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Ilona Codes
Ilona Codes

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Do you have any energy and time for your personal goals after a full day of work at your job?

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mortoray profile image
edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

If I didn't pursue my personal goals I'm end up with no energy for life. As it hard as it can seem, your personal goals are the ones that matter. If you dedicate everything to work, and it's not one of your personal goals, you'll find yourself burning out and in a terrible situation.

It's similar to sports. Getting exercise every day isn't an optional activity. If you leave it out, you'll suffer for it. It's irrelevant whether you think you have time or energy, there is no way you can avoid it and remain healthy. I find the same is true of personal goals.

Sure, I'm exhausted some days, and have a terrible lack of time. But the only thing making it worthwhile is that I'm pursuing my own goals.

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ilonacodes profile image
Ilona Codes

You are right! It's very important to have personal goals. They can boost and motivate us to live and help avoid daily routine.

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evanroggenkamp profile image
Evan Roggenkamp

Well said!!

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thomasjunkos profile image
Thomas Junkツ

The answer is complicated.
The easy one here is time. One of the things I realized by getting older is that time is scarce. Since getting older involved getting married and having two kids there is very little time left for personal - in the sense of individualistic - goals.

The answer to that part is: I have little time.

Next is the part concerning energy. The answer here is varying due to workload, daily performance level, food consumption, sleep etc.
So the answer here is: Yes, there are days where I have energy left which wasn't consumed by something else.

The really hard part is about personal goals.
That shifted a lot, because of the varying interpretation of what my goals are. And having little to no time helps focussing on what your goals are.

So setting realistic goals is helpful here.

If you accept that, you could say: »No, I do not do any sideprojects and code irregularly from time to time in a language I like just for the sake of doing it« and at the same time:

»Yes, I have energy and time for personal goals«.

That interpretation of the question doesn't fit in a headhunter's profile but in my definition of work life balance.

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ilonacodes profile image
Ilona Codes

Thank you for so the expanded answer! I appreciate it 🙂

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phoinixi profile image
Francesco Esposito

I am assuming that for personal goals you mean career and/or side projects related goal.

For me, It's all about energy and doing different activities.

If I spend all day coding, then I have no energy left to spend in front of a computer (or TV or any device) so I prefer doing sports, hanging out with friends (other personal goals) read: taking care of my body and brain, build and preserve important relationships.

If I spend the day in meetings or communicating with people (planning etc.) then I have some emotional and intellectual energy left to work on a side project at home.

It's important to set goals in order to achieve them, but it's also important to diversify the day :)

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ilonacodes profile image
Ilona Codes

I see your work-life balance is right and, moreover, gives your wellbeing a boost along with your career 🙂

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motss profile image
Rong Sen Ng

I would say achieving your personal goals is the reason you keep motivated regardless of your full day of work. It's totally OK if you want to take some rest or procrastinate once in a while. Take good care of your health is also the key to keep you going to do things you love. FWIW, I mean mental health and physical health. So, keep it up on your hard work and make sure you have work-life balance to be awesome.

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wuz profile image
Conlin Durbin

I've dealt with this for a while and recently I came to the conclusion that I was actually very burnt out. Let me give a little context.

I originally started out in college as a CS major. My freshman year, I decided to start a company with a friend I had met. He was non-technical, so I ended up doing a lot of the programming work on the application. Between the company, school work, and extracurriculars, I wasn't really sleeping much and I was drinking a ton of caffeine. This culminated in my sophomore year with me feeling like my heart was going to beat out of my chest at 3 in the morning after a couple hours of coding. At that point, I decided I needed to do something differently. I stopped working so much, switched majors, and took better care of myself.

I figured I'd recover pretty fast if I stopped burning the candle at both ends. I was still doing a lot, but it was all stuff I really wanted to do. The company ultimately didn't go anywhere, but I started working on other things. I had a lot of things that would burn out pretty quickly. I didn't seem to have a lot of motivation. This persisted for about 4 years, but was so minor I didn't really think anything of it.

Recently, I've been much more motivated to work on things. All of this to say I think I burnt out so hard that I had perpetual, 4-year long burn out. Let's call it cosmic background burnout.

This isn't to say that this is the only reason it can be hard to work on personal goals after working all day long, but for me realizing this as burn-out and taking steps to deal with that has been a real life-changer. I find it much easier to work on personal goals outside of work now that I am actually addressing my burn-out. Take a look at the other things you are doing, and see if there is something you can cut that is burning you out.

Hopefully, this helps! Good luck!

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ilonacodes profile image
Ilona Codes

Thank you so much for your story! 🙏 It's tough to detect when we have reached the point of burnout. The stress that contributes to burnout can come mainly from our job, also from our overall lifestyle, and personality traits and thought patterns, such as perfectionism and pessimism, can contribute as well. I am glad that you have overcome burnout and regained your balance! 🙂

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nuwannnz profile image
Nuwan Karunarathna

Nice advice. Btw What are the steps you took to control the burnout?

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lmolivera profile image
Lucas Olivera

Depends on my daily workload. There are days in which I have little work so when I get home I usually continue with my projects for an hour or two. This doesn't happen very often but I try to work on them at least an hour a week.

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ilonacodes profile image
Ilona Codes

You are consistent! I believe the consistency is more important over quantity of hours on the way to success.

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Otavio Tarelho

I've been trying for weeks, since I have some online courses that I want to finish, but some days I got home so tired that I just want to watch tv. One thing that I do to do my personal goals is when I'm making dinner, I also watch some videos from those courses.

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ilonacodes profile image
Ilona Codes

Balance is everything. Unfortunately, fatigue has become a part of our daily routine and when we feel that there is no energy to do anything, then it's time to take a rest.

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jamesdengel profile image
James dengel

I find it's easier to wake up early and start the day off well before work. Hit the gym or cycle into work, this gets my first aim of health completed for the day, also helps me feel better at work generally.

Plan my day to figure out when to have lunch with my book of the month, this means that I am going to be reading it during the day and not wait till the end of the day to do this. This month it's design patterns.

Side projects generally fit in the evening around children, they are rare but i use some other techniques like weekly learning goals at work to improve my skills.

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ilonacodes profile image
Ilona Codes

You are so lucky that you can spend morning hours on your personal goals 👍

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jamesdengel profile image
James dengel

Before I had children I would get up at 630 to get the gym in each day.
Now the children get up at 630 so both myself and partner are up earlier, once they are dressed fed and watered, then I'm off :)

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jaimetrejo profile image
Jaime Trejo

Not necessarily all the time. I think I need to set a schedule or something.

I'm trying to learn Japanese since I want to go to Japan in two yeah, play the guitar and learn some basic music theory since I graduated and have a job now, and also trying to stay up to date so I can be relevant for work.

It's tough, because after my commute, gym, and making dinner I'm beat.

I just need to set a schedule starting today and this post motivated me to take action.

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ilonacodes profile image
Ilona Codes

Have you tried to plan your day the night before?

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jaimetrejo profile image
Jaime Trejo

Not recently, life was a little mess so trying to put pieces back.

Making it the week of change and a day at a time.

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knth profile image
KNTH

Your willpower is limited, so if you spend the most of it during the workday, you won't have enough to pursue your personal goals. It's easier to get distracted, or simply to be tired.

One solution is to reverse your schedule. Wake up earlier, and spend your first hours of the day (this moment where you have the highest focus ability / willpower) to pursue your personal goals. You will allocate your best energy to it, and then go to work.

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ilonacodes profile image
Ilona Codes

It's great if you can spend the first early hours on pursuing your personal goals. I wish I could do that in winter.

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knth profile image
KNTH

It's a question of habit. You may be interested by the Miracle Morning book.

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sudiukil profile image
Quentin Sonrel

These days (and for quite some time now) I have neither the time nor the energy. And even when I have both (rarely), I use them for other things (chores mainly).

It's been a while since I had the time and/or motivation to work on (or even start) other personal goals (projects, blog, learning guitar...) after a day of work. Even week-ends are no good to work on those because I just want to rest, chill and do other things (go out with friends for example).

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ilonacodes profile image
Ilona Codes

I agree with that. Focussing on the goals without any motivation is difficult. Especially, if the body and mind just want to take a rest and relax.

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sergeydruid profile image
Sergey Aleksashov • Edited

I think it depends on what are the goals and the current job, 3-4 hours of self-dedicated time instead of 1 could make a huge difference in a week.

After working 8 hours a day I go to the gym for minimum 2 hours, 5 days a week.
Relationship "goals" aside, my goals are strength and physique oriented based on my training, I find the time to count the calories and cook myself the meals I need to stay healthy.

As a 28 years old, I'm pretty active and feel a good balance between energy and time/management, but I have to improve on the latter.
I guess the more you grow, the better you manage your time.

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ilonacodes profile image
Ilona Codes

It's true. I like your daily schedule. 👍
Yes, time seems to be going by faster as we get older.

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goyo profile image
Grzegorz Ziemonski

When it comes to energy, it depends what that full day consists of. If it's "lightweight" e.g. last day of the sprint, updating docs, releasing stuff and so on, I'm usually happy to get something "real" done once I get home. If I've spent the entire day cracking some difficult problem and spitting out LoC like crazy, then I usually don't have energy for absolutely anything afterwards.

Time is a whole different beast but I'm on the "lucky" spot here. Being an introverted nerd with no kids, I spend most of my time at home and get to choose what I do on a given day. I do my best to spend at least some quality time with my wife but other than that I'm free. I realize that this might end one day but I guess (naively hope) that I'll be happy to change my personal goal to "be a great parent" and fully commit to that.

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ilonacodes profile image
Ilona Codes

Yes, all in good time 🙂

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deyshin profile image
Daniel Shin

I don't have much energy once I get home. The cause is twofold for me:

Work itself can be tiring. It's not burdensome though.
What really gets me is the stress of thinking about all the things that I should be learning.

I used to enjoy learning a lot of random tech topics. But now that I think about 'What this could do to my career', topics that I would have enjoyed learning otherwise becomes a chore.

I hope to resolve this soon. Please help/enlighten me!

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molly profile image
Molly Struve (she/her)

YES! I recently started blogging and applying to speak at conferences so after work I usually like to do a little bit of that. I used to come home from work and either go and ride horses or I would sit on the couch and watch TV. Basically, I replaced the TV watching with blogging and writing CFPs. In the end, I honestly don't miss the TV much. I still get to it on the weekends or sneak in an hour after I have done some tech writing.

There are some days though where work was tough and all I want to do is let my brain veg out and do nothing tech related and that is 100% fine! I never try to force myself to write after work if I am not in the mood. I think bc I am pretty loose with my goals and I allow myself to be flexible I enjoy the writing a lot more than if I was forcing myself to get a blog post/week or something along those lines done.

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ilonacodes profile image
Ilona Codes

Wow! Impressive! 😃I am also trying to spend less time on TV and more on blogging, vlogging, conferences and self-improving. Keep doing it!