How do I balance all my 200 interests in life?

Horrible advice: find a way to blend your work with your interests so that you no longer understand where your core work hours start and the obsessiveness begins. Do this for > 12 hours a day, every day, holidays included. Tell your loved ones that you're busy with work, and take small satisfaction that what you just said was half true. Develop an unhealthy addiction to liquid stimulants and spring out of bed every morning with a burning curiosity that wont abate until you've tripped over enough hurdles to crush your enthusiasm for a few hours. Rinse and repeat for a decade until you're no longer a jack of all trades, but a master of most. Try to convey your interests to those around you, and failing that, retreat to social media where you will attempt to spin these as career developing STAR moments. Accept the disappointment you will feel in knowing that no one will appreciate the efforts you went to in achieving this level of tedious mastery.

I would just remind you of the paradox of Buridan's ass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass

"It refers to a hypothetical situation wherein an ass (donkey) that is equally hungry and thirsty is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the paradox assumes the donkey will always go to whichever is closer, it dies of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision between the hay and water."

If you have many interests it is easy to not make any appreciable advancement in any of them. Rate your interests. Pick maybe 2 and work those until you are content with them or find out you dont really like them.

- "How do I balance all my 200 interests in life?"

You flail around for a bit and die of old age.

(1) Start by being clear with yourself what things you're interested in knowing about vs. what things you're interested in doing.

Doing something generally takes much longer to accomplish than knowing about something, so focus your intentionality on what you choose to do. You can and will still learn organically about the stuff you want to know about.

(2) Remember that the core idea behind Kanban is to limit the amount of work in progress.

The more work in progress streams, the more time you waste context switching. Being intentional about the things you choose to do and the order in which you do them allows you to do more things in the same amount of time than if you tried to do all of them simultaneously.

Again, this applies to the things you do, not the things you learn about organically.

(3) When trying to do something, stay intentional about what your goal is - it's generally easy to decide what to do next, and it's generally hard to decide when to halt what you're doing now in order to move onto the next thing.

This is hard.

When I asked myself this question, I had to face the uncomfortable reality that I can not follow them all. I started trimming hobbies. To pacify myself, I told myself that I am not stopping FOREVER, but just for now. It worked. Most of them are gone, I continue with a few, and I occasionally dabble with one or two that I put away.

It's OK to have 199 interests. It's also OK to have 100. Or 10. Or 5. Or 2.

There may be times when you can't give any attention to hobbies at all. Sometimes work, family, or health require your full attention. In life, there are important things, and really friggin' important things. Hobbies are merely important.

You could follow Warren Buffet’s method.

1. List all your interests. 2. Circle the top 5. 3. Do those 5. Avoid the other 195 at all costs.

There are a lot of articles about it. It’s called the 5/25 method.

Realize you can’t do it all. Prioritize and perhaps put some of those interests as something for later on in life.

In my earlier years pre 18 I did EVERYTHING, when I say everything I mean it, football, cricket, adobe flash (remember Ray games), competitive gaming, after effects, photoshop, coding, 3d, sculpting, chess, painting, music production, enthusiastic reading and writing and I was PRETTY good/way above average at all but over time it just became impossible especially with a job and college at the time so I went from a jack of all trades to "master" of a few (my current routine now is basically gym & programming), you just literally can't do it all while working at least.

The good thing is a lot of that is lying dormant in wait so the plan I came up with back then was to hone the few since I wasn't born rich (been grinding the past decade) and make some good money, semi-retire and resume what I can in my late 30s when I don't have to work 24/7. I'd love to get up one day and just make pottery, paint or come up with ambient music in fl studio.

My overall lesson and what I've found to work and be happy is don't chase "mastery", being proficient enough to enjoy the activity is good enough, I can juggle a ball but I can't do advanced tricks and that's fine, I can sculpt a bust but I can't get the anatomy 100% like a true artisan, my paintings won't sell but they look good on my walls, I can make music others would listen to but it won't become a viral hit and lastly in my dedicated field I can write good enough code to live great life but I won't ever be a geohot or John Carmack or some bit shifting wizard.

> In the book Refuse To Chose: A Revolutionary Program For Doing Everything That You Love Barbara identifies someone she calls The Scanner—someone who frequently has a multiplicity of interests, but finds it hard to create a successful life he or she loves because their passions and abilities are taking them in so many different directions. Contrary to popular wisdom, Sher tells Scanners that theirs is a unique ability, not a liability. She also states that they must do everything they love, not zero in on one pursuit at the expense of all others. With dozens of powerful techniques Sher has developed to free people from “goal paralysis,” readers will stop thinking of themselves as dabblers or dilettantes, and find innovative ways to live lives of variety, challenge, and joy. - https://barbarasclub.com/about/

I won't claim the book changed my life, nor is anything in it really revolutionary, but it did help me feel a bit better and finding some new tools for dealing with it, after struggling with exactly the same thing as you for 2 decades.

Relax. I think with the exception of a passionate few, were all that way.

I would say try something like invest a third of your time and stuff that will help your career.

And invest a third your time in learning new stuff.

And use a third of your time pursuing things that are keeping your interest.

The other piece that I think is really important is you don't have to do all 200 at the same time.

You gave the example of woodworking, it looks like you had a fun time doing it and you enjoyed the work. But you got to a point where it's not your primary passion. That's okay. You can always pick it up later.

I try to take the time to do one or two things in depth as a current interest. But when it ceases to be fun I set it aside.

One of my hobbies that I really enjoy is bicycling. There have been times in my life where I spend 10 hours a week. And there are times in my life where I kind of let it lapse, but I'm back to doing it again and I'm enjoying it.

In general, we live a long time, and the stuff we're interested in will change over time. And the stuff you learned today, will always provide a foundation for your future interest tomorrow.

So give yourself a pass. You don't have to do it all at once. Interesting stuff isn't going away.

This is an interesting problem. Here is a potential solution that I (roughly) follow when I’m not very busy.

Start with a group of interests that has the most overlaps in terms of skills or resources needed - call these compounded projects. Out of the compounded projects, start with the one that interests you with 2 weeks of effort. If you can’t make a significant progress in that time frame, you either lack the skills, resource, or interests in them. Move onto the next compounded project.

After you finish with the list of compounded projects, review the original list and prioritize the interests based on your experience. Create compounded projects again and go at it. Repeat.

I'm like you. I call that "being passionated in passions" ^^ (rough french translation).

What I would recommend is to truly question what is the deep root of the interest ("where does it comes from") : Is it in reaction (for example, is it to escape something ? Is it because it's easier to have an other interest than to push when it becomes a bit harder? ...) ? What has captured your interest precisely at this moment ? If you answer all these kind of questions, I think things will begin to sort out already naturally.

If I go deeper in the answer, as we all are mostly in "productivity-oriented life" (or at least utilitarist-oriented life), our environment (friends, life, ...) tend to push us to do things which "has to" be "useful". Useful for our advancement in career, useful for an instantaneous joy, ... But when we reason like that, we tend to forget that not everything has to be useful. It's good to be passionated. To have many interests. Even not useful.

Just be gentle with yourself. In the end, it's not a race to the bottom. It's YOUR life, not the others, and it's yours to choose what you want to do with it.

It's because most of us are curious individuals. I had a lot of interests: coding, playing musical instruments, cars, woodworking, embedded systems, audio/video engineering, etc, but I had to pare it down to just a few after having had several bouts of burnouts. I'd recommend trying 200 interests at a shallow level, and eventually you'll find some of them are more interesting than others. And then start to focus on the few that you really want to pursue, or those that actually move the needle of your ultimate goals in life. I'd recommend the book "The One Thing".

Become a synthesist. Everything is related to everything else, including all your interests. Find the common connections and weave it all into a whole. There are few people who can see many sides of everything and while the world often doesn't acknowledge the need for such people, they are the ones who are responsible for a good part of the advancement of the world. Being a software developer fits well with electronics and math knowledge. Knowing electronics and math fits well with music. Sociology and psychology can be studied with electronic wireless sensors and smartphones, which requires software development and electronics and data analysis. Birding and hiking/camping teach you about nature and survival, which are useful for understanding the environment, animals, people, and climate change. Wireless sensor networks can be used to study climate change and requires software and math. Learning physics can be a gateway to math, electronics, chemistry, biology, geology and more. People who only know one narrow skill have a harder time creating anything practical and widely useful to people. A typical example is software developers who don't understand how people actually use user interfaces, which results in unusable software.

Such a tough situation to find yourself in the center of. Perhaps the first thing to acknowledge is there is no easy answer. Regardless of what you choose it may feel as if you're "giving up a bit of yourself" which sucks. However, the good news is life is long so there's always an opportunity to come back to things down the road.

Secondly however I'd suggest spending a bit of time getting crystal clear on what values drive your life right now. Identifying the top few can give you a chance to cross reference the "200 interest" and start settling in on the ones that truly satisfy your core values.

While again this might not take away the "sting" of putting interests on pause, it will allow you to feel completely fulfilled with the interests you do decide to act on. VIA character strengths is long but a great resource out of the UPENN positive psych department. Link below.

https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/resources/questionnaires-researche...

For me, it’s realizing that I can’t achieve mastery in even a fraction of the things I’m interested in. However, I don’t need a very high skill level for many activities to be enjoyable and/or useful to me.

I feel you just need a couple of months dedicating some time most days to get to a basic level, or a bit beyond that. It’s only when you reach intermediate levels that you start to see diminishing returns from the time invested. So, I define 1-2 things I want to focus on for the next couple of months and ignore all the others. Then, depending on how things went, I continue with the same or move on to others. I have an hour reserved each to day to do whatever the current focus is.

For example, a couple of years ago, I spent a good amount of the year learning to play guitar to say a advanced beginner level. I know I’ll never become a virtuoso, not even will I be able to play most of the things I like to listen to. But that doesn’t mean it’s not immensely enjoyable to just sit down every now and then and noodle around on the instrument for relaxation.

Retention and maintenance is easier than progress. If you get a skill to some level, then stop constructively practicing it, then you’ll allow your ability to slide back a bit but it’ll stay pretty good.

E.g. if you train to run 5k in 15 minutes (vvv hard, will consume much of your life for a long time), then return to a lower volume program, you won’t be able to run as fast but you’ll still be much, much faster than average.

So you prioritise. Pick something to do now, and say ‘I am doing this for June. In July I shall do this other thing.’ Maybe a SMART goal for the month. Stick to your schedule. Once it’s over, don’t forget the skill, but prioritise your new focus.

Having a back-catalog of skills is so much fun. They may only be 80% of what they were but that’s enough for 95% of cases.

I agree with the sentiment that you should simply reduce and focus. With that in mind, I would also encourage you to write down things related to the interests that you don't give any focus to — inevitably, they will come up. Random ideas, articles, people talking about it, etc. And I think they needs to be processed to get them out of your system.

Personally, I enjoy at least writing down the ideas, passions, or motivations I have towards them somewhere and collecting them. Then, if the time comes when I choose that interest or topic, I already have a good bunch of well-marinated ideas. Of course, that can also overwhelm me, but then you just go to step 1 again!

Have you tried the Eisenhower method ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower...

When I was younger I spent a lot of time oscillating between various hobbies, and trying out new things. I got a lot of joy from exploring new experiences and following my passions.

As I've aged, I've become much more interested in doing a few things well. This has necessarily meant reducing the number of hobbies I engage with.

I believe that finding balance is the single hardest task in life, and I don't think you're alone in struggling to find balance. I would encourage you to follow as many interests as is feasible without compromising your health or wellbeing, until (and if) you decide to narrow your interests in the future.

I find it (a tiny bit) helpful to create a mind map of all my various interests. In doing do I realized that many are closely related, for example, AI coding is adjacent to shortwave radio as both are on a technology branch. Other branches could be the arts, history, languages, etc, This helps me feel that I am not neglecting some interests, I'm just focusing on different aspects of it for now and I can rest assured I'll look at other branches in due time. https://www.mindmup.com/

First get that growth looked at.

Then find a long-term project to work on that you can get back to whenever you get bored with one of the other 199 interests. That way you get to have a sense of progress without getting bored.

I don't know. I've largely failed at it. I have a ton of hobbies, and I feel like they're all not getting enough attention, and are taking up too much space. But every time I think about getting rid of my stuff for a hobby, I get more interested in it and actually do it for a bit, instead of getting rid of it.

The one hobby that I have massively cut down on is woodworking. I still have the tools, but I almost never do it now. It's noisy, dirty, dangerous, and expensive. So it's pretty easy to decide to give up on, in favor of other hobbies.

Surprised that I haven't seen Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks[0] mentioned. It's kind of a lot but I found it helpful.

I'm personally still working on this problem, and just in the last week found this[1] SLYT video. It was helpful.

[0]: https://www.oliverburkeman.com/books [1]: https://youtu.be/-AdXIC44b7Q?si=J5CGx5YJBTqMFSV7

I've recently realised (at mid-age, of course) that a lot of my interests are in fact marathons, not sprints. This has actually abated a lot of anxiety around either spreading my attention too thin and feelings about not finishing anything.

To that end, I now feel that it's OK to de-prioritise some interests sometimes, or to just dip in for a short while. And in other interests I spend some time mentally planning and then going step by step and chipping away at progress.

Life is long, take your time.

The first step is accepting that you don’t have enough time to do it all simultaneously. From there, I’d suggest you to prioritize the most salient interests. I’d also give preference to interests which require a long-term time commitment. For instance, one of my hobbies is strength training; I always prioritize it over sometimes-more-salient interests because strength is use-it-or-lose it, and other interests are often fleeting, for me.

I'm in the same boat man. I suggest reading "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals". I found it helpful.

Being curious about the world is a good thing. The mental structure I created for myself is that accomplishing things is more important to me than following any of my interests so I focus on the things I really want to accomplish and chaos of interests is the place for play and self-development.

From my experience random good things happen when you can balance things.

I found one of the weird positives of going through a life changing crisis was during that period, what interests I did have at the time really were what I wanted to do. I kept just those interests up and it really helped give me some direction. But YMMV on that one.

Do you actually have 200 interests or do you like thinking that you have 200 interests?

I have a list of things I'd like to learn, which I sort periodically based on my priorities, then ignore it and follow the nearest shiny object.

Some people say they don't know what to do with all their time when they retire. I feel like I could live three lifetimes and still have plenty more I wanted to do.

You just have to prioritise and cull based on your own personal set of factors. Things along the lines of:

- what makes you (the most?) money?

- what keeps you healthy?

- what keeps you sane?

- what do you enjoy the most?

- what maintenance is necessary?

All the things you don't have time for, make a list of them as backups in case others fall through.

One somewhat odd thing of mine is to delay gaming until I'm actually less able to do physical pursuits that I enjoy and contribute to my physical health. This is partially a reaction to being essentially gaming-sober for a good decade and a bit; but I still hear the call every now and then.

P.S. just wait until you have kids...

I'm like you, but I'm interested in solving problems in multiple domains.

One interest, multiple domains. haha

This is obviously different for everyone (and the general problem is fundamental to finite human lifetime and other resources).

For me, I'm definitely putting more effort into things I'm relatively skilled in (both inherent, and due to prior work/historical advantage/access/etc.). Also stuff with the highest return on effort for the amount of effort I'm reasonably likely to put into it (so, something which requires 100 hours to get any result is still possibly ok, but something which requires 4000 hours/yr for 10 years to get any result is much less interesting; something which requires 4000h/yr for 10 years but with incremental rewards, maybe.

Also helps when interests are clustered -- I like hardware, and security, and infrastructure, and crypto, and finance, and satellites, and communications, and military/next gen drone stuff, and interesting legal and jurisdictional arbitrage, and there's a lot of crossover among those, more so than adding other interests outside of that galaxy like art.

Keeping enough spare time/other capacity to take advantage of opportunities as they come up is good, too. e.g. I'm interested in semiconductor fab stuff, but not at a deep professional level doing anything in it, but when I get a chance to work on (security, infra) in that context, I jump on it.

Write it down.

First, you take a yellow legal pad and create a pros and cons list.

Just fucking with you.

Try one thing at a time. If you have 200 interests, I guarantee you that you've never actually done most of them. Pick one, any one, and do it. Set aside some time (ideally 90 minutes) and do it every day for two weeks. You may find that you like the idea of the thing more than you like actually doing that thing. If you really enjoy it, keep doing it and ignore the rest! If you don't like doing that thing, pick another of your 200 out of a hat and try that for two weeks.

whats a 'growth guy' ?

There are no right answers.

There is no perfect balance.

Do the things that you think will work best for you.

You keep this up you will be mediocre at all the things that you do.

You are seduced by the feeling of excitement which is easy to conflate with progress and competence.

I guess some interests will have be postponed for some other time some other life some other you.

Peace.

Spend more time wasting the time of others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40511868

Doesn't it depend on the purpose of your life? I have written about this at my web site (in profile, nothing for sale, no stylistic ambition). You can email me if you can't find it in there.

For me, it is to have joy, by glorifying God through learning and service to others. And he gives us all, in return. We all have to choose.

(I agree; it is a hard problem.)

(Thoughtful comments appreciated with any downvotes.)

I have a similar overabundance of interests, and it can be difficult to manage. One thing I found that helps is to just keep a spreadsheet of notes about the various ideas I have--it's quick, and it gets the thoughts out of my meat brain and into my prosthetic electric brain. Later I can actually execute the idea if it rises to the top of my list.

Good luck.

Perfect question for HN

Pick 3-5 per year.

Yeah, the zero-sum game of personal time allocation is cruel, these days especially. It may help a bit documenting what you know, have seen or experienced about interests you're about to let go. That way it somewhat feels like it's never fully gone.