I’m in my early 30s and finding it challenging to balance work commitments with personal hobbies and interests. I’ve noticed that some of my friends seem to manage this well, while I often feel like I’m neglecting one for the other.
I’m curious about experiences from men over 30: how have you managed to maintain hobbies, fitness, or other personal interests alongside a demanding career? Any strategies or routines that worked for you without causing burnout?
34 comments
Get married and have some kids. Then hobbies will no longer be in your equation.
Do your work when you’re supposed to be at work. If you’re not on the clock, don’t worry about work. Use that time for whatever else interests you. Work isn’t high school, you shouldn’t be doing homework.
You really don’t know what your capable of until you have kids.. I get up at 4:30am just so I have some me time and a bit of a workout.. that’s after going to bed at 10 or 11 once the house is cleaned and everyone is in bed.. the days of all that free time outside of work vanish, it’s a beautiful mess
Set your priorities, you may only have time for one or two things, you have to ensure that those things align with your values, be ok with not being able to do everything, and if possible hit more then one need. For example I do jiu jitsu which hits exercise, play, community.
You don’t 😁
Be intentional about your time. Schedules don’t lock you down, they free you up to tell your time what to do. If you don’t have kids and you work a normal number of hours per week and you have hobbies that aren’t incredibly time consuming, there is enough time. What are you using your time on?
Wait until you have kids (if you choose to do so) and it only gets harder
I set boundaries with work, and I set a schedule with fitness. The rest finds it’s way in.
For me it was finding a job with great work-life balance. I’ve probably hit the jack pot, but I get a week off every few days as it’s shift work.
I didn’t pick up my hobbies again until I was in my ideal career position. I figured the faster I got to a place where I’m happy at work, the faster I’ll get to happiness overall. Hobbies can wait.
Easy, I turn off my work laptop/phone at the end of the work day and deal with whatever happens the next morning. I work from home 100%, and so I decided early on that I wasn’t going to let work creep out of working hours. Otherwise, it’ll consume my life and I’m not about that.
I don’t get overtime, I’m not working after 16:30. Simple as. That’s what I told my employer at my interview, and that’s what I live by. If there is a deadline, I do my best to meet it within my 40 hours. If it can’t be met, I let them know as far in advance as possible and either get assistance or an extension on the deadline. But, I build a lot of float time in my scheduling to purposefully avoid needing extensions, so.
And so, balancing life and hobbies with work is easy for me.
I’m in my early 30s as well and have been working full time and doing night grad school the past 3 years. I don’t have kids but work in a field with a high burnout rate, and will graduate with honors.
My hobbies are fitness, video games, and socializing. I know what days I have time to work out, and what days I won’t, so I try to see friends or game on those days, even if it’s just for an hour.
My approach is that variety is king, you can’t always do it all as there’s only so much time in the day. The number of hours you’re expected to work makes a *huge* difference imo, so anything above 40 requires a lot of compromise and prioritizing to use your free time exactly how you’d like.
That’s the cool thing, you don’t.
It’s quite simple, don’t end up feeling stuck in a job where you’re killing yourself to live. Find that balance where you can work enough that you’re earning enough to afford to do the things you enjoy, and still have time and energy to enjoy them.
All of my friends who have more than one hobby dont sleep. They’re always tired because they were up until 4am gaming ect.
I’ve just learned to pick my battles and choose hobbies I can fit in around work and other commitments.
Fitness I can walk to work and run home, cycle, or run on my lunch. Health I just get into the habits of making good choices. Like, not every meal has to be an exquisite hand crafted meal prep, but also eating for convenience doesn’t mean going all out with an entire large pizza.
Doing life admin on my lunch hour Reading on my lunch hour.
General cutting back on doomsdrolling has worked its magic too.
Sometimes you have to make sacrifices. Determine if you need to eat first, and figure out what gives you that option
I am married, have kids, and sustain some hobbies and interests (going to Judo, watching obscene amounts of MMA).
It comes down to time management. You need a mostly consistent schedule with time committed to doing things. For me, Judo happens at a very specific time and place, so I make sure I can get there to do the thing.
If you hobby is something you can kind of do any time but you do not have a specific time you can get to it, it gets very easy to put it off and just not do the thing. In the past year I moved and where I used to be able to get up early and exercise at home before work, I now have to deal with making sure I can get my kids to school. I have not yet found a fully satisfactory solution to that shift in routine because my new home does not have enough space for me to work out at home like I used to. I now use the office gym at lunch, but that has meant less time for exercise.
END COMMUNICATION
I’m 33, planning to have kids next year. Spending this year to really grind on my business so hopefully when the kids pop out I have the time freedom to continue hobbies and workout.
Current hobbies: gym, cycling, walking my dog (lol), working on my business, traveling (this has been toned down a lot since the business started), hanging out with friends, cooking and learning mandarin.
I sometimes fall off my routine just from attending constant weddings at this age, so I can’t even imagine how it would be to have a disruption like kids. Good like boiz!
Get rich young and play around.
i do it in the weekends after 4 cups of coffee
When I clock out I focus on other things. Used to have issues melding work and home.
If the career is truly demanding, you usually don’t. It’s a bit the definition of “demanding” – it requires your whole focus and attention, leaving little space for much else.
When I leave work, I leave work at work. My hobbies are things like reading, playing guitar, hiking, writing, photography, table top games, etc. I don’t need to spend a ton of money or hours on them to feel fulfilled and recharged. Finding ways to combine hobbies and socializing is a helpful. If you like sports, find a social league. I sing in a local choir. Stuff like that helps getting you out of the house and starts building your community. I’ll never forget the day I found a bunch of 40 year old dudes and at the local state park doing RC boat battles. It was a group of like 12 dudes and their wives getting together to have legit miniature RC naval battles. They short bbs and other ammunitions at each others boats to sink them. It was insane. Just some random hangout between buds in a weekend where I was going hiking.
Remember that life has its ebbs and flows. Some weeks and months you’ll be focused on work. Other times you’ll be able to do you hobbies more. Don’t forget to take care of your family life.
I work 7-3 m-f. So basically when im not doing that I do the stuff I love
I don’t focus on my career so I have more time for my hobbies and fitness, one of my hobbies gets me a lot of fitness so two shots in one basically.
I don’t have kids so way better to focus on myself!
Find a new job, you will never be able make up for the time you spent overworking.
Once you have kids the other things are pretty much gone. Some people can maintain some through luck or discipline though.
My hobby is my work. U.S. economy doesn’t allow for extra hobbies unless you have more money than sense.
Sounds like you’re single, you have more time than you realize. Wait until you have to balance work, hobbies, wife’s work, wife’s hobbies, 2 kids in sports and both in multiple sports. On top of all of this, working on ensuring your marriage is also receiving enough attention and staying strong.
I have zero balance. I’m single, I work 60 to 80 hours a week (most I did was 94hrs). I’m working like crazy now because it’s the only way I can get ahead. Jobs that get you ahead are also difficult to find these days, in my area. I’m also going hard because I think times are going to get very tough over the next year or 2, things are very chaotic and uncertain.
When I’m at home I go all out on hobbies and recharge. I usually make a list of things to do with my time off. Things I want to make, paint, clean, fix or play.
I’ve been trying to introduce what I can from my hobbies into my work schedule. I bought a steam deck to play games while away for or on the job. It’s been a game changer. I also 3d print at home so I shop around for cool things to print while away so when I get home I can just open the folder and pick from files that are ready to go.
Maybe one day I’ll get to a place where I can just work half the year, like work winter and take summer off. Or maybe I can make an online printing store. Make, paint and ship cool models or something. Till then, it’s working like a madman while I have the opportunity and ability.
My wife and I have one child and we did that on purpose. We are both hobbyist and we had no intentions on letting those go due to a child. So we are fully capable of maintaining our hobbies with one kid with a balanced schedule amongst us both. Also, it helps that we both have a strict “work only during 9-5” so the remaining hours belong to us including the hours before work since we wake up at 0500.
I have no idea why people are telling you to have kids like it unlocks some special time management powers when everyone with kids seems to be getting 6 hours of sleep and less than 3 hours a day to spend on themselves.
If you value your hobbies and want more time with them you need to find a way to either incorporate them into your livelihood or cut back on the time you spend working.
I’ve got plenty of friends who envy the amount of time I put into my hobbies while also finding success in my work. The secret I unlocked that almost none of them have ever considered is that I pursued a career in my hobby.
I like video games so I set out to work in video games. That turned all of my gaming time into research and training that made me better at my job. Loving my field made it easy to immerse myself in work, made my work stand out, and offers, raises, and opportunities just happened as people I worked with wanted more of my attention on their projects or titles.
As my interests matured and diversified, I was already ahead on my career and I made the conscious decision to be happy with what I had achieved and the level to which I had risen and that let me put more focus on refining the PROCESS of my profession.
I left the office and went independent where I had the freedom to focus on a narrower band of expertise which I was known for while I put my effort into streamlining how I make money through automation, tools, and relationships.
By narrowing my focus and building efficiency, I took 50 hour work weeks on a single salary and turned them into 8 hour work weeks earning 2-5 times my old corporate salary. That’s a lot of time to funnel into my health and hobbies.
Do what you love and you’ll never work a day but if you always take on more work then you’ll never fully reap the rewards of your experience.
what hobbies? More work?
I got a 38 hour job Monday to Friday. 3 hours commute a day. But that job doesn’t require me to take work home. Over weekends I am free to do what I like. But as I get older over 30. I don’t do much, I read reddit, do a little journaling, watch a movie and play one or two games of call of duty. Before, I had many hobbies, piano, ps5 games, iPad games, classical music, bike riding, scootering, photography, meeting friends, going out to parks, rubix cubes, nerf guns etc. but now I don’t do much. Maybe I just like to relax. I have a wife, no kids. We eat meals together , shop for food together and iPad separately in same area. But that’s about it.
Pick 1-2 max.