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Comment by kkleindev | Hacker News Reader

> If you never allow yourself mental downtime, then everything you do feels like work.

What makes you believe that what reedlaw described is not to be considered mental downtime? I have made quite the opposite experience: when consciously reflecting and deciding about my mental downtime in advance, it turns out to be the most recreative. It's worth noting that I made bad experiences with: tomorrow from 7-730 I will be reading/running/cooking/medidate/watching an educational video for recreational purposes. The way to go for me is to predefine a set of activities which I support based on a principle. When in the situation for donwtime, I then choose from this set.

Edit: typo

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How do you just pick up a project from a set like that? Typically if I put something on a list, it's not motivating enough for me to want to do when I have downtime unless I really want to work on something.

Many mentally challenging activities I'll start spontaneously, but it's typically small ones with direct, achievable goals, like write a little scraper in a new language or reverse engineer a single mechanism of an application.

I only have a few times a week when I have downtime that I feel like I can pick something off a list. The rest of my downtime I want something to do - and that's where games come in - and I'm quite glad for them, because without them I'd spend much more time watching TV, reading junk political threads on reddit, etc.

I guess the key here is that this list is based on principles and not just a list of activities I would consider advantageous to have done in some sense or another.

Those principles ought to be chosen as to align with my convictions and expectations from life. So you could say that I know that this list is the intersection of things I consider worthy doing (and immediately have a well-formed reason for their worthiness at the back of my mind) and recreation.

When a moment for recreation has come, there is nothing that makes me question whether I should do something from the list or not because I am reassured that I have thought of this sufficiently in advance to determine the best for me.

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