yura

I’m a software engineer who's currently struggling with deciding what to do with the time when I'm not at work. I'm currently following GTD to organize my personal action items: I capture ideas/tasks into an inbox, and regularly go through the inbox to clarify those items into "next actions"/delegate/defer. By now I have a ton of "next actions" in my list, all of which are reasonably important; for example: "prepare and file my taxes", "research a new place to rent", "read non-fiction book X", "study computer science topic Y", etc.

The problem is scheduling: I don't know when to tackle those actions, nor how long to spend working through my next actions list. And while I can prioritize these next actions to decide which one is the most important/urgent that I should tackle next, I don't know how to balance this "productive" time (next actions work) with time for other things that I don't want to let go of, such as: gaming, hanging out with my girlfriend and friends, watching movies or TV shows, going out to try something new, or just doing nothing (rest?).

What I've been doing so far is to have no weekly plan/routine whatsoever and just do whatever I feel I should be doing at any given moment, but lately that's not working out so great (either I spend too much time on fun/gaming/social, or I spend too much time doing productive things and start burning out). So I'm looking for good books/methods that specifically tackle the allocation side – that is, that teach you the skills and philosophy for designing a realistic weekly routine that balances productive work (as in personal/life work, not day job), admin, fun, and rest.

What books fixed this for you?