Ok this is not about balancing hobby stuff with the rest of your life – this is about balancing your previous hobby time!
What I mean by this is that all of us have precious little hobby time, and you have to use it carefully. My time gets divided up like this,
Building models
Painting
Playing games
Blogging
List building
Podcasts
Building models is either the quickest or slowest part depending on the models – and it’s worth taking its time. Thankfully there are a few ways to have it overlap into other parts of my life. For example cleaning resin goes hand in hand with making my other half a hot water bottle, and when being forced to watch a selection of rubbish TV shows I often file metal or build plastic kits – with tips like this on all but the most complicated kits, I can ensure building doesn’t take up hobby time.
Painting – now this is probably the bit which takes the most time, as you have got to sit and concentrate – or do you? One of the ways I try to ensure steady progress is just a little bit every day, whether it’s thirty minutes before work painting every left track, or an hour in the evening applying weathering – like the advert says, ‘every little helps’. My one caveat is using an airbrush, it seems whenever I try to quickly airbrush I manage to take thirty minutes getting it to work, another thirty unblocking and another thirty cleaning after – nothing is quick!
Playing games – this my favourite part of the hobby, sadly gone are the weeks where I could get 2 games a week, one every other week now seems about right! The only ways I’ve found to really maximise my gaming is one day tournaments – 2 day ones take up a lot of brownie points, but a good one day event doesn’t take those points, and is three games!
Blogging – this is one of the parts of doing hobby which fits around everything else. I often find a quiet lunch break (rarer these days) or a train journey great for these. The only part which really takes planning is photography, getting lights ready and a space for it. The only really difficult is getting the ideas for posts!
List building – I want to call this hobby empty calories, but man do they fill you up! I get numerous emails/Facebook messages etc on list building and other stuff like that. Whilst it’s fun I also think it’s fairly inefficient use of time for other hobby actions, the good thing is that it’s often quick and fits round other things (unless it’s a 40+ chain email)
Podcasting – this is the most fun, and also often a proper social event – anyone ever noticed us a little drunk? This does however require time and planning if multiple diaries! But always well worth it.
Anyway that’s my thought, any bits I’ve missed and how do you organise your time?
Till next time
Coxer
Some very clever tricks you mentioned with modeling – I often take a similar approach when waiting for youtube videos to load.
I also have a component of hobby time that I consider very important but isn’t on your list – background writing. I’m something of a storyteller at heart, which inevitably bleeds into almost anything I do, and the tabletop hobby is no exception. Even after I’ve finished painting a model I still won’t consider it fully complete until it has about a thousand words or so of backstory behind it, and I tend to inevitably end up creating an extensive narrative around the tabletop armies I build that often evolves independently of games played.
This generally means that a very large portion of my hobby time is spent at a computer typing up all this background, which often takes a while, especially if I’m suffering from writers’ block (usually I’ll have a clear idea of where I want to go, but struggle to expand it to the right length, or I’ll have a clear idea and know just what to make of it, but struggle to come up with a compelling start to get everything in motion). Unfortunately I haven’t found much that can be done about it, and so usually wait until I can put aside a whole day or the weekend just for such a purpose, while working on other things like modelling or painting in the mean-time.