I've been away for work for 4 months now, and while I am happy to say that I have only one more month left and then I can get back home and relax for a while, until that month ends, my free time remains limited while the rest of it is spent working.
When I do have some free time, I try to spend it in a more or less productive way. I rarely spend a big part of my break watching videos on YouTube or scrolling through Facebook or Twitter. I mostly read. Sometimes I write. Other times I sleep.
When I finally get to my free day, Monday, I try to think about what I should do with my time. I could go out and spend most of it in some cities nearby. I could spend most of it playing games on my laptop. I could spend most of my day reading and get close to finishing another book. Or I could work a bit more and publish an article or do something in Blender.
I have tried to do each activity individually to see what satisfies me the most. I spent a lot of my time in nearby cities and spent money on all kind of things, I spent 6+ hours playing Baldur's Gate and making quite a lot of progress, I spent most of my day reading and finished almost an entire book, and I wrote several articles in the hours I had at my disposal.
But none of those things were satisfying enough. At the end of each Monday I felt like I wasted a lot of my time. I felt like I didn't take advantage of my free day, that I didn't do pretty much anything that I wished to do. Sure, I did one of them, and maybe I did it well. But it still felt like a waste.
What finally helped me get over this feeling was giving up caring about one thing and the amount of progress I make in one particular area, and instead focusing on doing everything I wanted to do in a single day, with the little time I had available.
Although I'm not making as much progress in any of those activities in particular, doing all of them for a short amount of time brings me way more satisfaction than doing only one. Sure, I don't get to read 100+ pages, and I read instead 15 or 30, but that's enough. Others don't read at all. Sure, I don't finish the entirety of Baldur's Gate, but I get through some maps and level up a bit, and that's good enough. I might not write 6 articles to publish one a day for the rest of the week while I'm busy with work, but if I get to publish one a week, that's good too.
I realized that I get way more satisfaction if, at the end of the day, I can say "Wow, I got to do all the things I wanted to do today". Then, getting back to work for 6 more days doesn't feel like such a bad thing.
This might not change your life entirely, and it might not even work so well for you. But if you have some limited amount of time and you don't know what you want to spend it on, because you have so many things you'd like to do, here's a little tip - spend less time on each activity individually, and instead try to spend a bit of time on as many as you can.
We are awake for around 16 hours on average on a free day. We spend some of it eating, drinking, going to the bathroom, but the rest is free for us to do what we wish with it. If out of those 16 hours we can have 13 in which we can do whatever we want, then you might be able to do 13 different things in that day, investing one hour in each. Or 6 and a half, depending on how much time you want to spend on one activity.
Sure, the amount of progress you'll make in each activity won't be incredible, but it's still gonna be something, and you might get more satisfaction than focusing on a single thing while ignoring the rest.
We put enough pressure on ourselves while we're at work. We have a lot of things that we want to get done, a lot of things that require our attention and then our bosses my require even more from us. Stressing ourselves in our free time as well over the fact that we don't get to spend as much time as we want doing the things we're interested in doesn't change anything and it only affects our mood.
So, take it easy, relax, and do the things you want to do, for shorter amounts of time. At the end of the day you might discover that you're way more satisfied with doing more, but less, than doing less, but more.