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

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Rachel Soderberg

I don't typically have the energy or time for my personal goals after work, but I have a couple of strategies that still allow me to make progress on them:

  1. I make the best of my long commute! Every morning I have about an hour biking & sitting on the bus before I reach the gym for my before-work workout. This gives me a great opportunity to listen to 20-30mins of a podcast (usually an engineering topic) as I bike, and then practice some French via Duolingo or a Netflix show with French audio for the rest of the trip.
    Every evening my commute home is about 30 minutes by train, so I take that time to slow down and read a technical book. Sometimes it's an engineering topic and other times I read nonfiction (right now I'm reading Stephen Hawking's "The Grand Design").

  2. My manager is extremely pro self-development and goes out of his way to remind me that I can take time out of my day to work on my own goals if they serve to launch me forward in my career. I typically start my work day by reading a couple of French news articles and a couple Dev.to posts before digging into writing code. I also tend to write my own Dev.to posts during the work day as they are often related to whatever I've had on my mind at work that week, and occasionally I'll allocate some time to an online course. I realize not everyone has the freedom to dictate their own day, so I feel very fortunate that I can do this.