Before children and during the pandemic I did, but with one simple change, home office instead of 3 hours commuting in heavy traffic.
Same.
I have no kids. My employer just told us we had to be in the office 5 days a week now and I don’t have time to do anything anymore. I lost a big chunk of my spare time and freedom and I just feel like burning the office down now.
Employer here. Look for an alternative offer to leverage. Tell both parties that home office guarantees in writing will have a lot of weight in your final decision.
Yeah that’s what I’ve been trying to do. But nobody’s hiring right now. Or they don’t want to pay a decent salary.
Besides, they’re already forcing us to wear a suit and tie. To be in a cubicle office as IT consultants. To communicate with each other via MS Teams…
But how else will your superior feel powerful?
This sounds like hell. I’m sorry to hear this.
Employee here. If you need an alternative offer to get reasonable considerations from your employer, just take the alternative offer. The employer clearly doesn’t respect you and your current leverage is just a short term tool until they start taking advantage of you again.
Did they take your stapler?
I’m pretty close to getting all these done most days but the only reason it’s possible for me is because I work from home and make enough money to be slowly getting ahead.
I’m in a similar boat. Its definitely a luxury that comes from making decent money at a job that respects your personal time.
But also it does require some amount of focus on improving your own lifestyle because many people spend so much time scrambling to get their finances in order when the world is setup to separate one from their money that by the time you have your finances in order you can be too exhausted to try to do anything with yourself
That’s a good point and I can’t take credit for having my finances in order. My partner is amazing and much better at budgeting than I am. I think that is another big factor for me. Having a supportive partner to encourage and grow with makes a night and day difference. I’m lucky and grateful but also work hard to have a better life.
If you bike to work, you feed two birds with one scone.
It snowed 10 inches here today. Not really an option everywhere
TIL it doesn’t snow in Netherlands and Denmark /s
Gotta put those snow tires on.
lol have you tried biking in half a foot of snow, even with a fat bike? that shit is hard as hell and slow as fuck
I bike in the winter to get groceries and stuff, but it’s on mostly plowed surfaces
I was just kidding, I grew up in snowy winters.
An offroad motorcycle though…
An offroad motorcycle though…
There more pleasant ways for a suicide, no?
Simple solution.
You have to make work side project too and gym what you for for fun / hobby.
Too bad if the only thing you hate more than exercise is the job.
Also, as a society, we spend far too much time working to live and it’s bullshit.
People that do these things generally have a ton of energy, are incredibly disciplined, do things quickly, and to a pretty large amount, box-checkers and/or future-borrowers.
If you’re a 45-60 minute showerer, you’re going to have trade-offs
If you have threesomes during the week, you’re going to have trade-offs
If you are the type of person who needs to actually feel peaceful the majority of the time, trade-offs
The ADHD person needs more hours in the day. For everyone else, there’s half-assing it.
Priorities are everything. There isn’t enough time to get everything in life. A lot of us have fallen con to the box-checker’s quantity and compare ourselves to that. It may take some self work, but figuring out what actually makes you happy and what makes that sustainable is a pretty big, but worthwhile challenge. I’m in my 30s and still working on it, for what it’s worth. Different people figure this stuff out at different rates, and my hypothesis is that your availability of resources and birth privileges are big factors in the time it takes to figure that out.
In other words, stop worrying about what makes other people happy, and focus on what makes you happy. There may be overlap, but there also may not be. We’re all different and that’s okay.
not me lmao
It’s only really feasible if your fitness activities are also your hobbies and you have friends who share said hobbies. For example, rock climbing, running.
15 minute a day fitness program. Designed to be done with no equipment except a stopwatch.
https://leisureguy.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/rcaf_xbx_5bx_exercise_plans_text.pdf
Actual exercises are in the back of the book.
I do seasonal jobs when I’m not working on my artwork, but yes.
The trick to it is to make everything you do a routine. Get up at the same time, eat a fatty/oily breakfast, shower, work, eat, work out, shower, make your personal time count, go to sleep at the same time every single day. You should plan an hour to get up and ready for work, you should plan an hour to get home and an hour to get to sleep, so assuming 8 hours work and sleep that leaves 5 hours for workout, dinner, and hobbies.
Only downside is that external forces’ disruption of the schedule can cause feelings of rage.
I did.
Work + commute + lunch 9 hours. Sleep 8 hours.
Work out about one hour lifting weights or grocery store + meal prep on rest days.
1 hours spent on breakfast, shower, dinner etc.
Total 19 hours which left me with 5 for hobbies on weekdays. Laundry, cleaning, etc was done an hour or two on Saturday.
5:30 - get up, get dressed, make the bed
5:45 - go for a walk with my wife and our cat
6:15 - shower, coffee, lemmy, household chores
7:30 - ride bicycle to work
8:30 - work starts
5pm - ride back home
6pm - cook and eat dinner
7pm - household chores
8pm - 1h free time
9pm - go to bed
So I manage to not fall behind on the household, shopping, sleep, me-time or exercise during the week.
I can carve out up to 4 hours for some special evening event once in a while.
Weekends are filled with side projects, visiting family and activities with friends.
Riding a bicycle to work was the game changer for me. It adds 2h of daily exercise and time to reflect during my commute.I’d say there’s some differences between biking and gym in terms of whole body strength and flexibility, but it’s good exercise. Definitely more productive than driving.
I think one point that can still be made is that this schedule means your average day (averaging over weekends) contains 7 hours of work/commute and only 3.5 hours of hobbies/activities.
A move to a 30 hour work week would mean that you would only spend 5.5-6 hours a day working and get 5 hours an average day for hobbies/activities.
Yes but my commute is 10-15 minutes by bicycle, and my kids are all adults now.
I prioritize making time for sleep, exercise and sex in my day, and let everything else work around those. So some of my exercise comes from commuting but I do also do yoga about 4 hours a week and try to lift weights at least once.
When my kids were young, NO it is impossible to do alone. Even if you do have carpool help and aftercare and all, it’s hard. There were years I had to get up at 5 and run to get exercise and other years it was the gym at 22:00 after a night class. But I have always found that it works better if you make your priorities (exercise needs to be one of those) and make a commitment to do those.
I usually have had jobs that were more than the 40 hours, and am NOT a work hard play hard person at all. But if you have one of those 8 hour a day jobs and sleep for 7.5 hours and take half an hour on each end of that to get ready and (critically important) don’t have some hours long commute, there’s plenty of time in the day. I remember when I first got a job that ended at 1700 and having time to cook, feed everyone and go to yoga, or hustle to the 1730 Jazzercise class after work and then still have time to make supper after, instead of feeling so terribly rushed all the time.
Now my day is: wake up around 7, leave for work around 9 after a nice leisurely morning. Work 9:30 to 6:30 (18:30) ride home and get ready for yoga, go exercise and come home and make supper by 9 (21:00), eat and have a Pokemon go walk or read or listen to music, (I cook, my husband takes care of the dishes after) then get ready for bed and try to sleep 23-7, sometimes this is midnight to 7 but I do need a solid 7 hours, too much sleep is migraine trigger unfortunately but I sleep well and soundly for that 7 and wake up pretty naturally. It feels like a balanced life.
ETA: I forgot to add, we do the grocery shopping Friday evenings, at a complex that has restaurants and bars and a Ben & Jerry’s, go out for one drink or a restaurant meal then get groceries then go home, so we can treat it like a night out not just an errand. And most weekends are free of work, though we do each have busy seasons with 7 day weeks for a few weeks - during his busy season I do more of the cleaning and we get more takeout meals, during mine we get more takeout or he or the kids will cook. And we outsource the cleaning and have some essentials on auto-ship. I know that work and exercise aren’t the only things you have to do in a week! But we don’t do them on weekdays usually.
Yes, if part of your job involves physical activity and there’s never overtime and it’s not high stress and you have a short commute.
So, not my life right now, but that has been the case in the past.
I still think the 40-hour work week is inherently tied to the idea of the american nuclear family. The answer is that there simply isn’t the time to do any of these things unless one person is doing the 40-hours a week office job and the other is doing the 40-hours a week “taking care of shit with the house/kids” job.
