Most of us don’t really choose our hobbies. We bike, hike, or homebrew beer because, well, that’s just what we like to do.

But it’s worth giving some thought to our hobbies, because they’re not all created equal. Take running and bourbon, for instance.

Serious running and bourbon connoisseurship are both rewarding. Both relieve stress, are social, and are easy to take up. And you can spend a whole lot of time and money on either (trust me).

Daily planning, as useful as it is, can create tension between Present You and Future You.

Present You makes tomorrow’s plan, but Future You will have to carry it out. So in planning tomorrow, it’s easy for Present You to sign up Future You for some unpleasant experiences.

• "Five hours straight on the hardest report of the year? Sounds good!"
• "Lightweight emailing all morning, with the last two hours of the day dedicated to mentally taxing data analysis? Check!"
• "Important meeting with no prep time scheduled? Don't mind if we do!"

Don’t set up Future You for misery or failure—he or she isn’t any more interested in those experiences than Present You. Think about what it would take to make tomorrow’s work seem perfectly doable: 10-minute breaks every hour, an extra coffee run, or a mid-afternoon meditation session.

What do we do with our mistakes?

Jim Rohn’s advice here is the best I’ve found: “let your past be a school.” There’s no reason to ruminate endlessly on past mistakes, but neither should we sweep them under the rug. We can learn from our errors.

Especially the habitual mistakes, the ones we fall into time and again. We should all have a mental list of our negative tendencies: “When I’m angry, I sometimes do x, and I need to guard against that. When I’m embarrassed, I tend to do y.” It’s worth examining our negative tendencies so we can avoid such mistakes in the future.

I bought a Fitbit recently, and it tells me an awful lot. A few highlights:

- When I check the time, it shows me how many steps I've logged today.
- It monitors my heart rate and encourages me to keep going when I'm on a brisk walk or a run.
- If I've been sitting too long, it reminds me to get up and walk around.
- And my favorite feature: each morning, it issues me a "sleep score"---a single number that sums up how I slept last night.

There’s a lot of writing on the internet—some of it mine—about how overcommitted most of us are. Productivity bloggers urge us to narrow our focus to our most important work and cut out much of the rest. Do less, better.

The problem with this otherwise sound advice is that most of us struggle to put it into practice. Voluntarily backing away from commitments is easier said than done, and I’m currently exploring an alternative approach—committing to additional important work and letting it force out the trivial.