Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

September 12, 2023

I Have 12 Hobbies & 0 Space

I have quite a few hobbies I engage in regularly. I do both traditional & digital art. I also cook, bake, sew, embroider, read, write, garden, watch movies, play video games, listen to music… That’s a dozen hobbies. This presents a bit of a challenge.

Almost completed embroidery of a sunflower mandala in yellow thread on a grey background.

Why Can’t I Have 0 Hobbies & 12 Space?

It can be hard to find the space in your schedule & in your actual physical space for your hobbies. My apartment is tiny, I am not the only person who lives here, & my time is a finite resource. I have had to develop strategies to help fit all my hobbies into my life, since restoring a vintage TARDIS is not one of my hobbies.

Ink drawing of Miyamoto Usagi looking determined.

Strategy 1: The Buddy System

It’s a classic for a reason. Happily, lots of hobbies pair up well. I can paint while I bake, write while my paint dries, & listen to books or music while doing just about anything. Which of your hobbies can be buddied up? Which ones need to stand alone?

Watercolor of a nightingale singing while sitting on a branch. I baked a cake while painting this nightingale.

Strategy 2: Figure Out If It Needs Scheduling, Then Do It- Or Don’t

Sewing a simple garment or household item takes my entire work table, plus my ironing board set up nearby, as well as several days’ worth of my free time. Obviously I need to schedule that in advance. Things like gardening & cooking need to happen regularly. Listening to audiobooks or painting can happen at any time. Which of your hobbies need scheduling, & which can you jump into right away?

Reading Log designed to look like a library. Most of the shelves of books have titles, on 1.5 shelves blank book spines wait to be filled in. Outside the window is a watercolor; several witches & 1 ghost are flying up to the moon from the city below. One of the witches is a cat. A moment of appreciation for my local libraries' audiobook selection.

Strategy 3: Know When to Rest

Mind your spoons. Sometimes you need to take a break & abandon all but your lowest-energy hobbies. Sometimes you need to enjoy the oldest hobby of all – taking a nap!

Photo of two potted pepper plants climbing up a loose macramé string trellis all the way to the roof. A burro's-tail succulent grows in a pot hanging nearby. Or sitting & enjoying your tiny garden.

Variety Is A Blessing & A Curse

Having too many hobbies can be overwhelming. How many is too many? That largely depends on what hobbies you have, how much time you want to dedicate to them, how much time you have to spend… Some might say having a dozen hobbies is too many, but it suits me just fine. Of course, sometimes they distract from one another. Say, for example, you were supposed to write an article on watercolor illustrators & then, to pluck a for-instance out of the air, you got distracted reading the books they illustrated instead. And what if you followed this up by re-reading as much of Moon Girl & Devil Dinosaur as you could get your hands on? Well then, dear reader, if you had a dozen different hobbies then you too could pivot to an article about one of those other hobbies, or even an article about how to balance many different hobbies at once…

HEY WAIT A MINUTE!

See you next week for an article about watercolor illustrations! Maybe. I just got the notification from my library that my hold copy of Yukon Ho! has arrived…

Is there a picture book or comic book illustrator you want me to talk about? Let me know on Mastodon or Ko-Fi!

Karin Wanderer Learns