An Idle Mind…
I’ve been unemployed for roughly 9 of the last 18 months and it’s beginning to really get at me.
This is not my first brush with unemployment as I spent a whole year unemployed when the .com bubble burst. That experience taught me that even when idle one must keep a regular schedule. If you don’t keep a regular schedule your brain goes soft and it’s easy to descend into a really bad place emotionally.
So this time around I’ve been very careful to keep a regular schedule. I get up the same time every morning with a long list of regular morning activities to do including exercise and reviewing new job listings. This usually leaves me a couple of hours to do some miscellaneous reading/podcast listening/research before lunchtime. After lunch I’ll usually take a long walk then run some errands then do some more miscellaneous reading/podcast listening/research for the rest of the afternoon.
The problem is that the longer I’m out of work the less motivated I’m becoming to do the miscellaneous reading/podcast listening/research because I have little or nothing to apply the newly gained knowledge to. There’s no assignment from the boss. No deadline. No nagging client. So my knowledge gathering time is quickly transforming into time killing. Just wasting time until the day ends. This is not a very good trend and I must find a way to stop it.
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