If you have a full-time job, family, friends, exercise, and have a hobby or two already - I'm not sure where you come up with two hours of free time per day after that.

Are you literally scheduling everything you do? Are you sleeping less than 6 hours? Obviously, there's probably 2 hours per day in small intervals where I'm not maximizing my day.

Because of this, I recently picked up guitar, and this is nice for the random periods I'm free, because I feel like picking it up 4 or 5 times a day for 5-10 minutes still allows me to make a lot of progress, be creative, and learn a lot about (and appreciate) music.

Chess is also something you could do this with, but I feel like at that time scale it would be harder and less rewarding, and this is still about 1/4th of the two hours mentioned.

Edit:

I probably spend 30 minutes on HN per day, which is mostly a waste. But this is also in small intervals.

OP here. Yeah, the best advice I know for making anything a daily habit is to make it an emergency. It comes first. So, you get some negotiable time, the first thing you do is (chess) and then you figure out the other things later.

The downside is of course that sometimes the other important things are hard to maintain. But this is how you do it.

Of course you can’t just tack on another hobby that’s 2 hrs/day when you’ve already got others. There are sacrifices with everything. If you want to take up chess as a hobby you’ll need to make room by doing less of another hobby or something else.

Similarly I've wanted to allocate some amount of time to a creative outlet, which I've neglected for some time. Huge time sink to get something out of it, I feel. I also enjoy variety when it comes to games. That can be chess at times, but not in a dedicated, obsessive sense, just a means to flex my mind a bit with puzzles.

Admittedly, level of challenge in games can vary tremendously. I always like to have one on rotation that is difficult.