your limited time, energy, and money to move that most important thing forward.
And when that project is done, you get to pick the next one. And the next one. And the next one. Think of your cage match list as a queue of cool stuff to do, not the graveyard of your dreams. Focusing on one goal or project at a time, especially when resources are scarce, will get you farther faster than trying to do a bunch of things at once.
One note: If you consistently find yourself stuck in low-energy, low-value activities when you truly want to be doing something else, you might need more recovery before you can get into restoration time (which is what deep hobbies tend to fall under). You can’t restore before you have recovered.
4) Make it convenient to do your hobby
I’ve already covered this one, but in short, the faster you can get into—and out—of a discretionary activity, the more likely you are to do it.
The harder it is to start, the more likely you will binge Netflix or scroll your phone instead. Activation energy, both the need for and the lack thereof, is real.
And why is it easy to be able to stop quickly? Because time gets away from you. Because it’s more time you get to spend doing things rather than tidying. Because other tasks happen. Because sometimes kids/partners/roommates/house emergencies/etc. need your immediate attention.
In short: life is going to continue to happen, so stack the deck in your favor.
5) Make friends who share your interests
One of the greatest boons to any hobby is finding people who are also into it. Classes are a great place to go looking for friends because, in addition to providing structure and access to expertise, they bring together a bunch of people who also care about what you love.
In-person classes or meetups generally work better for this than online ones do, partly because going to the same place and seeing the same people consistently provides a sense of community around the activity, and partly because it is hard-to-impossible to have casual hallway and break-time conversations when you are in a virtual Zoom room. Online classes can be great for learning technical things, but they are not designed to optimize the human social experience.
6) Different phases of life have different constraints and resources.
My final strategy is to give yourself grace. Every phase of life has its own delights and challenges. Sometimes, you will have time but not money, or money but not time, or feel pressed for both. Not every season is for building; some are just for getting through.
As long as you keep an ember hot, you can rebuild that fire when you do have the resources.
To quote Jane Friedman:
Whatever your situation, if you’re not making the progress you would hope for, and it’s because life is getting in the way, my best advice is to take the pressure off yourself.
If you don’t want to bin a project outright, but you are DONE with it for now, allow me to introduce the concept of the Hate Shelf. The Hate Shelf is where projects that have pissed me off one time too many, but I still want done, live. Every so often, I peruse the Hate Shelf. As with many charged disputes, some time apart is often all the balm needed to restore harmony enough to at least try for problem-solving. And time away from a problem is a boon for seeing solutions.
One of my favorite tools for freeing up a chunk of time (when you still have brains) is to play half-day hooky. It’s exactly what it sounds like: take a half-day off from work—and yes, I understand that not everyone has paid vacation, being in this group myself—and do something much more fun.
It can be hard to scrape together brains and time, simultaneously, in early mornings, evenings, or weekends. Your normal work hours are probably covered for any other obligations that tend to require you in your “off” hours (see: childcare), and there is something delightfully transgressive about playing during work hours. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.
Tennis shoes are not at all similar to running shoes. Running shoes have a tread pattern designed for moving forward. Tennis shoes have a tread pattern designed for quickly changing direction and running any which way on little notice. I learned this the hard way back in high school when I sprained my ankle such that a rainbow-colored bruise developed from below my ankle up to my calf when I tried to make such a change of trajectory while wearing running shoes. I don’t recommend it.
This time, I’m making a bed. Or rather, I made the bed frame but still need to put legs on it. All of my woodworking (and other craft) projects are born of having a vision of what I want and trying to buy it. Sometimes, I find what I am thinking of, but it’s usually at a price point I have no interest in paying. More often, what I want doesn’t exist in the real world, and I am unwilling to compromise. Yes, it can be exhausting. I can be exhausting.
Shameless plug for a favorite writer: Scott Young has a new book coming out on May 7, 2024! It’s called Get Better at Anything and is about learning how to learn stuff. I’ve already preordered my copy and am waiting impatiently. If you, too, are a learning nerd, links to preorder (and preorder bonuses if you order before May 6, 2024!) are available here.
A positive gift of COVID was that everyone and their aunt figured out how to teach online classes. This meant that I got to learn from Mitch Albala, despite him being thousands of miles away from me. There is incomparable value in being able to show up and see entire processes in person, and also, online formats remove geographic barriers and can also be great.