How to be more effective with my time

1 points by mkdir_home 11 years ago | 1 comment

Hi HN, Consistently throughout my life (I am 20 years old) I have found myself wasting time.

I am not saying I need to have less fun, but quite often I will waste hours per day doing meaningless tasks such as watching a film or going on a long walk. I enjoy programming and learning - the problem is that I can't motivate myself all the time so I end up wasting hours doing meaningless activities.

I feel like a lot of the advice out there is written for people who have serious procrastination issues - I am more focussed compared to the average person.

But If I want to build something really cool and 'make the world a better place' I need to inch my way towards perfect time management, but I am really struggling to do that.

Thanks for reading, any advice?

wolffood 11 years ago |

I found that as soon as you have a meaningful task, you won't struggle with motivation any more. I've always tried to find side-projects to work on, with or without income doesn't really matter, as long as you're being part of something that's more than just "time-filler". For example for some time I was super interested in LED-stuff, so I got involved in an LED forum/community and all of a sudden I was super motivated to learn Arduino-Programming, to help other people in the forum as well as being able to present them my work. This interest later even got me some money on the side when I did some jobs for a garage (install LED lighting in cars). Currently I switched from Arduino to RbPi-Home Automation, but the principle still applies. Find a project that you're really interested in, try to get involved with other people with similar interest and you'll see that motivation will keep up.