Motivation Monday | Making Time for Personal Hobbies

Did I just make ‘Motivation Monday’ a weekly blog post series? Still thinking about it.

This is just going to be a quick tip for everyone who is as busy as me, whether it’s because of work, school or family, and have happened to just lose control over their time management and over their professional/personal life balance.

Aside from my workout morning routine, I have also set a kind of evening routine for myself. Since the beginning of the semester, at the start of this month, I have found myself to be caught up in my university schedule and studies, and extra-curricular activity. In fact, those who follow me on Goodreads might have noticed a sudden drop of activity.

I had stopped reading.

Well, to be more precise, I read less for pleasure, and more for academic purposes. In other words, it came to the point where picking up a fiction book to read made me feel guilty about that ‘wasting’ time period which could be spent on studying my prescribed readings or research articles for school instead.

But I love reading fiction. I want to keep reading. I started to think of a devise to make time for reading within my tight daily schedule.

(Funny, I also happen to blog more these days… I’m surely getting back on track with time management!)

And here’s the deal:

Inspired from the Pomodoro technique*, I decided to dedicate 25 minutes of my evening/night time to reading. It would definitely take me longer than usual to finish a book, but who said that reading is a speed competition? I would use an alarm timer, and as soon as the 25 minutes are over  and the bell would ring, I would close my book and get back to work (or sleep, since I tend to read before bedtime).

Often I would keep on reading until I finish the chapter, and it is totally fine too. As long as I’m keeping my reading habit, sustaining my long-term love for this personal hobby!

I was told once that the older you get, the busier you get and thus, the less time you get for reading. Slowly, we would then start telling ourselves: ‘I don’t have time to read.’

Well, not happening to me! 🙂

You can use this technique with all kinds of hobbies, for example painting or writing. 

Hope this helps! Good luck!

An Evil Nymph.

*Pomodoro technique: This is a productivity technique which involves intervals of 25 minutes of work, with a 5-minutes break in between, except for every fourth 25-minutes of work the break becomes longer, 15-20 minutes.