Personally, I enjoy at least writing down the ideas, passions, or motivations I have towards them somewhere and collecting them. Then, if the time comes when I choose that interest or topic, I already have a good bunch of well-marinated ideas. Of course, that can also overwhelm me, but then you just go to step 1 again!

1) Should interests be limited in the name of doing something meaningful?

2) If interests should be limited, how do you determine what is worth spending time on so that you do not regret it after investing a significant amount of time?

3) Put another way, how do you avoid wasting your life consuming mind candy?

I spend a lot of time on the web, and in retrospect, I consider a lot of that time to have been wasted. I latch onto topics for brief periods (a few days or weeks), make big plans, then move on to a different interesting topic. I will spend large amounts of time on pretty meaningless tasks. I will spend a week messing with a music mashup that I know will make my brother laugh. He laughs. Now what? I feel like I wasted a week.

I over-analyze everything. I think part of what I enjoy is just analyzing things. I like to analyze chess games. I might spend a week or more analyzing one interesting game. Then what? I feel like I've wasted a week, even though the process was intellectually stimulating. There are hundreds of other topics that I will do this with. I will hear a comedian interviewed, and realize there is some science to comedy and what makes someone laugh, so I spend a week semi-obsessing over how to deconstruct and analyze comedy routines. Or I realize that I can compile a database of chord progressions for millions of songs and make a mashup generator. After a week or two, something else interesting comes along.

Is the answer to discover your meta-hobby, deconstructing and analyzing things in my case, and then apply that in some area that benefits others?

Bottom line: don't try and pin down your interest, open up to it and let it run its course. The course may not always make sense but it knows what it's doing.

So I pruned. I actually made a list, and prioritized. There were a few things on there that, after years of diddling around, I'm just no good at. There were a few things that were just too expensive or time consuming.

Now I limit myself to 2-3 things, and I actually make progress on those. It's kind of freeing to admit that you enjoy something, but that it's just not a priority.

It was only many years later I realized that this was an accidental spontaneous invention of what William Edwards Deming came to call a Life List. His main purpose in that was to help people guide their careers and personal development.

For me this article is strange, but the way I integrate this sort of thing is by picking an interest and really sticking with some aspect of it. That almost always leads to a kind of boredom, but it has a limited context that makes it different and maybe even more useful. Like the way giving an artist only a few colors to work with can lead to greater creativity.

As a follow up a question. Many of you said you pursue your interests and passions, exploring them in personal projects. Feels weird to ask but, how do you identify/kindle these interests? I feel like early in my career they came fast and easily, but now my interests often take me away from the computer screen.

Separately structure your notes and build up your own framework that represents your interests and priorities. This can include setting structured goals if you want but doesn’t need to. You can also track random thoughts you have to identify new interests you might want to spend time on.

Add in more directed reading around topics of interest that you’ve identified through the process of undirected exploration followed by reflection on and structuring of what you discover.

You can make this a fixed framework by allocating time to each of these three activities in a structured way. But it’s also ok to do this more casually if you prefer.

Also good to share with others what you’re finding interesting and to find out what other people you like are interested in to help direct this process. You can also connect this to your work or desired future career if that feels relevant to you.

Last year I had a bit of a crisis. I believed that I needed to become more focused on one particular area to facilitate long term professional success. I think I got this advice directly or indirectly from different people at different times.

But I couldn't. I looked at specific areas to specialize in isolation. All of them are interesting, but I could feel almost physical pain from just thinking to narrow down my focus on any of those.

Then I gave up, and what a relief that was. I realized that I'm not wired this way. I see the connections between the things. That's what draws my attention and endlessly motivates me. Tackle a new problem, refine my skill a bit here, bolster my knowledge a bit over there.

Quoting Heinlein: Specialization is for insects.

This resonates with me.

Now I'm a programmer (full-stack web), teacher, consultant. Recently also started learning technical writing and working towards building an animal sanctuary.

I see more and more connections between those things, which is satisfying and rewarding, often in unpredictable ways.

It took me years but eventually I started focusing on what the outcomes I wanted to make happen and then started focusing bringing in the learning I needed to support this. This also helps when you have to make decisions about what not to learn as if its not supporting your outcomes then it becomes more clear you can drop it or save it for later.

I have often found myself trying to start side-projects that I didn't really care about, because I had some abstract, perhaps irrational idea that I "should" be working on this particular thing. Usually it's something that will teach me a new skill.

Recently, I've gotten a lot better about evaluating whether or not something is worth doing in my free time, but I still don't really have a good criterion for when I should pick one thing over another: When should I spend my free time learning about X, and when should I learn about Y instead?

One suggestion may be to pick whatever is the most useful or the most likely to help you earn money in the future, and indeed this is more or less the rule I have been using in the past.

I posted this article because I thought it gave some remarkably actionable advice for picking between different side-projects, namely:

> The basic idea of personal energy management is that you should focus on increasing your personal energy and lifting up your mood in your leisure time, instead of working on things that drain your personal energy. Hobbies should lift your mood, not drain you. This makes you better perform all the other tasks.

This is a different outlook from what you usually hear, but it makes a lot of sense to me when presented in those terms.

You filter through your interests WAY quicker with a first pass and then you can return to topics you felt were interesting and recursively apply this strategy, until a prioritisation seems obvious to you.

Diversified interests sounds like the opposite of boring to me.

> If one doesn't aim for excellence, is it a bad thing?

It probably indicates that your actual interests lie in something other than what you are currently doing. One suggestion I found useful was to make two columns on a sheet of paper and keep it at your desk. The first column is "I loved this!" and the other is "I hated this". When you find yourself enjoying a task (or vice-versa), write it down. The theory is that our interests are surprisingly specific. The guy saying this (Erwin McManus if I recall correctly) said that he is really excited by helping people find their passions. Not pursue them, find them. It helped me identify some of the areas I enjoy, so I've pursued jobs in those areas.

> I am jack of all trades but master of none.

Reframe this: I know a little bit about everything, so no matter what your problem is, I can solve it. I might not solve it the most efficiently, but if you need a problem solved, I'll solve it.

Some environments need raw production. Some need carefully crafted algorithms. Some need prototypes held together with duct tape. Some need solidly connected piping. Breadth favors some environments over others. Breadth is helpful for freelance contracting, for instance, since clients have a problem and want the assurance that you have already solved a similar problem before, so the more difference environments you have worked with, the more likely you will look like someone who can solve their problem.

I wouldn't worry too hard, though. (Nor would I recommend jumping in to freelancing too early.) If you're early in your career, focus on figuring out what it is that you enjoy, and leverage your skills to slowly move in that direction. And figure out what your boundaries are (hrs/week, pay, on-call, etc.), so that you know what things to avoid. There's plenty of software jobs besides FAANG out there.