In my review of 168 Hours I focused on the idea of taking stock of how one spends the weekly gift of 168 new hours. But how do you choose how to spend those hours once time like sleep and work are budgeted? If that time is going to as rewarding as possible, somehow you must find your passion and distinguish between activities that bring fulfillment and those that are of no value.
All decisions are emotional. Deciding how to spend time is no less personal and subjective. What is a joy for one person is a bore for another. Even within the same sphere of activity, the same work might be trivial for the experienced practitioner but impossible for the novice.
As a guide to “what”, Vanderkam suggests looking backward as to what activities had that magnetic attraction over the years. What do you find draws you back over and over? In fact, according to Vanderkam, we usually start in childhood. The child who loved to perform may find joy in an audience as an adult, whether it’s in community theater or in front of a class teaching. The childhood mud pie maker will be happiest with dirty hands their whole life whether as an artist, knitter or programmer deep in code.
I love the idea of adults as grownup versions of the children we once were, seeking the same basic satisfaction throughout life. It’s consonant with my observation that over the years people don’t change at their core. Over many years we are at our happiest engaged in the work of our souls.
Me? I’m a student. Mentally, I never graduated. After a BA it was an MD and PhD. Then Neurology training followed by another 10 years on a medical school faculty: still in school, learning more than I ever produced as a researcher. Even now after almost 20 years of working for a living as a drug developer, I’m in it for what I can learn. My writing here? Just another mode of learning for me.
One of my discoveries this year was Coursera as a resource for learning. During the year, I completed the full Data Science Specialization which was created by faculty at Hopkin’s own Bloomberg School of Public Health. Coursera does it right. These are courses with quizzes, projects, and deadlines. Once a course started, I had to be committed, sometimes spending many, many hours on a course project. The result? I’m now reasonably proficient in the statistical programming language R, many of its add on packages and the IDE, R Studio.
Understanding how to manipulate, display and analyze data is a useful skill set for me, of course. That’s why I’m learning about data science, not physics. But the joy for me is in the learning, the mastery of a body of knowledge. I’m continuing to look at my 168 hours each week and budget a nice chunk to exploring data analysis and statistics in a curriculum I’m designing myself.
It’s worthwhile to step, see where the time goes and try to set some of it aside for doing what you truly love.