extra career activities
Quick follow-up to my previous post about goals and “extra career” activities. I got a little overwhelmed by the daunting list of things I wanted to improve at, my existing hobbies, limited time, and limited money. This resulted in an attempted Venn diagram that turned into an Excel comparison chart.
My 3 factors of consideration were…
How much do I enjoy this activity?
How much money does this activity require?
How often do I want to be doing this activity?
For each factor, I considered both short term and long term enjoyment, cost, and ideal time spent. I gave each category a value between 0 and 3 for my current and potential activities. It’s important to note that this is not necessarily a spectrum of worse to better. The idea wasn’t to pick the most enjoyable, cheapest, or least time-consuming hobbies. I wanted to lay it out all out to be more mindful that I wasn’t committing myself to activities that were too demanding in any specific category. Balance was the priority.
During the exercise, I realized that many of my existing hobbies have persisted because of their low-cost and high enjoyment ratios. Other than photography, most of my existing hobbies had relatively small startup costs and were free afterwards (they say 0 for short term cost now because I have already bought the instrument or equipment necessary). I’m generally cost-conscious, so this made sense to me, but I realized I wanted to make sure I didn’t rule out an activity that could potentially be very rewarding just because it had a monthly cost associated with it.
I ended up with a variety of activities a little bit more clarity on what I wanted to spend my money and time on. Softgoods manufacturing and woodworking will probably be the most time and resource consuming, but I think the long-term enjoyment and skill-based nature of the activities will end up being rewarding. The results were pretty much what I expected, but it was helpful to go through the exercise and think everything through categorically. It gave me more confidence that I would be dedicating my time to the things that were meaningful to me in both the short and long-term, while not sacrificing either.
car camper
My first woodwork-y project is a bed for the back of my Honda Fit, which I’ve been designing / thinking about for a while now. Finally bought some wood and figured out some solid plans last weekend. Here’s a sketch of my current design — I took out my rear seats completely to maximize storage space for camping trips, although that may prove inconvenient at some point. I’m planning on using a foam mattress topper cut to size. The head to toe length will be about 70 inches.
Gari loaded up with building materials!
reflection question
What inspires you towards change and growth?