As of last year October, I decided to take a career break when I was given the opportunity. It allows me to take a step back and evaluate my 28 years of working career and to decide what I wanted to do with the 10+ years left in my career life (I have no intention of retiring early) and to finish off my NYU master degree.
Almost immediately I found myself filling up the now empty schedule with a bunch of chores, overdue tasks, and some long awaited home improvement projects. While I enjoyed all the time that I have now and the time with friends and family, I find myself being “less productive”. Maybe productive isn’t the right word to use here since I am currently not working, but I do feel like I am using my time in a “less efficient” manner.
You see, normally my work day will be filled with 3-4 meetings or appointments, and I also have the habit of blocking off sometime for me to complete the task at hand. This means my daily schedule will have several time block taken out, and if I need to do some reading, studying or just some personal tasks, I will have to either do it after work or within the fragmented time I have during work time. At the end of everyday, I will normally feel like I have achieved a lot even though that only meant I found time to pay my bills, read an articles from my favorite publications, or find time to reply to clear up my inbox. Without the work schedule, I do not have to try and optimize my tasks around the left over time I have everyday, and it became clear to me that I do not know how to plan my daily schedule when it is literally free for the entire day!
Upon having that realization, I decided to find something that requires me to focus a good amount of my time and start to fill my daily schedule with it so that I can again make myself busy and becoming more “productive”.
I’ve tried to look online to see what people in their career break will organize their time, but couldn’t find much information. So I decided to try cracking it myself. Here’s what I came up with:
- My master studies (about 4-5 hours a week)
- Cloud certification (10 hours per week)
- Cybersecurity practice – CTF, TryHackMe or Hackthebox (4-6 hours a week)
- Japanese language studies (1 hour per day).
- Writing (1-2 hours per week)
So now I have about 20 hours worth of “projects” in hand, let’s see how it changes things. I will probably do a reflection after 1 month to see the progress. Watch this space if you are interested.
A great latte from FEEKA Cafe at Happy Mansion
