Daily life often involves multiple tasks, especially for people who enjoy an enriching life. Since I started working, I’ve had my own side-projects most of the time, on one hand to gain experience and knowledge outside of work, and on the other hand to increase possibilities for the future.
So, how do I balance a full-time job, personal life, and side projects? Let me share my methods.
First, develop a project management consciousness for your own life and treat your life as if you’re running a company.
Everyone’s life has several main projects, each with its own short-term and/or long-term goals. For example, I currently have several main projects: one is a full-time job in product marketing, the core purpose of which is to have a stable income, and the goal is to increase experience, ability, and income; the next one is making illustrations, the main goal is to improve my art ability first, and secondly to grow an audience and gain cooperation in the future; another one is running this blog, because I want to verify a product of my own and establish a community; friends and intimate relationships can also be considered a project, with the goal of increasing happiness in life.
After clarifying your projects, allocate resources to each project. For each project, break down the resources needed in the process.
For me, the resources needed for each project are: my time, mental energy (for thinking about complex or creative problems), emotional energy (feelings, interpersonal relationships, dealing with disliked chores, etc.), and money.
Photo by Nadezhda Moryak
Then gradually adjust your life to be able to effortlessly manage these projects at the same time.
Taking the allocation of mental energy resources as an example, I hope to have more creative attempts in illustration, which means I need to invest more mental energy, so I need to create this surplus from other projects.
My main measure is to change my full-time job from a product manager to a product marketer, because as a product manager, I need to spend a lot of mental energy on complex logical thinking that I don’t enjoy as much, while in marketing I can invest more in divergent thinking which I really enjoy. This change gradually gives me more mental energy to put into creative thinking in painting.
At the same time, shifting my job to a position I like more, the inner resistance during work hours each week has also decreased, thus increasing emotional energy. This also helps creativity.
If you suddenly arrange some drastic changes in life, you will need more energy and effort to cope with challenges, and only then can you reach a calm external and internal state. If you are not strongly dissatisfied with your life and hope to live more satisfactorily, then through slow but orderly adjustments, you can gradually improve efficiency and satisfaction.
Is your life also in a multitasking state? Feel free to leave a comment.
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