Feel this hard. I feel like I did well during unemployment while the Covid lockdown played out. I was an audio engineer before that, and during lockdown I ran 30 miles a week, made a lot of music, learned some Python, managed to pivot into tech (analytics). Still, it never feels like I'm really doing anywhere near as much as I could - that was all pretty much 3-5 hours a day with the rest being more or less pure leisure and rest.

Part of me is tempted to buy into the idea that the human animal just isn't naturally inclined to do more than a handful of hours of difficult or "productive" work in an average day. I honestly have no idea whether I'm normal or not, but I agree the pressure I put on myself probably isn't ultimately helpful most of the time. It's hard not to feel like others are getting way more done, and even harder to tell how much of what is presented is authentic.

I'm quitting my job in December to work on my game full time, neat to find someone else who also quit for something similar.

Would love to connect, maybe we can help motivate each other :). My email is in my profile if you're interested in connecting, same goes for anyone else in a similar situation.

Can relate. I get excited about so many things I want to do, but ultimately lack the energy and abilities (executive dysfunction) to do even a tiny fraction of them. And there is this constant self-pressure of “I should do so much more”, which is not helping. Anyway, hope you have a great time and success with your indie game studio!

I'm also trying to find some free time to contribute to some open source projects. It's not hassling but I just want to give back to the community—who gave me the career and many awesome tools already.

Getting into contributing is not easy, I have to admit. It's like you're having a second job and no one has the dedicated resources to help you understand the internal architecture. All you can do is submitting the bugs, questions, pull requests and hope for the best.

I was in a similar boat. It helped me to find a collaborator who could inspire me and advance the projects without everything being on my shoulders. It's easy to be paralyzed when you know every single detail of all the work that you alone have to do.