How Hobbies can Drastically Improve Your Productivity

‍What is a Cool Hobby?

A hobby is something that we choose to do in our personal life. You may have already got a lot of hobbies installed in your life but not all of them are improving the quality of your life.

Curiosity and Passion - a cool hobby is something you actively do out of curiosity or passion. With this aspect, a hobby will ignite you with passion and pro-activeness to live life with more excitement.
Find joy in Challenges - A cool hobby is something that you enjoy doing even if it’s difficult. With this aspect, a hobby pushes you forward and challenge you to expand your horizon.
Nurture your Soul - A cool hobby is something that nurtures you the more you do it. With this aspect, a hobby will leave you more and more satisfied and fulfilled after the day is over.

Here are a few examples of cool hobbies that you can do all by yourself:

Making crafts
Sports and Exercises
Painting, drawing, sketching
Writing stories
Meditation, journaling, praying
Taking photos, making films

Note: Cool hobbies are deeply personal. Each person will likely have and you will find out what fits you the most through multiple trials.

How Cool Hobbies help you in the workplace

Better Stress Releases

Manage your stress with a Hobby outside of work | Image source

Rising stress levels around the world are one of the major issues affecting productivity levels these days. Research by Gallup in 2019 showed that over half of Americans are stressed during their working day.

This leads to problems such as health issues, poor work-life balance, and chronic fatigue. Being constantly stressed can cause you to feel unsatisfied with your life but lacking the energy to do anything positive about it.

Having something that you love to do in your personal life balances out your day. You can leave work at work and resume the headaches after attending to your hobbies later on.

This doesn’t mean that you treat your career with disdain. Instead, it is simply a mental shift that allows you to understand that there is more to life than work. As you relax and appreciate having a fuller life, it will make you a more relaxed and productive worker.

SEE ALSO: How to meditate for gratitude

Boost Your Confidence

The more you push yourself at your hobby, the more skill you will attain. This is something that will help you greatly in your life as well as in your career, as you are now more confident in your ability.

Gain more confidence with a hobby | Image source

Confidence equals competence.

Because hobbies are something that you will look forward to doing, the resistance to acquire these new skills will be greatly reduced. And you may end up learning new skills without having to go through the headaches and struggles in the workplace.

There will be lots of transferable skills that as you learned through your hobbies, you can apply them back in the workplace. It can be how to learn a new thing fast and effectively, how to manage your time better or how to be a better team player.

And as your skill level increases, so do your productivity.

Become More Creative with Problem-Solving

Creativity is the ability to see the connection when others can not.

The right hobby will encourage you to be more open-minded in how to solve everyday problems in novel ways. Perhaps you could create a new spreadsheet, a new process, or some other change that lets you get through more work than before.

Remember that routines kill creativity. A good hobby ensures that your day is always available for new experiments, new ideas, creating the space to exercise your creative muscle. And as you get better at solving new problems in your hobbies, your problem at work will likely be solved as well.

Enhance your creativity in problem solving | Image source

Not only that, but your mind may also actually solve a problem better when you are not actively concentrating on it. You may be experiencing a flood of new solutions during a run, or come up with a brilliant idea during your meditation session.

Some of the greatest discoveries in history came about when the person was doing something other than sitting about in front of their books or actively thinking about solving a problem. The same thing can apply to find ways of improving productivity.

SEE ALSO: How to start journaling in 2020

Get Proper Recovery

How do you rest from work at the end of a tough day? Many people believe that watching TV or just lounging around at home is the way to do this. But these methods don’t work. Researchers study pointed out that binge-watching actually leads to more stress, anxiety, and depression as they fry your dopamine receptors.

Give yourself true resting time | Image Source

Your mind would still be restless and stewing over the problems that await you tomorrow. You never truly get a rest from your work. And the next day at work, you will feel drained of energy and exhausted before doing any work.

This is where a satisfying hobby can help you immensely. When you get home and start doing what you most love to do, the worries and fears about your work will disappear from your mind.

Look at the way that some American Presidents switched off in their spare time from one of the world’s most demanding jobs. Ronald Reagan rode horses, Bill Clinton completed crosswords, and Dwight D. Eisenhower painted landscapes.

Preparing for Your Dream Career

Could a hobby help you to find a career that you are deeply passionate about?

Two of the most common obstacles that are preventing you from “pursuing your passion”

I don’t know what I’m passionate about

A hobby can be your trials and error system to figure out what you are truly passionate about. As all careers can be broken down into small daily exercises, you can reverse-engineer a field of work into a daily hobby and see how much you enjoy doing them.

Passion in computer science is tested on how much you enjoy coding daily. Want a career in design? Start drawing every day. How about starting your own clothing brand? Start coming up with more mix-and-match combos with your current closet.

Once a hobby truly sticks, it can be a very powerful hint towards your true passion in life.

I’m not good enough

It’s not smart to instantly quit your job to “follow your passion” if you don’t have a solid set of skills.

But that’s what a cool hobby can bring you over a long period of time. Once you have identified your dream career, you can develop your skills every day through your hobbies while still maintaining your current job.

Leverage hobbies to prepare for your dream career | Image Source

As you spend hundreds and thousands of hours researching, practicing and learning, your hobby has successfully turned you from a curious seeker to a knowledgeable professional.

If you are in the wrong career, no matter how productive or how good at your job you are, it won’t bring you fulfillment. And that’s what you would like in a job, isn’t it? To fill like you are doing the things that you are supposed to do, and live a life full of passion.

Get Started with your hobbies

I hope that this article gives you a rough idea of how just making a few tweaks in your personal life can make you much more productive in your professional life.

Habitify can be a helping hand in your journey to build an awesome personal lifestyle. Start documenting your hobbies as habits and marvel at your progress in no time!

What are your thoughts on building hobbies? Can you share with us in the comments below?

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