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I've noticed on occasion that a particular constraint, which at first may feel like a frustrating impediment, turns out to be a blessing of sorts. Rather than try to assemble a sweeping thesis on the value of constraints, I'll write a few, small-ish posts about particular anecdotes.
Today's topic: free time. For purposes of this post, I'll define free time as time spent alone and absent pressure to do anything other than what's piquing your interest.
I've got two kids, ages 5 and 8, who want me around them doing dad stuff at every possible moment. I've got an extroverted wife who, luckily for me, still wants my company. I've got a busy job in which I'm responsible for other people. I'm very fortunate to have all of this, no doubt! But it really puts the squeeze on my sweet, sweet free time.
With little kids, free time rarely just appears. What do you do on weekends? Parenting. Vacation? Parenting. Holidays? Snow days? You guessed it.
At this stage of life, if I want free time on any vaguely routine basis, I have to create it. I can create it by getting up early, before the rest of my family stirs. I can create it through diplomatic negotiations with my spouse. I can create it by hiding in the bathroom. (It's a thing with dads. Google it.) I can create it by taking a day off work and not telling my family, which is a purely hypothetical thing that I would of course never do.
I've struggled a lot with this lack of free time, especially when my kids were younger and zero-percent independent. In fact, there were large swaths of time where I came close to regretting having kids. I may even have stepped over that line in a bad moment or two.
I'm deeply happy to report that things have gotten much better, and I expect they will continue to do so. Kids get older and more interesting. Their desires start to overlap with yours. You can do more fun things with them. And they say a lot of hilarious stuff along the way. Parenting is still a challenge, for sure. But it's evolving into one I can handle, and even enjoy.
Back to the point. While I've spent nearly a decade wrestling with my lack of free time, when I do get it, I've learned to squeeze every last drop from it. If I have 90 minutes to myself on a Saturday because I got up early, then by god, I'm going to crank for every moment of it until my daughter wakes up. I'm often surprised how much I get done in these bite-sized bursts.
I also spend more time these days thinking about which activities will give me the most bang for my time-buck. I quit all social media because it gives me a negative return on my time investment. I mostly quit reading the news for the same reason. I avoid embarking on large-scale projects that I know will just linger and eat at me for months. I don't touch video games that require 100+ hours to meaningfully complete. These are all good developments, arguably.
The scarcity of free time means I choose smaller, more achievable, feel-good pursuits, and then chase them more strategically. For example, writing this post. Writing is great for all the usual reasons: processing your thoughts, exploring ideas, practicing the written word, and so on. It also lets me scratch some nerd itches, such as honing my Vim chops and exploring Gemini and Gopher. It's achievable; I can finish a post, or at least a crappy draft of one, within a single sitting. I feel good about myself and how I spent my time when I'm done. Writing is a wonderful hobby. And somehow, it feels like I'm doing it more (or at least more deliberately) because I have less time on my hands.
Contrast writing with, say, trying Arch Linux instead of Fedora. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and it's one I find tempting. But it would take a lot of time, would create a goodly chunk of frustration as I stumble around, and might not yield any tangible benefits. It's not a worthless exercise -- I'd enjoy parts of it and learn some things -- but it scores poorly on my free-time rubric, so I avoid it.
This long-term constraint on my free time has provoked me to be more thoughtful about what I do and why. I still wish on a daily basis that I had more free time to pursue more whims, but I suspect there often are benefits to wishes not coming true.