We are all busy! It’s the sickness of our times. Too busy for everything including having quality time with our family and friends, with our partners and even too busy to take care of ourselves. Too busy with work and obligations…

Busy is a word I despite with my whole heart. Thanks to a former colleague, in another life time, who was the laziest person I’ve ever known, but who dared using such word, everyday, several times a day!

For the purpose of this post, I’ll still use it. But generally I prefer talking about priorities. We can discuss this another time!

So we are all too busy, and yet, we always want to add more to our schedule and try new things. It is part of being human to seek new experiences. Unfortunately, most of the time, the interest quickly fades and we move on to something else or just back to our regular routines. We say we tried but it just didn’t work out for us… we’re too busy!

I’m there too. There is so much I want to do and my to do list doesn’t shrink a bit. Some of the items I put on my list in January last year, are still not crossed! 😉 A few things are, so I do praise myself for that! I say it’s a few months of delay 😉

However, the other day, I came across a little infographic, which I found brilliant and so I wanted to share with you.

Such infographic said that:

We need 3 sorts of hobbies, in our lives:
one to keep us creative
one to keep us in shape
one to make us money

and as you can guess, I loved it!

I believe this is fantastic advise and totally manageable because it is short and flexible.

Considering my 5 simple goals for last year, which I described when I told you about my depth year, you can see that it’s like I already had these categories as priorities, without realizing it!

Now, let me add a couple comments and additional tips to these…

There can be crossovers

What I like about putting such hobbies into 3 categories like Health – Creativity & Money is that, there can be crossovers too. This makes it rather easy to cross all 3 boxes!

Staying in shape isn’t just about exercising, it can also be about cooking healthy food from scratch, which does require some creativity!

Some of my creative activities are making me money. My blogs RTatW and the drawings I publish on Society6, are not my primary source of income but are a nice addition to it.

There can be additional requirements

Personally, I would probably add, as an additional requirement, that at least one such hobby should involve mental challenges. That you have to learn new things in the process!

For me, blogging has been fulfilling such requirement easily! In terms of technical things I had and still have to understand, to make things work. As well as in terms of content creation. For RTatW, for my mini guides… I had to study so many different topics. I’m no expert in Roman architecture for exemple, but I have learned a lot while working on such topics.

And I think that keeping our brain sharp and learning new things is just as important as keeping our body in shape!

So maybe it could be considered as another “activity”? In which case, it could be phrased as:

one to stimulate our brain

And finally, I think this little list might be missing one additional thing. If you think about it, it looks like a rather selfish list, very self centered.

Yet, numerous studies have shown that people are happier when they help others. When they engage in activities that are useful, when they do good in the World.

So it only makes sense to add one more category / requirement to the list which could simply be phrased as:

one to help others

That’s it for me because I like it short and simple. But if you do have additional tips or recommendations, please do comment below!

A little fun checklist to help you choose your next hobbies

So to help you with your hobbies’ selection, I created the below little check list where you can check if your hobbies match your requirements.

Click on the image above. It will open in a new window from where you can save it or print it directly! You can use this to help you find your next ideal hobby… one you will stick to 😉

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